I love Pikmin 2- I must fight against this slander. Please share, discuss & support this video!! I wanna live!! In seriousness though, it's perfectly fine if some people think Pikmin 2 is 'the weakest.' I can understand why people would prefer it less or more to either Pikmin 1 or 3 based on what they enjoy. Heck, I even still agree with a couple broader criticisms Schaff makes- I just think his arguments are bad & tend to over exaggerate. Anyways if you read all this- have a good one!
Ok. My opinion on the pikmin games are: 1 is prob the best. 2 is prob the most unique. 3 is prob my fav. Hey isnt as bad but if we are looking at it like a pikmin game then yeah....its not good. And bloom........who? Jk its an ok app but yet again, not pikmin like. Now 2 is my least fav, and before anyone says anything, no i am not a fan pf this dude. Rarely heard of the crab person. But Lemme t3ll all the probles i have with the trilogy. Pi,min 1 felt.....simple. not that it is bad but sometimes i felt like the same things were happening. With 2 i dont like the caves and no, its not becuase of the absent time limit. It's becuase well.....if we talk aboht layout, then it is always fun and cool but it definetly lowers the difficulty. And 3..........it's easy. Listen. An ewsy game isnt bad becuase its easy, but i feel like even when i play on the hardest difficulty where the game mustnt hold back, i still feel like yhe game holds back. Hey.........where do i begin. The sun time limit is gone which makes you consider if it even is a pikmin game. Performance for the og 3ds is terrible, the game feels like its struggling to decide whether it is a platformer or not, you have the same pikmins from 3 without them removing or adding any, and the story feels bland. With bloom i dont realy have a problem. It is just a fun excercise app if you like cute things or pikmin, buuuut if you want an ACTUAL pikmin yame on mobile then no.
I love how Schaffrillas takes criticism, instead of making an angry response video or starting beef, he instead considers the other person's points and promotes the video on his community tab! It shows just how mature he is!
Unless you don't like Rio 2. Then he laughs at you, deletes his original video, and then re-uploads it to add a section shitting on the people who don't like Rio 2 because what the fuck are you doing getting this heated over someone saying they like Rio 2?
@@faultyvideos2215 I though it was because people were harrasing him, to be honest he is one of the most mature "critics" or content creators because he can accept the other point of view. Also, maybe that whole Rio incident had to do with the recent events he was in and some people were laughing at him.
@@valordelink yeah, it was harassment, but it was harassment that was, for some fucking reason, based in hating Rio 2 of all things. Schaffrillas has had some controversial opinions, some of which he's even gone back on like his Better Call Saul video, but of all the takes of his to garner so much backlash that he'd delete the video it came from, the take that he likes Rio 2 (not even that he thinks it's a good movie, just that he likes it) is certainly not one I had on my bingo card.
@@HidinginPrivate *video not vid. I do not understand the concept of wanting to shorten a word that is already short enough as it is. I find it ridiculous. However, I do understand wanting to shorten long words.
@@SuperPlacido1It would have been much wiser of you to place a comma before the word "but" rather than a period. If you wanted to make that a separate sentence like you did, I would suggest using the word "however" followed by a comma. Please, worry about proper use of conjunctions and correct English rather than the shortening of words, which could also be considered slang.
@@Tuxum Thanks a lot! Finally someone smart enough to help me with my English! It feels good! ^^ (English is not my mother tongue! My mother tongue is French!) Have a great week-end! ^^
@@SuperPlacido1 protip: english speaking people find it very irritating when you correct them on shortenings or slang because it is considered haughty and pedantic
I think what pikmin 2 does exceptionally well is show that the pikmin gameplay style can work in more than one scenario. it's not *just* a style you can use for a good puzzle/rts game, it can also make for a fun dungeon crawler
@@329link Give Pikhacker's Colossal Caverns a try! It puts every enemy/boss/treasure on a MASSIVE randomized sublevel and has tons of fun game options! It's definitely the kind of gameplay you're looking for!
The only thing I know about Pikmin is that a whole lot of Pikmin were killed by Captain Falcon while they were harassing a BOB during the Subspace Emissary campaign in Super Smash Bros Brawl but I agree with everything you just said.
The random generation is my favorite aspect of the game! 🥰 Always requires new strategies and highly revs up the replayability! There's always more to explore!
A thing I feel like people forget about pikmin 2 is that even though you don’t have a finite number of days to complete the game, you still sorta get punished by extra world spawns as the game goes forward For example in perplexing pool past day 32 or so a bulbear will show up actively patrol the overworld as well as beady fuckin long legs appearing if you study the trunk in the wrong place So I’m a way, punishment for wasting days still very much exists
To add on this, in Pikmin 2's over worlds, I at least always preferred to spend a day clearing out enemies and getting general pathways cleared for treasure collection later, and the as we all know enemies respawn after three days, so if I don't manage my time in quickly killing enemies and then collecting treasure I'll have to worry about the enemies I spent time killing respawning and getting in the way again.
Holy shit the "Strawberries arent Fruits" bit is literally something I feel strongly about 90% of the RUclipsr community and their tendency to hide behind "RESPECT PEOPLE'S OPINIONS" and Ive never been able to put it into words until now
I understand what he was going for but funnily enough strawberries are not technically fruits. They are pseudofruits lol. Also, "Strawberries are fruits" is more objective than something like "this mechanic is unfair", which is in a gray area between fact and opinion
I’ve noticed this a lot in Schaff’s videos talking about video games, but I feel like he approaches game criticism in much the same way you would for film or literary criticism. On a surface level, this isn’t a problem at all- he’s dignifying games as an artistic medium and judging them on their merits to tell a meaningful story. But, that’s also the problem: Video games are NOT films or books or static paintings. A lot of what makes a game good is how its gameplay tells the story. The fact that THE major criticism against the dungeon crawling system was bad aesthetics and removal of the day cycle without considering the gameplay shift to resource management is one tell of this. It’s kinda clear that Scaff doesn’t really know much about game design, which is fine yknow. Pikmin 2 could, theoretically, be an objectively better game than Pikmin, but there would still be people who prefer Pikmin out of personal taste. But, you gotta know what you’re talking about or else you’re not going to make a convincing argument. EDIT: On the enemy revival mechanic, THIS is what I mean! Schaff is positive about urgency in Pikmin when it’s a nebulous story element but NOT when it’s an active gameplay element like enemy revival or frustrating enemies. It’s the exact kind of take that someone who mainly reviews film rather than games would make. Story is an element that make games more entertaining, but gameplay is GOD in *games*. A good story does not a good game make
Agreed and for a game the story will usually always go last unless it is a certain case like a visual novel, text based adventure, etc. and it can survive if an area is lacking in some departments like aesthetics, audio, and as said earlier story, as long as it does not hinder the gameplay. To hit home on the day limit thing in Pikmin 1 and 3 it really is just mainly an artificial time limit for story purposes yet in actual gameplay especially in 3 your hardly in any danger of that time limit normally. Granted yes having a compelling narrative will increase the game’s age it doesn’t solely make the game. The story needs to be built around the gameplay itself not the other way around.
A lot of people complain that Olimar doesn’t have as much personality or character in Pikmin 2 as in the first game, but those who say that probably have never read through Olimar’s journals in the Piklopedia
Thank you so much for making this video. I really hope he sees it. When I was watching the original video, I couldn't go a minute without getting extremely irritated. It's not because he doesn't like the game, I couldn't care less about that. Everyone likes different things. It's the fact that he's a RUclipsr with almost 2 million subscribers, has almost no real arguments, and most certainly turned tens of thousands of people off of an amazing, relatively small game.
For some reason, this dilemma reminds me of the Dark Souls trilogy, and how the second title is usually the most disliked due to hearsay and not being the original or newest title. While some complaints are grounded, the game is otherwise still fairly good compared to its adjacent titles.
