Pikmin 2 (2004)

Note: this is the version of Pikmin 2 included with the Switch port of 1+2.

Pikmin 2 is a substantially more expansive and challenging game than its predecessor, both giving it some solid improvements and questionably slogging it at its endgame moments.

Captain Olimar returns to the mysterious planet of Pikmin to search for treasure with his co-worker Louie, in order to recover their company's debt. In doing so the player explores four rich biomes with even more Pikmin and foes than before. Players will farm Pikmin and explore treasures in these landscapes (with no time limit to allow for some wiggle room) and explore tough areas with smidges of procedural generation, the caves. Players can also swap between Olimar and Louie on the fly to manage two separate groups to maximize efficiency.

This switches up the strategy of Pikmin 2 - the player can no longer trivialize gameplay by memorizing part locations, but need to preserve and learn how to fight and utilize their Pikmin across a number of deadly obstacles and enemies to harvest even more treasures within. While daunting, some improvements have been made to make your crew more combat ready. White and Purple Pikmin now allow digging, heavy object carries, enemy stuns and poison that can kill enemies. The red/yellow/blue Pikmin make their re-appearance and players must balance between all five colors of Pikmin as they traverse the overworld and their caverns. AI is decently improved for Pikmin, with less places to get stuck behind and a more accurate call direction. Some treasures even upgrade Olimar's abilities and elemental resistances to help this further, though Pikmin still do inane things such as get distracted and fall into pools accidentally (they can be called out this time!)

While the story mode is the meat of the game, there's a couple more challenge and competitive modes for some capture the flag style fun and time trial treasure hunting. Granted the main single player mode is immense in comparison to 1 and can be a bit exhausting, especially as the cave layouts get plain vicious in the postgame. However, careful and patient play will ensure the game is thoroughly beatable.

Pikmin 2 is a game that feels more easily understood, with less obtuse mysteries hiding its play and lean mean straightforward strategy action at its core. While fundamentally changing the experience laid out by Pikmin 1, it's still a solid and decently fun game that's about as enjoyable as the first one and slightly more approachable (high difficulty curve aside).

Once I was done with Pikmin 1, I decided to go ahead and immediately try the second one since they're both on the same cartridge. And... yeah, it's not good. It takes the original structure of Pikmin 1 and adds a lot of cool ideas to it. However, most of these ideas are added on top of the original game with no thought behind them, and they end up actively harming the overall experience.

Let's start with some positives: The overworld is gorgeous. It takes full advantage of the Gamecube hardware, as the development team is now a lot more comfortable using it, and it really shows. The maps in Pikmin 2 are mostly edited versions of the maps of Pikmin 1, but it's honestly quite hard to tell with the graphical change. The same applies with the new enemies and characters, they all have fun new designs that feel really special, and I really like all of them.

The main story isn't quite as strong as the original game though. Turns out that, while Olimar was stranded on Earth, the company he works for came into some financial hardships, and now they're in debt. The company's CEO tasks Olimar and his coworker Louie to go back to Earth and get as many treasure as they can find, in order to sell it and make some money.

The writing is not a serious as the first one, however it's not trying to be, so I don't think that's a bad thing. And even if it's not as emotional, the writing in this game is still really good and funny. Gone are the days where Olimar talks about how much he misses his family between levels, and now you get jokes talking about the president and how much money he owes, or the spam emails that Olimar receives. Plus, if you want to read something more serious, just take a look at the brand new Piklopedia and you're set!

As I said before, Pikmin 2 has waaay too many ideas, and the developers try their best to implement them. The most important one is double captains, as you can now swap between Louie and Olimar with the click of a button. In theory, I love this, as it allows you to multitask more effectively and split up tasks to be more efficient. But in practice, the game doesn't give you many opportunities to make the most out of this mechanic. It's an amazing tool for Dandori, but it wouldn't be until later entries where we can see how good multiple captains can be. So for now, it's just alright.

As the goal of the game is now to repay your company's debt, you'll no longer be looking for ship parts but rather for Treasure. Scouting the overworld looking for real world items is an amazing idea and a great replacement for the ship parts, and the fact that it's come back in every sequel proves it.

So how did they fuck this up?

Pikmin 2 essentially takes the first game, and just sticks all of its own ideas on top of it. This sounds like it should be a good idea at first, but in the end the game's just a convoluted mess of ideas that do not fit together, that slowly turns into a boring grind as you approach the final boss. And the one culprit? Caves.

