Pikmin 2 is the perfect example of an excellent game that torpedoes itself with an abundance of repetitive and poor-quality content. Despite making plenty of improvements over its predecessor, the majority of Pikmin 2 is spent engaging with its worst content: caves. I wanted to love this game as much as I loved the original Pikmin, and truthfully it surpasses the original game in many ways. But unfortunately 75% of the game is at best dull, and at worst frustrating.

To start with the positive, Pikmin 2 delivers more content than its predecessor. There’s more Pikmin varieties, there’s more enemies, there’s more treasures, there’s more hazards, and there’s even an additional playable character. This is all fantastic. I liked having two captains to control as it allows for more multitasking, which is a core component of the Pikmin series. One captain can oversee a group of Pikmin knocking down a wall, while the other captain can command the Pikmin to attack enemies and replenish their numbers.

The two new Pikmin varieties both are unique and integral to your success. Purple Pikmin are heavy but slow. They can carry 10x the weight of normal Pikmin, and they are incredibly effective in combat. They deal bonus damage and stun enemies upon landing from a throw. White Pikmin are faster than normal Pikmin, are immune to poison, can find treasures underground, and deal massive poison damage to an enemy that attempts to eat them. Both of these varieties are powerful, but are cleverly balanced by their rarity.

Both purple and white Pikmin do not have their own motherships, and as such you cannot use the normal chips and enemy corpses to spawn more of them. Instead, you come across colored flowers that you have to sacrifice other Pikmin into five at a time. This heavily limits how many of these special Pikmin that you will have. While the purple Pikmin in particular are incredibly powerful in combat, I felt nervous bringing large quantities around because losing just a handful of them could be catastrophic. I think this was a great way to balance these new varieties. Having powerful Pikmin at your disposal is very fun, but limiting their quantity makes them risky to use.

Another welcome addition is the inclusion of sprays. You can spend time having Pikmin collect berries that will be refined into two varieties of sprays: bitter and spicy. The spicy spray speeds up your Pikmin and increases their attack power. The bitter spray turns enemies to stone briefly. I enjoyed how these provided some additional decisions to make during combat. You could use them to make encounters much easier, but you had a limited quantity of them unless you spent a ton of time farming them. I saved them for dire situations or tricky boss fights, and I appreciated their inclusion.

When I played the original Pikmin my biggest issue with the game was the poor AI. I haven’t done any sort of extensive testing, but I definitely feel like this was improved in Pikmin 2. They seem to not get stuck on random bits of geometry as often. They don’t get distracted by grass as much. They are quicker to pluck and faster to respond to the whistle. I still had some occasional woes when trying to dismiss Pikmin into groups, but overall, I appreciated how much more responsive they were overall.

While I didn’t spend a ton of time reading the entries, I loved the Piklopedia. This journal has fun descriptions of both the enemies and the treasures that you collect. These have a lot of personality and charm. They’re funny and a great addition for people who want to delve more into the world of Pikmin.

The gameplay loop of Pikmin 2 is almost identical to the original. Instead of crash landing on Earth, you voluntarily journey there to collect treasure to alleviate your company’s debt. You command your troop of Pikmin to knock down barriers, fight enemies, and collect goodies. A major difference however is that Pikmin 2 lacks a maximum number of days. In the first game, you had 30 days to collect 30 parts. With each day being roughly 15 minutes, there was a sense of urgency to get something done with every second. 

The looming time limit in Pikmin was something that many players felt anxious about, but I think it was a critical element of gameplay. It encouraged the player to maximize their time and take risks. You could leave a troop of Pikmin to knock down walls or carry things back to base, but there was always the worry that they could be intercepted by hungry enemies. And even if you had a couple minutes left in the day, there was always the question of what you could do with your time. Whether it be replenishing your Pikmin supply, feeding them nectar to upgrade them, or knocking down barriers to make the next day easier, I wanted to maximize my time. 

Thirty days was plenty generous unless you were wasting a ton of time, but the looming threat of failure was crucial. This isn’t present in Pikmin 2 at all, as you have an unlimited number of days to accomplish your goals. There’s no rush to do anything, you can play incredibly safe and not have to do any risky multitasking. You don’t have to squeeze every second out of the day, as you can just go to the next day with no downside as the timer approaches night. The lack of urgency was definitely unfortunate, but it was a minor issue when compared to the biggest flaw of Pikmin 2: caves.