It reminds me of the dkc trilogy as the 3rd game is hated for no other reason than it's different and while some claims have some truth to them other claims are just stupid because one guy decided he was going to get pissy because he could not beat a level made a hate video on it and spawned a group of gremlins who never played the game but hate it even though saying kiddy Kong is weird is not a argument
it's sad that this happens in so many franchises, from games to books to movies. I'm all for people venting about their personal preferences, but when you dress your pet peeves up as objective truths, you're robbing anyone who believes you of the opportunity to form their own opinion.
@@theluiginoidperson1097Same shit happens with Bioshock 2 since to this day there is hearsay that it is "the worst one" and isn't talked about as a masterpiece like 1 and Infinite is. I still remember thinking it was going to be bad when I first played it and ended up enjoying it more then the first game. Guess sequels to great games get a bad rep.
@@theluiginoidperson1097 The thing is, the situation regarding Ds2 is genuinely really weird. First came the initial critque from Matthewmatosis that did paint the game in a bad light, but wasn't overly scathing or "charged" with rage similar to Schrafillas. Basically he critisized for not being a "bad" game but for doubling down on what made Ds1 annoying to play at times, such as hordes of tough enemies the game's combat system isn't neccesarily geared for or "bosses" that are just rooms of normal enemies and with the main bosses being completely and utter pushovers outside of the dlc, which also came with it's fair share of issues such as the infamous frigid outskirts. So as result, HBomberguy made a response video but instead of properly backing up his claims with objective evidence and finding flaws within specific critiques, he created strawmen to make Ds1 look shitty before going on some abstract speech about how the Iron Keep is Great from a "thematic" standpoint while sprouting out nedulous jargon. Not to mention, he barely gives mention to what many consider Ds2's strongest attribute which is it's dlcs which led some Ds2 fans to claim that it was a shitty defense and that the game deserved a better video. His fate would later be sealed as Mauler put out his ten hour long response series tearing apart every single sentence of HBombersguys video which completely destroyed his credibility as a Ds2 "defender" and unfortunately, the reputation of the game itself. Thankfully, I feel like nowadays the opinions have cooled down significantly for both sides despite some Elden Ring hate being a thing for a couple weeks post launch. But as of right now in 2023, I can't help but feel like most fans are just really grateful to Fromsoft as a company and glad that they can keep putting quality titles, especially with the release date of Armored Core 6 around the corner and the awesome trailers that game had. The Pikmin fandom is way less volatile than something like the Souls fanbase or god forbid the Zelda fandom which is just the definition of fickleness. From what I've seen, most Pikmin 2 hate stems from Schrafillas and the people that watch him cause most people still seem to really like Pikmin 2. Saw some ranking videos on the Pikmin games and several of them have Pikmin 2 as number one, not to mention some articles that ranked the games. Ds2 wishes it could have that much popularity. Not speaking on the quality btw. Just explaining some parts of the Ds2 situations and what people thought about it.
I think you really highlighted how unfocused his video was. It's clear that there are a lot of different aspects of the game he didn't like, but especially in regards to his comments on the game design, he doesn't know how to identify why he didn't like them. In a logically consistent way anyways. Great video.
Thanks! Yeah I feel like he had a lot of perfectly valid opinions of personal taste but then felt the need to justify his feelings objectively and started tripping over himself
I think Schaffrillas doesn't fully know why he doesn't like 2. He has this idea of what pikmin "should" be and is holding 2 to that on top of just not liking some things. The point on the underground breaking immersion hardly feels like a point because nothing about it breaks the flow of the game. the alternative is make time still pass in caves, but then I think his complaint would be there's not enough time to get all the treasure, or you are stuck in a sub area without an exit when night hits. That point is entirely based on the vibe and Idea of pikmin, but puts no thought into the gameplay ramifications. The rest of the video seems to become "I don't like X, let me try to make reason". The only point I semi agree with is the lack of a day deadline. I think having the boss' life in your hands with money milestones (Or louies life afterwards) would be cool. But thats just retroactive thinking and not a point against the game design.
I believe pikmin 1&3 and pikmin 2 appeal to totally different types of players. Pikmin 1&3 requires puzzling through fast micromanagement. Pikmin 2 is more for the people who like combat and collecting. The game requires greater mechanical skill (not as much if you play wii motion controls) and has more collectables.
With the wii version, I think the difficulty of pikmin 2 is roughly the same as the gamecube version, you throw you pikmin slower in exchange for more accurate and easy tosses, It is much easier to make the mistake of throwing a pikmin into danger in the gamecube version, but you can throw pikmin crazy fast if you can tap fast enough. (this is kinda why challenge mode in the gamecube version is so much easier than the wii version.)
I completely disagree, pikmin 1 is embarrassingly easy to 100 percent (I'm terrible at rts games and can do it within the time limit with a few days to spare, I did it on my first playthrough even) and pikmin 3 does not require quick micromanagement in the slightest outside of bosses....and if that's your point pikmin 2 also requires quick micromanagement against bosses. Pikmin 2 just focuses on a different kind of urgency. Pikmin 3 is the worst of the worst when it comes to making things easy and slow. If you gather the fruit readily available to you right around the beginning of any area you can sustain yourself for the entire playthrough 😅
I think the weirdly popular opinion that pikmin 2 is slow compared to 1 or 3 is just wrong. Unless you're talking about playtime in general, and not game play.
@@rosel2452 pikmin 2 is as fast as you make it yourself. You can do the safest and slower strategy in every situation, peeling groups of enemies by attracting them one by one. But you can also decide to fight them all at once, resulting in faster gameplay.
Reading the silly item descriptions was some of the most fun I had with Pikmin 2 as a kid, and just the silly items overall (crayons, chocolates, jewelry, toys, all with silly misinterpretive names). Somehow prefering the limited (but still fun) ship parts of Pikmin 1 just seems weird. It was like he wanted to cover as much of his negative thoughts on the game as possible, even if it was only a minor complaint, like I feel in this case.
Yeah I agree. I'm glad he atleast also recognized how fun the piklopedia is bc I love that feature and was so sad when they took it out in the original pikmin 3
This is why I bounced off of Pikmin 3. Juice just isn't fun to collect. There's nothing interesting about it, and there's no room for funny flavor text. I don't want to collect fruit, I want to collect weird artifacts.
While I think this response could've been tightened up a bit with a script, this is still a good showcase of someone going on about a game they don’t like, but can't articulate why. Sometimes something doesnt click with people and that's ok! Aesthetics are important to me too so like if the rust floors and tile floors don't do it for him + the length of time being in the dungeons is draining on him, that's totally fine and understandable. His reasoning is just wack and all over the place. It would help if he mentioned what specifically he meant by like game menchanics and such because yeah, Pikmin 2 does a lot of things differently and adds a lot! It'd be great if he elaborated on a lot of things.
Yeahh I definitely would have been much more succinct and solid if I scripted it but like... I hate this video so much, there's no way I could hate myself enough to spend another month making a response to a video he clearly didn't think twice about. It was also fun experimenting with this style!
Agree I honestly love Pikmin 2 more than either 1 or 3 since it feels balanced for the most part. I can do a lot of different things, the game doesn't get dull and the sheer amount of enemies and new features means that you should have a wide array of pikmin to handle them.