Pikmin 2 introduces randomly-generated dungeons to the franchise, where you can find more treasures and repay your debt faster. Once you enter a Cave, you cannot get new pikmin, time completely stops outside, and it's just a race to the finish while trying to retreive as much treasure as possible. And it sucks. There's no more strategy involved, no managing of any kind happens inside, it's all just a big combat test that goes on for way too long. It asks you to play an entirely different game, but refuses to adjust the gameplay to make up for it.

The point of the caves is to "explore" and get new treasure, but there's nothing to explore. Not only are most of the themes really generic and boring, especially when compared to how good the new overworld feels, but all caves are also randomly generated, so they blend together even more. All it amounts to is hours of the player running around repetitive hallways, waiting for the treasure radar to go off.

And the worst part of it all? Almost 90% of treasures are found inside caves. Caves are the game's entire identity, and aside from one or two special cases, they're all terrible.

The game also introduces Purple and White pikmin, two new types with entirely unique mechanics and designs. And of course they're directly tied to the caves, why wouldn't they be? There's no way to get the new pikmin other than going into a cave, finding a candypop, and bringing your new pikmin out. So if you want to play around with your new toys you better be prepared to grind!

The balance of this game is just horrible too. There's so many new enemies that one-shot your pikmin, enemies that stun you while everyone else dies, and more instakill hazards than ever before. Gee, that sure sounds like fun! Especially when you cannot get new pikmin while playing through the main gimmick of the game! But don't worry, turns out you also have access to a few unbalanced tricks of your own, like bitter spray and purple pikmin, that make the game entirely trivial! That's kinda like balancing the game, right?????

I simply couldn't do it. I got all treasures in every other game, but Pikmin 2 was the one that broke me. I managed to get the final boss, but it also had as much thought put into it as the rest of the game. It's attacks either do nothing but waste your time, or wipe out half your squad with no warning, no in-between.

IN CONCLUSION: This is bad. Pikmin 1 was a game with an incredible amount of thought put into it, where all the mechanics were expertly designed and flowed into each other. Pikmin 2 is a game that takes the original formula, entirely changes how it's played for no good reason, and then just makes it the player's problem. There's good parts to this game, sure, but they're all ignored in favor of the cave system, and you don't get a chance to explore what's really fun. All you're left with is a non-cohesive mess that does not work.

And the worst part? It's that it's 2024, and Pikmin 4 is out now. It's a complete redemption of Pikmin 2, where the developers tried each and every one of these ideas again, and where all these issues have been fixed by actually putting some thought into the way the game functions. I just finished playing through it and I absolutely loved it. It showed me how bad this game really is, and I don't think I'll be touching it again anytime soon 4/10

Another Gamecube game I never finished before is finally off my backlog. I figured it'd be neat to have the whole series on the switch so I picked up Pikmin 1 + 2 to play this one rather than finish the playthrough I started ages ago on the Wii. I was a bit disappointed to find that the motion controls in this version kinda suck in comparison and that they decided to remove most of the recognizable brands (like Coca-Cola) from the items you collect throughout the game. It does take away some of the playfulness of the original release unforutunately. I felt similarly disappointed when they scrubbed Monster energy drinks from Death Stranding: Director's Cut, but in the end it's not a big deal.

Pikmin 2 does a great job of expanding on the foundation of the first game while allowing the player to enjoy the series's strategic gameplay without the threat of the time limit the first game had. Purple and white pikmin, especially the latter, both feel like very worthwhile additions to the pikmin species roster here.

Caves are a good addition as well though I couldn't help but feel like they overstayed their welcome by the end of the game. I can appreciate the more strategic element of selecting a party of pikmin you think will be able to tackle the challenges a particular cave poses before jumping in. But I constantly felt annoyed that I couldn't make more pikmin when things went awry in the middle of spelunking and going back to the overworld to get more from the onions and bringing them all the way back over to the cave was enough of a chore for me to play more slowly and carefully than I otherwise would have liked to while below ground. Because of this I felt dissuaded from experimentation-- in fact I don't think I ever even used the nectar spray you get fairly early on because I forgot about it immediately.

