Pikmin 2
Pikmin 2
This was originally posted on the 28th of January, 2024, in this Twitter thread.
 |
| Nintendo |
Pikmin 2 was a neat twist on Pikmin 1's foundation. It's mainly focused on cave exploration, which in more video gamey terms is pretty much dungeon crawling. Rather than time being the main limiting factor, you're primarily limited on how many Pikmin you can bring into caves.
It gets pretty brutal though if you're not great at it. For example, after fighting this boss, I didn't have enough Blue Pikmin to get its treasure out of the water, so I had to go through the cave all over again.
This also happened to me on the final boss. I beat it first try yet, I didn't have enough Pikmin to carry any of its treasure so had to go through the final cave again, and fight the final boss again.
Strangely, because the captains can tank a lot of hits, and they're way better at evading attacks, oftentimes they're better to put in danger over the Pikmin. Eventually I realized, I could just fistfight certain enemies which completely cheeses some cave floors (albeit extremely slowly). (Note: You could fistfight stuff in Pikmin 1, but it was far less powerful due to the time limit. Plus I just didn't know about it before.)
From what I understand, the entire game can be beaten really slowly if you're bad at it and/or patient enough, since beyond Day 1, I'm pretty sure you can just farm enemies for cash indefinitely, which is pretty powerful when the game's win condition is just to get a bunch of money.
The lack of a Day limit was kinda odd, since the story seems to imply that there is, but nope, there just isn't from what I understand. I imagine this was probably done to make the game more appealing to casuals, since a lot of people from what I've heard found the first game stressful.
The game does still track your playtime and in-game day count though, so you could still push yourself to play fast if you wanted too.
It feels a little weird though that the Day/Night cycle doesn't progress while in caves. Days can end up really weirdly paced, because someone will take like a dozen minutes, while some take like 2 hours due to spending a bunch of time inside caves. Caves being free from any sort of time limit is nice though considering they already provide their own challenge.
I'm a little mixed on how player, enemy, and item spawn locations are randomized in caves. Sure, it makes things more varried, but it can lead to some floors being way easier, and some floors being way harder than I feel feel they should be.
Or well, they weren't too hard. I never used either of the sprays until I got to the final boss, so I was gimping myself pretty significantly. As to why, I tried using the red spray once beforehand, but I didn't have any Pikmin called so nothing happened, so I just shrugged it off and never bothered to learn what they did until way later.
The Challenge mode also has some interesting twists. It's uses cave floors for its stages rather than the surface areas, so the levels are a lot smaller, yet there's a lot more of them. You have to specifically unlock and reach exits in order to keep your Pikmin. The added element of having to reach an exit makes it actually feel like a "Challenge" mode, and not just a high score mode.
Shout out to this boss again because getting a Perfect on this Challenge was a pain in the ass.
I again had to beat this thing multiple times because the first time I beat it without loosing Pikmin, I accidentally threw some Purple Pikmin out into the void, so I ended up spending another hour just to get a perfect again.
My absolute least favorite part of the game was the cutscene that plays every time (in the Story mode) you get a tresure. (Discluding times your ship has something special to say, which only makes things take longer) The treasure cutscenes take 10 seconds each, which I found excruciating since there's 201 of them. The treasure cutscenes alone make me not want to never 100% this game ever again.
Pikmin 1+2
This was originally posted on the 29th of January, 2024, in this Twitter thread.
 |
| Nintendo |
This is a fine pack.
Some UI elements are horizontally stretched which looks a little weird.
It doesn't come with any manual which is a little unfortunate. Sure, they're not super necessary, but it's still just part of the original experience that's missing.
I don't really like the boxart. I get that it's going for what the original japanese versions went for, but I prefer the non-japanese boxarts.
Lastly I wanna talk about the gyro controls. They only function when you're either throwing Pikmin, holding a Pikmin to throw it, or blowing your whistle, and when not doing any of those actions though, the pointer controls revert to using the left stick, which I found to be really clunky.
You can just turn them off in the settings though, and since the original games weren't designed for them anyways, so it's not a huge deal that they aren't very good.
This was the case in the Wii version as well I believe but, I thought it was weird how using the motion controls to aim was simply just more optimal. Being able to strafe around enemies while throwing Pikmin at them isn't too weird of an upside, but being able to simply just throw Pikmin further than normal felt pretty cheesy.
| 2024 Media Page |
Comments
Post a Comment