Yeah I get what you’re saying. Another pikmin guy, Arlo, brought up the spectrum of “function vs feel” during his pikmin 1 review video. Essentially it was the idea that an individual gamer exists somewhere on the spectrum, and where they are on it determines what they value in a game. A “feel” person is more about the vibes of a game, chasing after the feeling a game offers like the feeling of being a stranded space explorer or a heroic adventurer. A “function” person is more likely to value the actual design and mechanics of a game, how each mechanic fits together to make the game into a rewarding challenge. Schaff is definitely much more of a feel guy, all of his criticisms stem from the feel of the game. He criticizes the removal of a day limit because it doesn’t make him feel like his days are literally numbered, he criticizes the story because it makes him feel less like he’s on a meaningful adventure, and he criticizes the caves because they don’t feel quite right to him because it removes the clock and are a bit too tricky and strategical that he feels powerless to control his own fate. This makes sense, he’s a film reviewer. Of course he would value his games based on the story they tell. Pikmin 1 was much more of a “feel” type of game, it hammered home the aesthetics of being in a strange new world and having to try to survive while your imminent doom looms over you. When it came to function it was very simplistic, with only 3 pikmin types and not too many moving parts, with the hardest part being said time management. 2 twists this by doubling down on function, creating these elaborate caves that you have to crawl through with heavy tact unless you risk you losing your only pikmin, it adds an item system where you have to strategically use rare items at the right time in order to minimize risk, it adds new pikmin with their own relationship to the player completely unique to the first three and even goes back and gives the original three more depth with new resistances. This is why his video feels so scattered and confused, this is a someone attempting to reconcile with a game that’s not built for his tastes. He’s trying to compare two games that are on drastically different sides of the feel-function spectrum and thus his points completely fall flat.
When you paused it after he was talking about the balance of purple pikmin and just went "what" that was literally my same EXACT emotion and reaction to what was said lol
There was a few times I was taken aback lol. I think that is one benefit of reacting and responding rather than writing a scripted response. You get a lot more genuine moments like that lol
@@HidinginPrivate I feel like his script must have used ChatGPT or something because it's so incoherent. He complained about how OP purples are that it breaks the game, then says how he would never want to use them because of rarity which is literally game balance. It was either ChatGPT or he's just stupid...
No, it makes sense. If you just throw 10 purples at an enemy, you're not going to lose any. Because they're stupid ppl in combat. But then if they get hit by a falling boulder or bomb rock, artificial difficulty, they die and it sucks because of how valuable they are.
@@s.i.m.poster6823 You can scout rooms to trip most falling rocks. Do you think in a way it's an admission of him as a player being bad, or does it lean more towards artificial difficulty? I'm think more towards the former, but can understand the latter. I don't like falling rocks and bomb dweevils, but they didn't make me rage quit the game. Single reset after realizing what dungeon I'm in. I feel like his video is very exaggerated for the sake of entertainment.
15:50 they actually do explain in game that time doesn't pass because of the strong magnetic fields of the underground. I think they explain it in the game booklet too. They also state that as the reason why the caves are randomized.
@@gay4sswhovian I mean, pikmin isn't really made to be realistic, it just has some realistic features. The game makes no sense and it is pretty goofy, just making it more appealing. I really don't think nintendo made something like the Man-At-Legs because it was "realistic." I do agree that the explanation could have been better, like They can't see the sky underground so they never decide to count how much time they are down there in actual days and instead in time. And if they realize it's dark out, they will wait until the same time they entered because then they know it's safe to leave.
@gay4sswhovian my head Canon is that the plasma wraith is toying with olimar still. Remember, pnf 404 isn't quite our earth obviously. So there's weird stuff and creatures everywhere. So a higher power messing with olimars concept of time makes sense (I say concept because maybe olimar could be down there for way longer than he thinks idk)
I appreciate you defending this game, because it just seemed like such an oddball take considering most people love this one the most. It also made me kind of nervous to approach this one since RTS games really aren't my thing. I loved Pikmin 3 and with this new re-release and some restored confidence I'll be going through all of them in order in anticipation of Pikmin 4! 😁
Glad to see more love to Pikmin 2 Also imo Schaff opinions on movies for me are on point and very good i enjoy them a lot but his videogame takes always felt pretty weak to me like the guy really knows how to analyze movies and how to express that but when its about games yeah his quality drops a lot
Yeah I agree. I don't always agree with Schaff but generally I don't have an issue and chalk it up to difference of opinions. In this case though he goes beyond that and just sorta says... wrong things
So, I wanted to add when he is talking about the underground sections. He mentions that sometimes treasure could be in water, so you need blue pikmin to get it. Then if you reset it can spawn outside of water. What I heard is "I'm bad at preplanning my pikmin line up, so when the games gives me something I knew could potentially be here I didn't prepare."
If a cave has water as a hazard, the player should always bring 30 blues. This is because most treasures are between 5-25 and 5 extra blues is insurance in case a few die.
Something that isn’t random in the caves that I hate is in the cave where the emperor bulblax is the final boss of it, and right at the end is a treasure that you need a combination of blue and red pikmin to get. What I hate about that specific one is that the game doesn’t tell you that there is water at all, so I initially went in without blues, meaning I then had to do the whole cave again after I had just finished it. That was a completely random nitpick but I wanted to mention it
The grind for farming purple pikmin is a lot easier than how Schaffrillas is describing it. He leaves out important stuff that makes this grind a lot more forgiving: First, you don't have watch the entire cutscene when moving on to the next floor. Since you can skip these cutscenes, the time to wait until moving to the next floor is really narrowed down to the "saving" screen. Second, and more importantly, you do not need to repeat the same combat and the risk of losing pikmin in order to go to the next floor. You can leave your pikmin at your base, enter the exit hole by yourself, and you won't leave any of your pikmin behind. You are essentially skipping all of the enemies, hazards, and puzzles in Subterranean Complex up until floor 8, making it near impossible to lose your pikmin and your progress. The fact that Schaffrillas and his gameplay doesn't mention these shortcuts may either be that he didn't know about them, or that he's exaggerating about the grind being very tedious than it actually is
I think I recall Chuggaaconroy (one of the bigger LPers for Nintendo content and certainly another major influence on the image of several games) actually recommended just running the Dungeon with 3 Pikmin. Since none of the exits in the SC require Pikmin to reach (no walls or such to block the captains), you'd basically run to the exit to speed to the 8th floor, toss those 3 Pikmin into the Queen Candypop buds to turn 3 into 27, and then turn 15 of those 27 into Purples (not to mention you can do this with White Pikmin on Floor 4 in the same run at no net loss or impediment) while having Eggs to Flower those Pikmin immediately. The grind takes about 15 minutes per run (for the time to run to the cave entrance and zip to the exit 7 times per run) and doesn't require putting many resources at risk while increasing your pool overall, be it the Whites and Purples or the Buds just growing your overall number. Yes it does add some time overall to get the Doomsday Apparatus but it's not as dramatic or risky a grind as I think the original video suggests (unintentionally or otherwise). Pikmin 2 is just a game that focuses more on Resource Management than Time Management overall, which fair if that's not his style, but it's more a difference of preference than one being weaker in design than the other.
I recently played pikmin 2 for wii and replayed 1 on switch yesterday and I actually believe that pikmin 2 is the game that truly made pikmin great. The game is not only much longer, but it also has a great story and the different pikmin types give you so much to think about. In pikmin 1 reds are your go-to, blues are needed for water parts, and you need like 15 yellows for bombs, thats mostly it. In 2 you not only have the added hazards for yellow making them much more useful, but you also have the limitedness of whites and purples, you have to decide if you want to risk taking out those pikmin, and you actually have to care for them, theyre not easily replacable, which is what a pikmin should be. The caves can be tedious at times, but I actually love the challenge, and I felt so achieved when I beat pikmin 2, it took me quite a while to strategize under and overground. It's really an awesome game. I used to think pikmin 1 was leagues better on the overworld but now I disagree. Not to hate on pikmin 1, but much of the progression is finding bombs and/or waiting for next days to get more bombs, and waiting for bridges to be built and walls to be destroyed. And I get the idea of doing something else while letting them work, but I still beat the game in 15 days, You really need to force yourself to beat it in 10 days or less to have a very strategized challenge (if youre good). I also beat pikmin 3 twice last week and it was also very easy. Even on super hard, and getting every fruit. I have a new found appreciation for the challenges and controls of 2. I miss swarming and the precise whistle of 1/2.