It's good to have Olimar back though I have a weirdly strong dislike for the new character, Louie. It's probably something to do with the horrifying eyeball-popping facial expressions he makes a lot of the time. Still, it's neat to have two characters this time around. It allows for some more complex pikmin micromanagement even if the game doesn't really do all that much with the feature outside of a particular optional(?) boss battle.

This is certainly a worthwhile game for anyone who's enjoyed the other entries, though I think for me it sits somewhere below Pikmin 3 and above Pikmin were I to rank the ones I've played. Now I can finally dive into Pikmin 4 whenever I get around to nabbing a copy!

(Played on Switch via Pikmin 1+2)

Pikmin 2 is an extremely lovable yet flawed sequel that left me frustrated but mostly happy with my time.

• Impeccable vibes, even more-so than the original, so lovable. I still love my stupid children.
• Game leans heavily into underground dungeons. These are at first a fun diversion, but once they dominate the game, they confoundingly hamper the experience.
• Virtually abandons the dandori design of Pikmin 1. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the game fails to replace it with meaningful substance beyond difficult combat. The overworlds are hollow, and I believe the dungeons are so difficult because if they weren't, the game would have nothing else to offer.
• Dungeons are way too long, and mostly forgettable.
• Any hilarious tragedies along the way are not a fun experience, rather they force you to reset your console unless you want to waste hours of your time. I believe the designers intended this given the autosaves on each floor, and how punishing it is to leave early.
• The end of this game is so frustrating, so punishing, and so devoid of merit that it soured my taste of this game and lowered the score to a 3. It leaves me struggling to remember the good times I had along the way.
• The early credits scene with Louie is hilarious, one of the funniest things I've seen in a Nintendo game. The extras in the menu are awesome.
• Overall I am glad I played it, it's almost a 4/5, but it really stumbles.

Continuing where I left off in my review of the first Pikmin: If Pikmin was an appetizer, PIkmin 2 is the full-on banquet. It's such an expansive game that it makes the first look like a mere tech demo. It expands on its world, providing prettier visuals and more varied environments. It also improves the gameplay by introducing a host of new features, such as caves to explore and a new captain that lets you split your group for more granularity.

The headline addition, though, is the introduction of two new Pikmin types: the venomous White Pikmin, and the super-strong Purple Pikmin. With five different Pikmin types in your arsenal now, it feels like there is a greater focus on strategic decision-making. This especially comes into play with the game's caves, as you need to carefully decide what kinds of Pikmin to bring with you--whatever you bring with you is what you've got. Additionally, since White and Purple Pikmin can only be acquired through delving into these caves, they are much rarer than the traditional variants, adding additional weight to your choice to put them in harm's way.

This time around, Olimar is joined by his companion Louie, as they return to the mysterious planet PNF-404 to collect human junk... I mean, "treasure." There is no fight for survival this time around, and as such the 30-day limit of the first game has been removed. I'm personally very mixed with this choice; the removal of this time limit makes Pikmin into a more pleasant and leisurely experience that puts the focus on free exploration, rather than time management. At the same time, the drive to make me want to make the most out of an in-game day is completely gone, and as such the newfound ability to split your group feels like more of a convenience than a necessity. In fact, there is only one boss encounter in the entire game that really requires you to split your group into two. As a result, Pikmin 2 feels like less of a strategy game, and more like an exploration-based collectathon.

Nevertheless, I think Pikmin 2 is a slightly better overall package, simply because of how deeply it fleshes out the concept of the first game. This heightened depth presents itself most apparently in the game's many caves: multi-tiered dungeons that you have to explore for treasure. As the game progresses, these caves become pretty brutally difficult, and they delivered the great amount of nail-biting suspense that the first game was missing. The difficulty just slightly starts to verge into tedium by the end of the game, but since you only need to engage with the final caves to 100% the game and achieve the "true" ending, I find it easy to forgive.

Up to now, Pikmin 2 has been my favorite game in the series, thanks to how it pushed the gameplay concepts that the first game only explored, and delivered a satisfying challenge as a result. It's also filled with so many adorable touches, like how your Pikmin army begins to sing songs as you march along, or how whimsical names are assigned to each collectible item, as the characters speculate about their former Earthly uses. I'll quickly note that, just like with the first game, this Pikmin 1+2 port does not bring with it any kind of improvement to the experience. That said, Pikmin 2 holds up well on its own today, and I loved revisiting it. Now, on to Pikmin 4!