Before I begin ranting about caves, I want to make it clear that I genuinely think that they are a good idea. They act as dungeons in which you progress floor by floor with no opportunity to replenish your Pikmin. They have a heavy emphasis on combat, each floor is packed with enemies and there is usually a boss at the end. Defeating the boss usually yields a special treasure with a unique upgrade such as immunity to electricity. I think this is all great. Entering a cave is anxiety inducing as you don’t know what lies ahead, and losing Pikmin can devastate your odds of success. This is all great, but the caves have a few issues: bland aesthetics, monotonous gameplay, and frustrating level design.

There are 14 caves in the game, and even shortly after beating the game I can only really remember 4 of them. And 2 of those I only remember because they were infuriating. A big reason why caves aren’t memorable is because they are just plain ugly and bland. Many of them are just big dirt pits with little to distinguish themselves. Moreover, the levels are semi-randomly generated, so they can’t make up for forgettable visuals with interesting level design.

 Most of the caves lack anything to make them unique. Just floor after floor of basic battles with no end in sight. And many of these caves can take upwards of an hour to complete. It grows old quickly. There are a couple of good examples in Pikmin 2 of what caves could be: Submerged Castle and Glutton’s Kitchen. 

Submerged Castle is easily the best in the game. You have to work quickly to recover treasures in this water-filled cave, because a nightmarish blob appears after 5 minutes on each floor to steamroll your Pikmin. This is a unique mechanic that encourages you to move quickly, but even if you aren’t fast enough there are strategically placed pipes that allow you to hide from the monster. Glutton’s Kitchen is nearly as horrifying, but it is memorable nonetheless. It takes place in a child’s playset of building blocks and a wooden train set. Fat breadbugs try to steal your treasures and drag them back to their dens. The combination of being visually distinct and having a central mechanic is vital in making caves more interesting. It’s a shame that none of the other caves live up to the quality of these two.

I have to mention that my entire experience was left on sour note because of the final caves in the game. They were memorable for the wrong reasons. They felt completely unfair. Every floor was a cramped nightmare filled with dangerous enemies. Not to mention traps such as bombs, rocks, and enemies falling from the sky. I don’t mind a bit of elevated difficulty, but the difficulty spike here is egregious. There are so many ways that you could instantly lose half your army deep into a dungeon. The saving grace here is that you can hard reset to the beginning of the floor.

I don’t think relying on frequently resetting your system is a great mechanic, but it feels necessary here. There are so many catastrophic things that can happen, and it often feels unavoidable. Due to the randomized nature of enemy placement, some configurations are far, far harder than others. The final dungeon, Dream Den, has many floors that feel like the developers just threw every enemy they could into cramped rooms. These aren’t cleverly designed challenges, they are meat grinders that require unsatisfying tactics to succeed.

Like I previously mentioned, you can always just reset and hope for a better outcome or easier layout, but there are some ways that you can combat the tougher encounters. You can play super carefully, going through each floor with no Pikmin at first, triggering every trap. Then abuse the enemy AI to bait them out one at a time. This is time consuming and feels a little cheap as you are just bypassing every obstacle. You could also use purple Pikmin and bitter spray as they are surefire methods to simplify tougher fights, but these are very limited resources unless you spend time farming them. Truthfully, some of the floors in the later dungeons feel like absolutely no thought went into them and they weren’t even playtested.

In my perfect world, Pikmin 2 would have cut down the number of caves dramatically. Instead of 14 repetitive caves, having 5 unique and intentionally designed caves would be a massive improvement. The caves would have their own aesthetic themes and unique mechanics to make them interesting. Each floor would be designed with care and there would be thought into the layout and enemy placements. I understand that randomization can increase replayability, but in the main campaign I wanted purposefully designed dungeons. Randomized dungeons could’ve been a great challenge mode.

I was let down by the number of poor-quality caves in Pikmin 2. Even without a day limit to encourage efficiency, I still was having a great time up until I started delving into the caves. The vast majority of the game is spent in the caves, and it’s by far the worst aspect of the game. More isn’t always better, and Pikmin 2 would’ve been greatly improved by cutting the number of caves in half and spending more time carefully designing them. It really is a shame because Pikmin 2 gets so much right, it just sabotages itself with an abundance of uninteresting and occasionally aggravating content.