Amazing video, ive never been able to put it into words on why pikmin 2's systems and nuances make sense. while at the same time you disproved one of the most lazy and popular critique videos of this game I really hope this video gets more traction actually incredible stuff
@mincraftotalwar I’m telling you, Pikmin 2 is worth it. It is by far my most favorite Pikmin game, and will be one of the only ones I will go back and play again above Pikmin 1 & 3
ITs harder than the first but still great. No game is perfect but Pikmin 2 went for more quality content and grew on Pikmin 1. Funny the things Pikmin one was harped on got removed or fixed in 2...then that got harped on. Just proof that you can't please everyone.
Yes the "insta-kill" hazards that appear without warning... that conveniently have a timer (bomb rocks) or a shadow (falling rocks) to warn you that they are coming so you have a few moments to avoid it before they actually do damage... Like yeah, I can see how it would be considered random and unfair, if you didn't know about those ahead of time, but that's why you scout out the area, that's why you _strategize._ And for the record, I never, _not once_ used the auto-save reset feature to cheese my way out of my own mistakes. If some Pikmin die, I don't just reset I keep going. But I've never had to worry about losing an entire squad of Pikmin because _I know what I'm doing._ It sounds to me that Schaffrilas just has a skill issue.
I definitely reset a lot as a kid but yeah that's why I'm like "almost all hazards are instakill" bc pikmin don't have health bars- they either die or don't with exception of like water, fire & poison. You have plenty of time to react to bombs and rocks, but the amount of time you are alloted changes based on how fast your pikmin move which actually positively gives a balancing reason to the leaf vs flowers. Silly!
I will play devils advocate a little. If you are used to the smoothness of pikmin 3’s control style, it is a little frustrating when you try to avoid a rock and your turns are not as sharp as the new title/s. I’m new to pikmin 2 but I still like it so far tho (beat the game already btw)
To be fair, as someone that also scouts ahead... it's not very fun to do that. It's just kinda taking a lap around the area to disable all the traps (the ones that don't require Pikmin to be with you to set off, anyway) then switching to the other captain to actually get stuff done. Part of me likes the thrill of the random traps and tricky enemy placements, it can ABSOLUTELY be unfair. A Bulbear ate my Pikmin THROUGH A WALL.
@@whomdunit2457 The point is the traps can be avoided, and that can be more enjoyable than the frustration of losing Pikmin to some people. If you enjoy throwing caution to the wind, that's a viable playstyle.
@lasercraft32 Fair, they can indeed be avoided, but I'd argue that some (Mainly falling rocks and Volatile Dweevils) are more punishing than others. Even if they can technically be avoided, they're still pretty annoying regardless of how I play.
really good video while dismantling every single "point" Schaffrillas made in his video, you also gave words to the reasons why I like the gameplay in Pikmin 2 so much that I wasn't able to articulate myself
Bro put point in quotes like Schaff never made a single point in the whole video. Also, this guy makes a lot of non points too. like 21:20 . What's the *point* of this "rebuttal" ? Schaff mentions one thing he thought was cool and wanted more of. This guy mentions bulbmin as if that was what Schaff was looking for and wanted, but thought he somehow missed him. Maybe Schaff didn't mention them bc they really didn't affect any of the problems with the game that he had. it's like if this was a movie review, a guy thought a movie was bad, but he liked one scene bc of the pacing or something. then someone makes a response thats like "uhhh what about this character who I thought was really cool?" like, okay, that's fine, but how does that invalidate or disprove his point?
I choose to see the Pikmin series as games about resource management, NOT specifically time management (time just happens to be a very relevant resource). Pikmin 2 just places more focus on Pikmin management than the other games (limited amount of Pikmin in dungeons, purples and whites can only be obtained in dungeons by converting other Pikmin types, all the new hazards that need different Pikmin types). Also, in a sense, dungeons do have a time limit -- you have until you run out of Pikmin to clear the dungeon. (It may be a little unconventional to think of it that way, since your timer doesn't decrease in regular intervals, but it is still a limiting factor.)
As somebody who’s currently playing through all of the mainline Pikmin games in preparedness for Pikmin 4 I stumbled onto this while playing the second game. Homie definitely just tried being angry and trashed the game for the sake of being an angry reviewer. How this is still a thing in this day and age amazes me. You picked it apart really well and it kept me entertained the entire way while you were never abusive in your deliver. Great video. Kisses.
Loved everything you had to say. I needed a positive video about Pikmin 2 after realizing it has been dunked on by the community; I just learned it was so divisive in the last year. 😅 Great video! 🙏
46:36 You know what? Carrying the Doomsday Apparatus actually just takes almost half a day and you can STILL manage to beat the WHOLE area in one single day. I actually managed to do that when I beat it on the Switch! Also, thank you very much for this video! Very very important!
My favorite part about the Purple Pikmin bit is how he says by the time he gets to Wistful Wild, he only has 65 Purples, while also saying he resets whenever he looses them. Despite the fact that you can get over 100 Purples by the time you reach Wistful Wild without grinding for them.
Pretty sure at most you can get 99 (you can just a few extra Pikmin in the starting cave if you have less than 20 purples, which is why it’s an odd number) before grinding in the 2 main purple candy pop bud caves, still 1 away from the total without grinding, but is still 1 trip anyways! You probably could get more than 100 if you miss some treasures and have to go back to some caves, but that is unlikely if you aren’t new to Pikmin since you get the treasure gauge instantly.
I really should replay Pikmin 2 because I honestly do not remember getting anywhere near 100 Purples naturally, while going as fast as I could up to that point. And I belong to the "1 Dead Purple = Instant Reset" club x)
Pikmin 2 is definitely my favorite of the series with its new ideas and the gosh dang piklopedia but it definitely had a lot of the flaws that schaff brings up. He just doesn’t present those flaws in the best way. I think you both have valid points about this wonderful game and franchise. Pikmin 3 is still way too easy though.
This video would be significantly better if it wasn't structured like a 2015 rant takedown. The vitriol in your voiceover and script undermines what you're actually saying about Pikmin 2. This video that could just be about the positives of Pikmin 2 not only requires watching a lengthy video on another channel, but also sitting through entire sections of his vid repeated, along with frankly obnoxious complaining just to hear any counterpoints. Even as a response, this video could easily be restructured into a 15 minute script.
Important thing to note is that culturally, in Japan, debt is considered to be a worse fate than death, because debt will follow you past the grave and will torment your loved ones after you die as the debt can be passed onto them. You don't dispel personal debt through Bankruptcy in Japan, especially if your loan is with shady people (such as All-Devouring Black Hole Loan Sharks). That cultural element doesn't really carry across... The idea is, basically, even if Olimar were to kill President and Louie in a hostile takeover of Hocotate Freight, the debt would just be passed onto him. Even if Olimar killed himself, the debt would be passed onto his family. Debt is a MUCH bigger deal in Japan. It's why their economy is stagnant- people are legitimately terrified of debt.
Hi! fun fact, the art he used at 2:29 is actually my art, he didn't credit me in the video, or in any of the descriptions or anything, i also noticed other pikmin art in the video that wasn't credited to my knowledge as well. 300k views and no artist credit :D
@@HidinginPrivate Yes! I can send more info if you'd like. Its also like the 4th result when searching up olimar's family on google so that's probably where he got it lmao
firstly, Goop Videos edited this. Secondly.... Goop probably just put that there after looking up "Olimar Family" on google and pasted the image. I don't think it's especially necessary since he's not getting money or attention due to YOUR art, it's B roll footage. Not only that, it's 3 second B roll footage.