Ok so I was emulating this on dolphin as one does, and after 100% the game and finally, after 4 hours, beating the final boss, the game just crashed on me...

Not dolphin... Not my desktop... Not even the game considering it still showed me the fps and the sound... But... The game just stopped... And I had to fight that miserable final boss again...

That's the best way I can sum up my experience with pikmin 2...

Unlike Pikmin 1, I actually did beat the main story of Pikmin 2 before. When I first beat it, I enjoyed it more than Pikmin 1, but looking back on it in hindsight, I was wondering if I would still feel that way during my replay. Overall, I did enjoy Pikmin 2 more than Pikmin 1, thankfully.

Pros

• Subtle improvements to the AI. The Pikmin have a bit more autonomy. Occasionally they would ruin my planning, but I found it more helpful than harmful.
• I'm a casual player, so I could be completely wrong, but I felt like the different Pikmin seemed more balanced. The exception to this would be the purple Pikmin, which are super strong.
• Controlling two characters at once makes multi-tasking even easier. It feels great to be able to switch between leaders while working on separate objectives.
• The inclusion of multiplayer is fun. Whether it's vs or co-op in challenge mode, the multiplayer mode is a good time.
• More variety. There are a lot more varied environments and enemy types.
• The addition of sprays is welcome. Having new tools and options add more decision making.

• I prefer the tone, presentation, and story of the first game more. 2 leans more into comedy, while the first game was more serious. Reading Olimar's journal enhanced the experience and added to the immersion. Seeing Olimar's unfiltered inner thoughts was a great reminder of his isolation. Some of the entries got sentimental as he reflected on how badly he wanted to return home and reminisces about his family. Each entry was soaked in emotion. I could feel his anxiety, uncertainty, and desperation, which slowly turns into hope and optimism as the game progresses. 2 on the other hand lacks this story telling and emotional weight. The objective isn't to survive, so the stakes are inherently not as high. The ship talks and is made to be super sassy, which takes away from any sense of gravity. The emails at the end of the day add to world building in the sense of showcasing the personality of the people that interact with the characters, but they do not progress the story like Olimar's journal did in the first game
• It's harder to restart a day/level. This seems a bit silly to criticize the game for, but it's something the first game let you do easily so taking it away makes it more annoying to play if you're the type to restart for whatever reason
• Camera cuts after collecting treasures actively hurts you. It slows the pacing down by making you stop to read the prompts and it doesn't even stop time, so you could see your Pikmin struggling while you're busy reading.
• The main reason I was a bit skeptical if I would still like 2 more than 1: the caverns. This game has a heavy reliance on the caverns. They're dark. bland, claustrophobic, and not very memorable. It doesn't help that 90% of the treasures are found in caverns. The caverns are the least enjoyable part of the experience, and they make up a majority of the game.
• There's 1 less level than the first game. 1 level is just a reused level from the first game and the 1 post-game level is a combination of 2 levels from the first game. This felt pretty lazy.

I beat this with the help of someone who used to be a good friend of mine (no longer), who was a big fan of the game. I had never really played Pikmin as a kid, though I have played a lot of bingo battle in Pikmin 3 with my sister. So I was curious what I would think about the Pikmin style in a campaign setting. I have a few minor gripes but for the most part I found this to be a really excellent game with a lot of charm and atmosphere, and I enjoyed immersing myself in its world.

Let me quickly get some of the gripes out of the way. I'm not really sure how I would've recommended to combat this, but it can be really cumbersome to control the Pikmin sometimes. They get stuck on stuff, they fall off, they don't know how to orient themselves and oftentimes it can get a lot of them killed. I don't think it's a major issue because I think it adds to the coordination aspect but sometimes there are some moments that are super frustrating because of how challenging it can be to properly navigate them sometimes. It can also be hard to aim them properly, especially if something is in the air and you have to figure out how to align your cursor right under it, it plays with perspective in a weird way sometimes. The camera can also be frustrating to work with sometimes, it can make it hard to see what the Pikmin are doing or how to throw them properly when it's locked in an awkward way. Also I appreciate the game's challenge but there are some instances where I felt like I knew how to deal with certain obstacles and they would just do something weird that completely threw me off, or certain dungeon instances would just be really unfairly challenging and I would wonder how I could possibly properly keep enough of my Pikmin alive. Like on some occasions the magma rocks would explode like almost instantly on the ground and I'd have to restart the level (My former friend said the Pikmin may have been attacking it because they were left to their own devices? Idk). Also I only played it once but I think I prefer the setup of the Bingo Battle mode in Pikmin 3 to the multiplayer mode in this game.

