I wasn’t really impressed by Pikmin when it was first being advertised, but a guy at work loaned it to me, so I played it through. Turned out to be a lot of fun. Solidly in the real-time strategy genre, but disguised to look like a kid’s game. And better than most of them, because you have much more solid control over your troops than in Starcraft, say. But, it was also pretty quick, done within a week, so I gave it back and never got a copy myself. Fun is fine and all, but short is lame.
Except! Sometime in the past 3-4 years since then, my game practices have turned around, and I run out of patience pretty quickly now. (I have some fears about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in this same vein, as the reviews make it appear to be bigger than ever. And I didn’t quite finish Vice City.) So, when Pikmin 2 came out earlier this month, I leapt on it.
The gameplay is essentially identical. You run the little guys around killing big scary monsters (well, okay, ladybugs and frogs, mostly) and bypassing geographic obstacles in order to collect shiny objects that can be sold as artifacts on your home planet, thereby getting your shipping company out of hock. You’re limited to a set time per day, and must leave at night. On top of the strategy of building up the right forces for each task, the monsters will regenerate after a few days and the geography will too after a few more, so there’s the added strategy layer of how many days to stay in each area.
Changes to play include an unlimited number of days to play, randomly generated caves to explore, and two main characters to control the Pikmin, instead of just one. The first one doesn’t change play a lot; sure, you have time to be thoughtful and unhurried, but you pretty much had that during the first game. The caves aren’t as random as the literature would have you believe. Each one has the same treasures and creatures in the same order. The only difference is the layout of where these are placed on any given cave level.
Where the game shines is in the multiple player aspect. I’ve only played by myself, so all I can see is the glimmer of how useful two minds able to control two groups independently would be. The ability to control two groups on sequence is great, though. You can start a group on a task, then move back to another. It’s also a lot harder to accidentally leave any Pikmin behind. Also, I’m blathering, because this will be non-sensical to someone who hasn’t at least seen the first game. My point is, this is a boon to the strategic element game that cannot be overemphasized.
The rest of where the game shines is in the game world itself. It’s genuinely fun to watch and read everything that goes by. Fun enough that when I made a big flub on Day 10, I restarted and didn’t resent it. Fun enough that despite having played the end credits about an hour ago, I’m likely to pick up the controller and finish exploring every nook of the game that I can find, later today and over the next several.
Everything has a downside, of course. This one is in the save-game structure. You can choose to save at the end of every day, which is fine. You can’t have multiple save files, which is lame, but acceptable. (Technically, you can have up to three. This is designed for multiple players at the same time, but you can do copies and get up to three that way, if you really wanted to expend the effort.) The game auto-saves when you enter a cave and when you move on to each successive floor, which is terrible. You can auto-save or you can limit the number of save files, but doing both is ridiculous. This is why I had to go back and restart 10 game-days in, incidentally.
In any case, that’s not a game ruining flaw, and I would recommend either of these games to any Gamecube owner. It’s not quite good enough to buy a system for, though. Luckily, there are multiple Zelda and Metroid games released / planned over the next year to satisfy that issue.