> "No day limit? Waaa there's no urgency or strategy anymore! This game is bad." > Enemy introduced that adds urgency and strategy to the game > "WTF this enemy is so cheap and annoying! This game is bad."
I’d love to see your own Pikmin 2 video where you go into tons of details and share your own opinions! Maybe talk about some missed opportunities too if there are any to you?
I think he makes some good points, as I also feel like bitter spray and purple pikmin are OP at times, I feel like he takes everything else and runs with it in the wrong direction.
Honestly I love both of these takes. I think Schaffrillas was valid, but it’s important to not let one person's opinions dictate your own. I love yours and Chuggaaconroy's love of this game just as much as I love Schaffrillas ragging on it.
@@HidinginPrivateatching Chugga as a kid is what got me into the franchise and made me force my parents to buy a Pal version of Pikmin 2 for the Wii for it not to work and make me beg for a GameCube copy.
Uh, What? (To my knowledge) Chugga hates Pikmin 2. He actively said his LP made him hate it *more* I mean, at least it didn't become his total eclipse of the Sticker Star. But he really didn't look upon it thaaaat favourably during (or after) his LP.
Pikmin 2 is my favorite, so I was interested in this video. Buuut a lot of your counter arguments are pretty weak and feel like they're missing the point of the criticisms or grasping at straws. The plot counterpoint just is flat, there was SOME dark humor in pikmin 1 but it was not the focus at all, those pointless ship parts were still things Olimar needed to complete his ship afterall, but were nice to note as not needed to take off. (The piggy bank was his LIVES SAVINGS too, that's important even if not needed) In any case these pointless ship parts were a background detail to the overall oppressive plot. Pikmin 2 is just FULL on dark comedy, to the point of undermining the very serious stuff you ignored from Pikmin 1s plot that took center stage, olimar talking of his family, lamenting lost pikmin, fearing for his life. It IS natural to feel whiplash if you come from 1 and go straight into 2 on that regard. There being a few silly pointless parts in 1 does not help that. The daily time limit really barely matters, you have no reason to try an get more than 1 treasure a day, treasures remain where they've been moved to the next day, every bit of progress you made in a day stays done. And you are literally fine getting just 1 treasure in a day, then spending the next couple days farming. The daily time doesn't matter at ALL outside of consistency between games, I know when I was young I felt 0 pressure from that clock and so did literally everyone. Time not passing in caves is just a continuation of this point, the pressure of running out of pikmin is a seperate thing, it's less real time strategy and more just try not to freakin die a bunch. In fact pikmin 1 gave you MORE reason to worry about losing pikmin because u only had limited farming days. Pikmin 2 just makes you trudge through the cave again, and while that can provide it's own pressure, it's more an annoyance rather than a worry. Im pretty sure the comment about "Cut corners" is referring to them cutting corners specifically for the overworld, he even specifies "here" which I can see. They are a lot less designed to challenge you to get through, and more just designed to gatekeep you until you get the right pikmin. You can easily clear out every overworld in a day in 2, compared to 1 where that is a lot more challenging to pull off. Also every overworld spot DOES feel smaller to me, except maybe the perplexing pool. He was deadass wrong about the dungeons aesthetics though. The macro time limit was a big thing in pikmin 1, it is the reason I hear of a large majority of people struggling with it when they were little, it is the reason you tried to gather as many parts as you could a day, it is the reason you couldn't just farm pikmin forever and never run out of resources, downplaying that just comes off as disingenuous at worst or uninformed at best. I'll give you that in 3 the time limit doesnt really matter though, and that's a common complaint WITH 3. Also other RTS games have the time limit BE the other players, namely if you can get a strong army before they do, it's just not an upfront time limit, but a moreso implied one, that still makes you have to hurry. I'll continue this in another post but to cap off this first post I have a minor conspiracy that there WAS intended to be a time limit in caves at a point. Namely because there's a time limit in challenge mode for cave runs, as well the weird fog that comes out of caves. The time limit in challenge mode really gives the impression of a feature they had in the game but decided not to use so they applied it to the extras mode. I imagine the air down there was likely intended to be too dangerous for the captain's suits to filter out for a long period, or perhaps would kill all their pikmin after a time, but they probably couldn't find a right balance for it, or it didn't feel right.
Most of the dungeons DONT have real gameplay differences, they have different themes and enemies but, it doesn't really matter that much in most cases. Most floors are just enemies kind of randomly scattered about alongside treasures randomly scattered about, there's no setup or specific challenge present for a lot of cave floors, meanwhile gathering every treasure in 1 and a lot in 3 have a lot of specific challenges to overcome to reach them, challenges that arent "a wollywog happens to be nearby better kill it first" (Which even in 1 that'd be more of a problem cause of limited time to deal with things, ignoring all the wollywogs in the forest navel is a common thing people try to do, and is an active challenge to accomplish) Sure you might need to deal with a different [this kills pikmin of the wrong type] hazard but that doesnt really matter outside of bringing the right resources, which I discussed in the last post is different from any real time strategy pressure, and moreso just a checkbox you try to keep filled. And the different enemies offer some variance, but without specific setups to make them pose a challenge, with them just scattered about randomly, that tends not to matter at all. You can just plow through them cause you use purples as well. I played pikmin 2 without purples and a LOT more of the enemies ARE actually a threat then, but most people on their first playthrough aren't gonna realize that, or think to actively not use a thing given to them. Now there are SOME cave floors that do offer specific challenges still, outside of the water wraith, a good few in fact, namely in the later game, but those tend to be ones that have set layouts rather than being randomly generated. A LARGE majority of floors don't offer much unique, no specific challenge to overcome, random enemies that there's no rhyme or reason to their placement and random traps to disable. (The shower room is especially egregous with this) Challenge mode ACTUALLY majorly fixes this especially though, with a LOT more specific setups to gather treasures, and setups based on your time limit making things difficult to manage. Tanky enemies really put the pressure on you in that mode rather than just enabling you to cheese them, and the fact that you dont have purples always makes every challenge they want to pose a problem, actually pose one. The game doesnt do much interesting with the proceedural generation. the actual GOOD floors, which you use as a point, are the ones not generated. Which doesnt undermine his point as the caves majority ARENT that preset floors. The point of him saying they're only "slightly different" is that most floors are just as I stated above, random mish mashes. And they continue to be random mish mashes. The advantage of procedural generation is supposed to be to offer random unique challenges with every playthrough. If the levels are just stuff thrown about every time, they're gonna both be thoughtless and barely different. This is something that seperates good rougelike games from bad ones too, random generation needs a very delicate hand to not just vomit up the level design equivalent of TV static every time. SURE the tv static is different every time you turn on the TV but no one's gonna notice or care cause its still just a mess of grey and black. The caves would be so much better if they weren't randomly generated (Which they wont be in 4 thank god) His complaint of pikmin potentially running out is silly though.
