Love the new pikmin types, and the new areas. The idea of the semi-randomized dungeons were excellent and offered a great challenge. Most of the new enemies and bosses were a delight to figure out. The difficulty increase to this game is dramatic and most of the time it felt great. Trying to slowly figure out a boss or stress-fully working through many layers of a dungeon to keep a healthy amount of pikmin for a boss felt wonderful. However, for all the great new ideas this game is held up almost entirely by how hard it is to easily and safely separate pikmin when trying to do pikmin specific tasks. All the late game dungeons have very specific hazards that will near instantly kill all but 1 pikmin type and it is often incredibly frustrating trying to grab only that type of pikmin.

An astounding follow up to Dark Souls, and a clear mid-point before Dark Souls 3. This game had a lot of great ideas mired by some of the most bland areas and confusing layout. I never have felt as pointlessly lost as i had trying to figure out where to go for so much of the first half of this game.
The combat remains incredible and while i don't think i prefer the changes made to estus and how healing works in this game i do think it is very well constructed and works very well here. Unfortunately the actual bosses of this game were underwhelming to me. There are some great standouts the smelter demon, Velstadt, and the Darklurker all were fantastic. but for each great encounter there are 2 boring ones.
I lack the words to properly explain this but i can see both how this game came from Dark Souls 1 and how Dark Souls 3 came from this but the gap between Dark Souls 1 and 3 still strikes me as a profound downgrade.

Not counting the final boss this game is a wonderful time. A good challenge tho it can be a bit simple in retrospect. The puzzle solving as you slowly figure out each area, combined with the short overall length allow for a great experience as a one off or to come back to trying for more and more optimized days. The big 30 day time limit feels daunting but it given the ease or restarting days and the size of the maps it never felt truly harrowing, its not impossible to run out of days but it is not as tight as it may seem. The boss encounters in this game vary wildly from being jokes to being insane tests of kinda arcane aspects of this game. The final Boss especially just feels bad the idea involves a really good understanding of how bombs stun enemies and it really doesn't work well given the games controls. I find it hard to fault this game for most of my complaints given both its age and how weird it is; but man this game needed a better way to select which Pikmin to throw. Similarly the Pikmin A.I. is rough and can lead to them standing in the way or killing themselves on edges or near water. That said this game is still a wonderful time. May be best to start with pikmin 3 or 4 tho.

This game has not aged super well, i revisited it this year and its just not great. I think the acceleration platforming challenges clash super hard with the combat and the enemies often just feel like a waste of time and a poor artificial difficulty. the writing is fine enough for 2015 and the small indie team; same with the games art and sound design. I know that most people wouldn't care about this but this game also has an achievement for doing 1000 levels. the main campaign is less than 100 and even going for all items and speed-running each level will get you nowhere close to that, really really frustrating.