That's pretty much all of the gripes I can think of at the moment, onto the positives.

From Chibi-Robo and movies like the Toy Story series and A Bug's Life, I've long been a fan of the possibilities of an environment where you're really small. How ordinary locations turn into these massive environments with unique geography. Pikmin 2 definitely plays to that. The environments are so charming and beautiful to look at, and any of the design aesthetics used to populate the maps and dungeons are really pretty to look at and nicely textured. I especially loved the look of the shower tile textures of some of the dungeons, very atmospheric and aesthetically pleasing. The game creates this great atmosphere of a scavenger leader going through this world that is evocative of something I find myself thinking about a lot, which is the concept of a world where humanity existed but then is somehow gone and how all of that manmade stuff would interact with nature over time. I love that kind of stuff. This game is just so pleasant to the eye, with all the character designs full of charm, and personality in their animations. The Pikmin themselves are so charming. The sounds play well into this style as well, with great sound effects for everything, and while the soundtrack hasn't impacted me on the level of some of my favorites, it's definitely solid and atmospheric.

The maps are solid but the dungeons are the really interesting thing about the game, especially with how their procedural generation ensures you have to keep adapting to however they're laid out. This means that if you get a layout that isn't so great, you can restart and try something else out. The dungeons are something you have to commit to, so individual Pikmin are more precious and you have to plan ahead properly, however the game's use of geysers are useful because you can choose to go back if you're just not doing too hot but at the cost of your current progress. Boss battles were generally solid for the kind of games this is, the final one was especially interesting. I also like how the focus on treasures forces you to generally explore these areas to their fullest, unless you really feel like it's not worth it (and in some cases it wasn't for me, including repeat boss fights in the one dungeon). It's a good framing for an overall objective for the game, and gives it a sort of collectathon vibe. Makes it so you have extra stuff you can go for in the sake of completionism (like the challenge mode as well that I don't really have time for) but you don't have to.

Another cool thing is a habit Nintendo has of making games that push the boundaries of genre definitions, that skirt the expectations, can be hard to classify, or challenge typical genre conventions. Like Super Smash Bros. does not neatly fit into the concept of fighting game, some don't even consider it that but it opened up a new type of "party fighting" game that went on to inspire a bunch of other games to try a new style. Or Luigi's Mansion, what do you classify that as, a twin-stick shooter? Pikmin 2 is defined on Wikipedia as a puzzle game and an RTS. It's like a melding of both in a way that doesn't completely fit in one or the other. It's such a unique yet incredible take on real-time strategy with some mild puzzle elements thrown in for good measure. I'd love to see more games approach a similar take to strategy games. It is strategic but in a completely different way than say Age of Empires or StarCraft. It's the unique kind of variation that still technically fits that Nintendo is best at. You can be very strategic about who gets what Pikmin and where you're going to place them and which you're taking, and I really love that they let captains go out on their own because there were situations where I was so grateful I could just beat up and kill enemies on my own without the Pikmin.

I think there could've been a little more polish in some of the controls and maneuvering the Pikmin and there are some situations that are a bit cheap, but I generally found this game very enjoyable. Aesthetically and sonically it's very pleasant and charming, it's a lot of fun to play with the Pikmin and figure out how to best control them, the dungeons are fun to explore, and it provides a very unique spin on typical genre conventions. I definitely recommend this game to everyone, extremely charming and a lot of fun, with compelling difficulty.

[I didn't go for 100% completion but I spent significantly more time than needed to beat the game because I was just enjoying myself and going back for some stuff I missed, because I was having a lot of fun with the game.]

Pikmin 1 had the great premise, and Pikmin 2 had everything else, improved in every possible way! The dungeons were a lot of fun to explore, the new Pikmin types were super useful, having two characters to control made everything feel a lot more "tactical", the removal of the time limit was a big relief, and everything that made Pikmin so great was improved to make it even more interesting and unique.

This here is the perfect sequel, you don't see a lot of these!