The argument of the game being cheap is definitely a weak point on his end. I majorly agree with your counterpoints there. Although I can understand those elements FEELING cheap in the heat of the moment, like when a Bulbear just randomly drops on your head or a bomb rock appears after your pikmin start carrying something. Your point is overall good there though, I would say those elements he pointed out COULD be a bit better presented in the game itself. As for purple stuff however, I feel you are just wrong on every regard, it's hard to find any even diehard pikmin 2 fan that actually defends purples or bitter sprays, it feels a bit grasping to even try to defend it. Comparing bitter sprays to elemental hazards just feels beyond disingenuous. They instantly disable ANY POTENTIAL ENEMY rather than just letting you be able to fight a specific enemy with less risk. Also bitter sprays are NOT DIFFICULT AT ALL TO OBTAIN? They are in the third area and you run into them before even getting yellows? You can then freely farm them from then on! And you can't just get 1 or 2 in a day in pikmin 2. Pikmin 2 days are 13 minutes, the berries respawn every 2 minutes. So you're getting about 6 a day if you're farming, and that's not counting if you got some from caves or flint beetles which are both moderately generous with them. Enemies are a joke and basically just walking "elemental hazards" in 3 though. Downplaying how many you can get a day doesn't help your point, much like how him over playing instant death hazards doesn't help his. They didnt re-add the purple sprays in any future pikmin games so far for a reason you know. Forced water hazards are rare as hell in pikmin 2, especially ones that have enemies that only stay in the water. 20 purples are insanely easy to get in the first few caves too, first cave gives you 10, then from there it just needs 2 more flower encounters. Honestly you can't defend purples whilst also bringing up how enemies in 3 can just be instakilled easily as a counter complaint. There's only one enemy with electricity as a potential threat to purples, and even then they have the longest windup ever, you really don't need to be that careful especially since the purple stun lock. All other elements can just be whistled off them easily, letting you not even have to give a moment of thought to them with purples. You literally need like only 5-10 purples to obliterate almost every enemy. The point is, the limitations they tried to employ, didn't even matter much for the majority of the game. Purples literally invalidate so much of the only thing the caves have going for them, COMBAT, in comparison, especially to their white cousins. Which also drags down caves further, you barely have to worry about losing pikmin with your purple squad around if you play with the smallest of caution towards things falling from the ceiling and electricity. Purples are seriously so busted, when I was young I did not notice there was an actual difference between how Orange and Red Bulborbs acted. The difference feels however STAGGERING if you're not using purples. The disparity from how many purples you need to invalidate 95% of enemies and how many you need for the doomsday apparatus is immense. Doomsday apparatus is just bad in general, if you're going in blind you dont even know you'll need purples for it, and because it forces a grind even if you 100%ed everything before hand. You can get 100 purples in an hourish for sure in subterrainian complex, but it's a bunch of time you feel FORCED to do it, and FORCED to tread through a bunch of stuff you already did, compared to just sitting near your spawn point easily grabbing sprays. It's inherently more frustrating by accidental design. As for the conclusion, again, I'm not gonna defend pikmin 3's choices there, I think they messed up a good bit too. Pikmin 2 has it's flaws, I think it has a LOT of good for it too though, and playing without purple stuff recently made me love a lot of it all over again. The enemies become engaging which makes even the more random samey cave floors actually pose some challenge. The collecting is in general great, there's a lot of neat ideas, there's just conceptual issues between the cool stuff, that matter different amounts to different people. Don't defend Purples or bitter sprays though-
@@JammyJam5588 Damn son, you could probably make an entire separate response video with all this material. It's so rare to see someone in the comment section actually be thorough and concise with their defenses. Based.
Doing gods work here. Edit: Now I’m actually like halfway in and this is exactly what I expected an animation RUclipsr to sound like trying to argue game design. I’m so sorry you had to sit through this alone.
This video was very well done and had some really good arguments about 2 that I hadn’t even thought of. That bit about Pikmin resource in caves being functionally the same as a time limit really struck me! I freaking love Pikmin 2, heck I left a whole dang essay in the comments of his video on why I love it. I wanted to share some of my thoughts: 1- I think you could have been nicer in how you presented the argument. Even though his logic was silly, it kinda felt like you were mocking him a bit, and whether that was deserved or not, it does cloud your point. Less people will be open to listening to you if you’re too harsh. 2- your arguments about purples and bitter sprays were very good, the logic was all there (and quite brilliant, again I had never thought of some of those points), but you have to admit, they *are* very busted and *do* kill the balance of the game. The game does give you a lot of bitter sprays through eggs and various other methods. The easiest play through of Pikmin 2 I ever did was my no-death run, because I used purples, I never use them on a normal play through. I get the sense you knew that, but just didn’t mention it because you were focused on the logic behind it, which is fine, I just feel like your overall argument would have seemed more reliable if you did mention some of the game’s flaws. In the same vain, you do have to admit the caves do get a bit repetitive and blend together a bit. Although every aspect varies cave to cave, the way you handle it rarely does. I still think they’re amazing, but there’s a lot more potential they didn’t tap into. 3- I really appreciated your point on Pikmin 2’s story being a natural extension of Pikmin 1’s dark humor. I also just wanted to add that it’s also an extension of Olimar’s character. Olimar is characterized by being a normal guy, stuck in absurd, ridiculous and tragic situations, but still overcoming all the odds by raw determination. That has only been more emphasized through 2 with it’s RIDICULOUS and completely unhinged situations you find yourself in. (1 definitely emphasizes the tragic part, while 2 emphasizes the ridiculous part) Not to mention how brilliantly Louie and the President (and even Olimar’s family) are used to emphasize this. Olimar is the ONLY sane thing about 2, and that contrast is also a natural extension of the strong contrasts found all throughout the series, that’s especially prevalent in 1 and 2. There is not a single aspect of Pikmin 2 that isn’t unhinged and crazy, except for Olimar. Everything ties back into his character so brilliantly. I’d even go as far as to say more than in Pikmin 1, if not just because there’s more in 2.
Personally I love the lack of day limit of the campaign. Pikmin 3's need for fruits (and consequently implied time limit) stressed me for nothing, even if I had ton of backup juice. I wish once you had all fruits you didn't had that timer so you could wander around without worrying and appreciating the scenery and pikmins. And take pictures n such.
Something I find weird that neither of these videos really try to bring up is that Pikmin 1 and 2 both take the basic Pikmin formula in essentially opposite directions and are tonally very distinct from one another. Pikmin 1 is, at its core, a game about *time* management. The entire game takes place in basically 3 regions small enough to explore in a matter of minutes, and every ship part is in the same spot every time. Pikmin 1 is short and fast enough that you can easily memorize and craft a faster route through every day, both before and during the days themselves - how many Pikmin can I afford to assign to these tasks? That's why Pikmin 1's 30-day timer is an integral part of the experience. Even if it's not actually a threat, its mere presence means that playing Pikmin 1 *well,* means playing it *quickly.* Pikmin 2 is, at its core, a game about *resource* management. Everything is so numerous, expansive, and unpredictable that trying to memorize where everything is is a fool's errand, so exploring is an integral part of Pikmin 2's gameplay loop. Purples and Whites are rare, elite units that represent a much greater risk/reward dynamic than other Pikmin, because losing them is much more severe. Likewise, the sprays are a consumable resource that represent a cost-benefit analysis - is this a good, safe opportunity to use my rare, valuable resources effectively? That's why Pikmin 2's difficulty doesn't come from a time limit, but from brutally powerful enemies that can murder dozens of Pikmin if you're not careful. Playing Pikmin 2 *well,* means playing it *safely.* You can see from how Schaff plays through Pikmin 2 (like taking an entire squad into a rock-filled tunnel, throwing Reds into a body of water to build a bridge early, killing a Fiery Bulblax with only Purples) that he's more concerned about playing quickly than safely. I doubt sending a captain alone through a sublevel to preemptively set off all the traps even crosses his mind as an effective strategy, because that's not as time-efficient as getting everything on the first pass, even if it is safer. We also know that he really likes Persona, a JRPG series whose main innovation on the JRPG formula is implementing time management as a gameplay feature via the Confidant system, so maybe he just gains more enjoyment from games by doing everything as quickly as possible. I also wouldn't be surprised if Schaff tries playing through Pikmin 2 in only one or two sittings, which is a valid strategy for the other two Pikmin games. If that's true, then it's no wonder he hates how samey the caves feel. Schaff's complaints about Pikmin 2 honestly remind me of how old-school Paper Mario fans complain about every game past SPM. They both go from "I don't like this entry because it doesn't appeal to my tastes" to "This entry is a betrayal of everything the series stands for and that's why it's terrible!" Just because Pikmin's most iconic feature is its day timers, doesn't mean that a Pikmin game has to use time pressure as a core part of its play experience.
