Pikmin 1 and 2
Tags: review
Pikmin 1
I really enjoyed Pikmin 1. You play as Olimar who crash lands on Earth, scattering the parts of his ship. You recruit and manage the pikmin to help you fight various insects and carry the parts to reassemble your ship. Theres a time limit of 30 in game days before Olimar runs out of oxygen and gets turned into a pikmin himself.
I played the game first a couple of months ago and quit midway because the time limit was too stressing. This time, I just made sure to get a ship part each day and was totally fine.
Managing all of the pikmin and exploring the scaled down planet was super fun. Keeping your squad alive and figuring out the weaknesses of enemies was satisfying.
The pikmins movement ai is a little fiddly and they get stuck on literally everything if you don't manage them carefully. I like it though because the pikmin are supposed to be a little dumb.
Overall, I really liked Pikmin 1. The soundtrack is relaxing and its simple enough to jump back in again and go for a shorter run.
Pikmin 2
I have a lot more to say about the Pikmin 2 because I didn't like it nearly as much as the first. In the second game, you return to Earth along with your co-worker Louie to collect junk to sell and repay your company's debt.
The bulk of Pikmin 2 is spent in caves, a departure from the first game which is entirely above ground. The caves are dungeons where you clear out each floor, grabbing all the treasure you can while losing as few pikmin as you can.
The new Pikmin types are the purple and white Pikmin. The purple are good for combat being able to do massive damage and stun enemies. The white are able to traverse poison and dig up hidden underground items.
The good
Having 2 captains is really useful, opening the way for more productivity and giving a nice risk/reward of having more productivity but more risk of danger because you can only control and see the view of one captain at a time.
There is also a lot more treasures here than in the first game, mostly product placement from real world brands. The switch remaster gets rid of all the branded products though.
The piklopedia is fun to look through and see Olimar's observations about all the treasures you collect.
The bad
My biggest complaints with the game are to do with the caves. Nintendo removed the quick save loading from Pikmin 1 that this game sorely needed. In the original, you could press a button and reload from a previous save. Pikmin 2 is a lot harder with a lot of one shot kill enemies that could wipe out your whole squad. To reload your save here you need to restart the whole game. It might be worth playing it through an emulator for the save states.
I really didn't like a lot of these caves either. It was a chore to get through the tougher ones, only because of the aforementioned save loading. I stopped at the start of the post game content because the difficulty just spiked up exponentially and it was become too much of a chore.
Time is also paused in the caves which encourages going through them a lot slower to save your pikmin unlike the original game which prioritised going at a fast pace and aiming for efficiency.
The caves are procedurally generated so in almost all of them, visuals are incredibly barebones compared to the overworld of the first game.
Focusing on caves and combat instead of the exploration and time management above ground shifts the tone of the game a lot to feel more like a dungeon crawler rather than an exploration game which in my opinion, makes it lose what made the original so fun. Ditching the core loop of gradually exploring the terrain to uncover treasure and managing time in favor of a slow, grind centered much more on combat.
All of my complaints can pretty much be boiled down to "skill issue" so maybe don't take this that seriously.
Conclusion
At some point I'll be playing Pikmin 3 and 4 I guess because I've heard that 3 is a lot closer to 1 and 4 is sort of a more fair version of 2. Right now I'm playing re4 remake.