Pikmin 1+2 Review – Review
A look back at Pikmin’s growing pains.
Pikmin 2 is something of a black sheep in the Pikmin franchise. It exists within Nintendo’s mid-2000s transition away from hardcore gamers towards more casual audiences, and it feels like a weird midpoint between those two extremes. I have no idea if this dichotomy is the result of any intentional design decisions on Nintendo’s part, but the result is an undeniable sense that the game has trouble deciding what exactly it wants to be. Sometimes it’s too easy and lacks some of the challenges that made the original Pikmin compelling, and sometimes it’s brutally punishing in ways that only the most skilled players will be able to stomach. The audience for this game feels slim, but the most dedicated fans of the franchise may enjoy it for the truly unique experience it brings to the table.
Pikmin 2 opens with Captain Olimar and his new partner Louie returning to the Pikmin homeworld in search of treasure to pay off their boss’ massive debts. The two captains enlist the help of the native Pikmin to carry various delicacies, devices, and doodads back to their ship to sell for cold hard cash. The big twist introduced in this game is the presence of underground caverns teeming with treasures and monsters alike. Though the traditional overworlds of Pikmin 1 are still present (literally, since you visit remixed versions of the original maps), the majority of the game’s runtime is spent in the caverns, descending deeper into the Earth with no warning of what you’ll find ahead.
The caverns themselves are sadly pretty dull, made up of copy and paste assets that are lightly randomized. Enemies and treasures are fixed to each individual cavern, but their exact positions will be different each time you enter. The layouts of the underground are mostly flat and simple with very few visual themes, and I swear I saw a few layouts multiple times (though I’d never be certain given how basic and featureless each one is). The randomness also makes the gameplay feel directionless; I would often break down walls and obstacles that lead to nowhere while treasures were laying out in the open. The bespoke puzzles and challenges in the overworld are just as good as the original Pikmin, but they feel few and far between since your time in the caverns will easily dwarf your time above ground.
In terms of difficulty, Pikmin 2 is very uneven. The core challenge of the first game—the limited number of days you have before a game over—has been completely removed, making the day/night cycle feel like a tedious leftover. With no hard time limit you’re free to explore at your own pace and take as much time as you need to restock your army of Pikmin with no consequence, leaving no incentive to optimize your route through the game. Every few minutes the sun will set and you’ll be forced to go through the rigmarole of gathering your Pikmin and returning to your ship before coming back the next day and returning to what you were doing exactly where you left it. The result is that the end of a day feels like it might as well be an especially long loading screen for how little purpose it has, especially since time freezes completely when you’re underground.
The flip side of the coin is the intense challenges to be found in the underground, which feature some of the most punishing consequences for failure I’ve seen in the franchise. Caverns are densely filled with powerful enemies that can easily catch you off-guard and wipe out an entire squad of Pikmin in an instant. Multitasking is actually deeply discouraged in the underground since unexpected enemies can be lurking around the corner, and the game often throws what I can only call pranks at you as explosives literally fall from the ceiling without warning. Monsters become tougher and more destructive as you progress further through the game, and I had to make frequent use of the autosave the game makes on each floor of a cavern to get through some of the unfair and unexpected curveballs that would be thrown at me.
Ironically, I think this punishing difficulty is actually something that especially dedicated fans of the franchise may find appealing. Combat in Pikmin is often simple because you aren’t directly engaging with enemies, and the intense difficulty found in the caverns is exactly what I’ve seen many hardcore fans say they love about Pikmin 2. The tedious repetition of each cavern’s randomized features took away a lot of appeal for me, but there’s no doubt that the game’s high intensity that requires intimate familiarity with the nuances of commanding your Pikmin is unlike anything else the series has to offer.
As for the Switch version specifically, the updates in the HD version of Pikmin 2 are pretty much identical to those found in Pikmin 1, which I covered in
a mini-review last month. The primary change unique to Pikmin 2 is that the real-world product placement found among the game’s treasures has been removed, and a joke spam email from an online dating site (yes, that’s real) has been rewritten to be more family-friendly. One thing in both games that I didn’t realize until playing Pikmin 2 is that while using gyro controls the cursor can still be moved around by the control stick. This was not the case in the Wii versions of Pikmin 1 and 2 where you could freely aim independently of your character’s movement, and you’ll need to actively fight against the cursor drifting away when positioning yourself around enemies.
Pikmin 2 is a tough game to recommend, especially with the brand new Pikmin 4 featuring a much more successful version of its key feature, the caverns. The high difficulty requires a lot of investment from the player to overcome, and the lack of bespoke design underground makes the journey to overcome those obstacles too tedious to feel rewarding. Dedicated fans who want to be pushed into learning the intricacies of Pikmin’s mechanics will find something special in the unique challenge, but pretty much everything else about Pikmin 2 has been pulled off much better in another game in the franchise.