Honestly the moment I realized that Sachfrillas didn’t know what he’s talking about when he suggested Purple Pikmin have an onion, that or saying purple Spray is an instant win button when Charging in Pikmin 3 is basically that. Also Pikmin 2 has the best writing in the series because it gives small sub plots to the NPC’s as you go through the game, hot take but Olimar’s family are more interesting characters than Alph or Charlie in the original Pikmin 3 since that lacked the piklopedia.
he's only saying they should have an onion because the Doomsday exists. I'm sure he'd rather have the treasure removed than an Onion added. Also, no, charging in Pikmin 3 is not an instant win button. You actually have to time it and you'll probably lose some pikmin if it's a tougher enemy/there's more than one.
I think the point that Schaff dances around that I've seen expressed by even Chuggaaconroy is that the dark humor of Pikmin 2 infects some of the difficulty to such a degree that you're less likely to play the game with your mistakes and more likely to reset the game because of a catastrophe. The value of a full squad AND the pressing need for certain types of pikmin in a dungeon to find treasure makes reseting way more worth it. The design philosophy has changed from "how do I manage my time in a day with limited mistakes" to "how do I survive this without any mistakes because I can just reset whenever a catastrophe occurs, because they will, even if you scout ahead." Pikmin 2 really wants you to fail at points, which can be a bit mean spirited and lead to some players willingness to delve into tedium to mitigate that issue. This change in philosophy I see is also represented in the jump from Dark Souks 1 to 2. Ds1 wants the player to be responsible for most of their mistakes in the gameplay with deliberance and measure, while Ds2 wants players to deal with hordes of enemies over haphazard level design for the sake of the game feeling hard and tedious.
don't pretend the game is hard to the point you necessarily have to lose pikmin. Play better, get focused, and you won't lose many troops. If you can't do that then maybe the game isn't made for you
@@pikminologueraisin2139 that's not what i'm saying. I'm saying the Pikmin 2 feels more obsessed with killing the player’s pikmin and causing catastrophe so bad that it forces a reset because of it. The existance of bomb rock traps, gattling groinks, the water wraith, all feel like they're poking fun at the player, it isn't about playing the game good enough that you don't have to loose Pikmin- which I know you can- it's the idea of wandering into something you didn't know was there and poof you're done. You can strategize, scout ahead, and use the potions, but the change in philosophy is more what I'm pointing out. There was never a point where I felt like I had to reset playing Pikimin 1 other than feeling "I could have done that better." Doesn't mean I don't enjoy Pikmin 2- I'm playing it right now! Don't leave a dismissive comment without reading what I wrote a little more critically next time. The get gud or "focused" response doesn't apply when I'm just talking about game design. Pikmin is personal goal based, and not everyone going into it is going to have game knowledge so those catastrophic accidents will occur. If anything I find them funny.
@@adsventuresome7511 Yeah I'm with you on this one... I think Pikmin 2 would have turned out MUCH better if instead of having that random element and many short floors, caves had larger floors without any randomness in layout. That way it would have been easier to design more compelling challenges than just "rocks fall, everyone dies" while having each floor be larger and less numerous would have helped make them more memorable, more fun to fully explore, and help discourage the all the resetting across so many Pikmin 2 players.
@@pikminologueraisin2139 I'm a veteran pikmin player, I can 100% 0 pikmin death 1 in 9 days, 2 in 11-12, and 3 in 10 days, and I can safely say pikmin 2 is the worst of the 3 games. The process of optimization is what makes pikmin so appealing. Being able to improve, grow, and beat the games in fewer days. Pikmin 2 is easily the worst designed, as the most optimal way of playing 2 is exceedingly dull. Scouting out caves is boring, and wastes 2-3 minutes per sublevel. It's not interesting or challenging, it's just boring. Like, imagine playing Mario Kart but instead of the countdown at the beginning of a race being 3 seconds, it could be anywhere between 3 seconds to 120 seconds. You wouldn't call that interesting, nor engaging. It's just unnecessary. And if you don't want to play pikmin 2 optimally, then you can look forward to a very frustrating experience, with excessive resetting. Any game that compels players to reset the game excessively, even during casual playthroughs, is probably doing something very wrong. And likewise a game probably shouldn't be sporadically hovering between 2 extremes, in this case boredom or frustration. For another nail in the coffin, Pikmin 2 also handles its other hazards very poorly. The hazards in 2 are basically like those wooden block puzzles for babies. You just match the hazard to the pikmin color and nothing else. Doesn't matter if one sublevel has fire geysers everywhere, and another has poison pipes. Doesn't change how you overcome the hazard. The only difference is the color used. Pikmin 2 is just bad game design central. I myself can still like it for what it's worth, but I'd most definitely don't want any of 2's design to ever return.
@@bluetoad6848 Scouting ahead isn't the optimal way to play Pikmin 2, it is the safest way. The optimal/fastest way is to bring a squad that is big enough to get things done but small enough for you to manage without losing all of them to a trap. For example, in Subterranean Complex Sublevel 5; you could take 1 White and very safely scout all the falling bomb rocks out before collecting everything, or you could take 25 Whites and utilise swarming to dodge the bomb rocks whilst collecting all the treasures in one fell swoop. Also, what you said about hazards in Pikmin 2 applies to hazards in every Pikmin game ever. In Pikmin 3, 3 of the 5 Pikmin types have dedicated walls that only they can remove, fire geysers are still around and Blue Pikmin are the very definition of the wooden block puzzle in every game they are in. The Blues thing also hurts the most in Pikmin 1 than any other game because there are only 3 Pikmin types and thus proportionately more bare-bones wooden block puzzles.
Honestly, I actually still agree with a lot Schaffrilla's critiques of the game even after watching your video. Still, I love your videos man, so it was still a joy to watch this one, even if you didn't particularly convince me otherwise.
No disrespect to you as a person, and of course I respect your opinion, but I take a really big issue with you treating Schafrill as this poorly articulated narcisissist. You claim his opinions, at times, are "argued for verifiably false reasons" when 95% of the time, your arguments aren't debunking what he's saying but rather communicating that it's "not as big of a deal" as he thinks it is. Especially with you putting a ton of attention on the "maybe RTS games aren't for you", saying his reasoning/logic is "crazy stupid" (39:50) is laughably disrespectful. You are not only committing the same flaws in your argument that you claim he is, but arguably being more disrespectful and ignorant to actual discourse. You said in a tweet you were mostly "cordial" to him, but that's simply not true and there's so many instances of blatant disrespect throughout this video. I'm not even a diehard Pikmin 2 hater or even Schafrillas fan, but I hate it when people are so dismissive of other people's opinions. This entire video is littered with passive aggressiveness and poor attitudes. You condescendingly laughing and scoffing at his criticisms in real time and saying things like "Wow, his logic is just totally twisted" isn't engaging with his argument in good faith at all. You're being incredibly disrespectful and childish over someone who disagrees over a game. - "Co-Op would have ruined the balance of the game" (1:30) Balance the game around it, then. Pikmin 3, while being made a tad easier with friends, is SO MUCH fun in co-op. Replaying the campaign with my brother is one of our most special memories; additionally, it reinforces the RTS elements and brings in a brand new element of communicating with another real person to be efficient and produce strategies, which only enhances Pikmin 3's already great RTS elements. Pikmin 2 could have that it as well. - "Many of Olimar's ship parts aren't necessary for survival" (4:20) But Pikmin 1 still has that fundamental human connection and tells a story about WANTING to survive. This is especially prevalent in Olimar's logs at the end of each day. If humans' persistence to survive and flourish wasn't a huge them in this game, the developers wouldn't have gone out of their way to so heavily characterize Olimar as someone who wants nothing more to survive and see his family again. I don't think it's "weird" to say that Pikmin 2's treasures are less compelling at all because they have absolutely nothing to do with Olimar's motivation as a character or his journey from the last game. You act like him complimenting the humor is contradicting his point, but admitting something has good humor is not at all the same as thinking the overall narrative of a game is unsatisfying. "It's weird he would talk about the removal of the day limit" (6:25) Not really. This is a massive complaint that is incredibly common amongst people who aren't huge fans of this game. I feel like you're dancing around his point because you're not telling the whole truth here. Do days end in Pikmin 2? Yes, but the consequences behind that are entirely different now. There's no hard 30-day limit from Pikmin 1 or the more friendly limit in Pikmin 3. Now, you're free to waste as much time as you want, which is inherently & fundamentally contradictory to Pikmin's RTS elements. So much of the motivation behind strategizing behind each day has evaporated completely because, now in Pikmin 2, playing efficiently is now almost entirely a self-imposed challenge, a direct betrayal of the ethos of the first game. "Caves are limited by your Pikmin count" (7:00) I agree that this is the intended appeal behind caves; however, the absolutely horribly balanced Purple Pikmin destroy whatever appeal this was supposed to have, as I'll get into with my later comments. That aside, this doesn't change the fact that the appeal behind caves is just fundamentally different than the appeal of Pikmin as a whole. Caves, even when operating as intended when Purples aren't making every enemy encounter trivial, are more about being careful and knowing best how to approach fights. That's an entirely different form of strategy compared to the "how do I manage and split up my squad in order to get the most done with the time I have?" form of strategy that 1 and 3 employ. "That strategy remains the same in 2" (8:30) I don't want to say this is factually wrong because that's not conductive to discussion and puts a halt to disagreeing opinions, but I want to say that this is an extremely generous and biased view towards how the time limit works in 2. Fundamentally, it is not the same as 1 or even 3's because wasting time lacks any real consequences in 2. Not finishing a task or having to waste a day to go back and finish something aren't punishments for the player's failure to optimize their play at all anymore. I don't consider bridges being reset a consequence at all because, by nature of the game's design, you have unlimited time to rebuild those with next to no incentive to act faster the next day. Also, I do not agree AT ALL that there's more urgency in 2. How is the urgency artificial in 3 just because it's an easy game? There's story, character, and gameplay motivation just like there is in 1. The only difference is the day limit is much more forgiving; still, that's far and away vastly more than what 2 accomplishes because there is at least a consequence to wasting time in 3. Even if you have tons of juice left, wasting a day and getting nothing accomplished means you now have a more finite supply of juice than before you wasted that day. For reasons I've already explained, Pikmin 2 has no sense of urgency. Players can be as inefficient as they want and the most punishment they'll receive is maybe some Pikmin 2 deaths, that of which only matters so much anyway when they have infinite time to restore their Pikmin population. "I don't know how bad he is at Pikmin, but I was able to finish Pikmin 1 with half the days remaining" (9:30). First off, this is one of the first comments in your video that shows your tendency not to engage with what he's saying, but question the validity of his statements with some sort of personal judgement or condescending comment. Saying "Schafrillas doesn't sound like he's that good at Pikmin so his criticisms are questionable" is an incredibly condescending and disrespectful thing to say. His opinions are valid regardless if he's as much as a Pikmin Speed God as you, even thought that may not even be true considering I think he says he's beaten the game in less than half the days just like you. Regardless, the game actually INCENTIVIZES you to play efficiently, even if it's just through a high score system. But that only exists in the first place because that 30-day threat is initially scary at first, and part of the appeal of the game was seeing how much you could improve your efficiency to the point where the 30-day limit is no longer a factor at all. There isn't anything like this in 3. There's no story or gameplay motivation at all to act efficiently or want to optimize/improve your play over multiple playthroughs. "You're admitting that the above-ground portions are as long as Pikmin 1's". (11:45) You are misinterpreting his point. He's not complaining that there's LESS above ground content in 2, but that the ratio between cave exploration and surface exploration is vastly unbalanced. It doesn't really matter how much of a good time you have on the surface - if you only spend 15 minutes up there for every hour you're in the caves, that's going to be disappointing if you're a fan of 1 and 3 most likely. That choice alone makes 2 feel like a very different game than 1 and 3, hence 2 being dubbed the black sheep of the series.
"How can you say corners were cut when theres so many new things?" (12:30) Pikmin 2 could have 100% new assetts, mechanics, and features, but if they were repeated a million times with not a lot of variety, like the caves fall victim to, it would still get old. For example, I love Tears of the Kingdom, but under your logic, absolutely no one could have the opinion that the same map being reused was corner-cutting because the Runes are completely new and there's 1000 differently placed Koroks. In a way, the logic you're operating under here is "bigger = better". "I'm not going to criticize someone for having a different opinion" (14:50) But you'll laugh at their opinion as you watch their review and tell them to "stop playing good games". This is going to come across as maybe too aggressive or rude, but this feels like moral grandstanding considering some of the disrespectful comments you've made already and the overwhelming negative comments you're about to make towards him later. "Nearly every dungeon has some sort of unique setpiece" (15:30) You're right, but they rarely ever are incorporated into the dungeon's theming at all. I remember getting to a sublevel that had some treehouse elements and thinking "Wow, I wish 90% of the caves weren't reusing copy/pasted textures and geography. These things you're mentioning feel like the exception rather than the rule. At least on the surface, each area had a unique aesthetic with new things to see consistently. Having 4x the caves as there are surface areas meant that there was going to be much less visually variety, and the occasional new texture does very little to help the overwhelming abundance of repeated environments and mechanics. "There is as much time-management in 2 as there is in 1 and 3" (16:20) Once again, I feel like this is being extremely generous towards 2. By nature having no day limit, so much of the incentive to act quickly and efficiently is gone completely for the reasons I've already mentioned. A core element of 1 and 3 isn't here at all; thus, as I mentioned previously, any semblance of RTS in Pikmin 2 is more-or-less up to doing self-imposed challenges, which simply isn't how 1 or 3 operate at all. Also, acting like he's mainly concerned with the story reasons for the RTS elements is silly and a misportrayal of his point. The time limit in 2 is fundamentally different. Just because the days end DOES NOT MEAN that it operates identically to 1 and 3, because 2 DOES NOT punish the player for wasting time or not optimizing their play, at least nowhere near to the degree that 1 and 3 do, so saying his argument is a "strawman", completely invalidating his reasons (and a lot of people even though you act like these complaints are strange and uncommon in this review) for personally disliking two's omission of RTS elements "There is MORE variety in caves due to limited resources" (17:23) This would be true if caves accomplished their intended purpose at all, but that's not true considering Purples' ability to stun and do double damage completely negates any incentive to weigh your options on each sublevel. The game eventually gets so desperate for some semblance of difficulty and balance that caves begin to throw bottomless pits, bomb rocks, and falling rocks everywhere, as if that's some sort of solution or safety net against Purple Pikmin. "He's stretching how big of a deal this all is. This game performs borderline identically to 1." (18:00) This is such a cheap, easy, and disrespectful way to dismiss someone's opinion. It's not a stretch to say these things considering these are the most common complaints people have with Pikmin 2. Sure, the game's mechanics and controls are largely the same, but the framing within those mechanics are entirely different due to the addition of caves and lack of any real incentive to act quickly or efficiently. Even if you love those games, I think it's dishonest to pretend those differences from the first game don't exist and saying people's complaints are "strange" or "illogical" for pointing them out and having a problem with them. "He's asking Pikmin 2 to be less interesting and less novel" (18:35) For reasons I've repeated multiple times previously, Pikmin 2 fundamentally removes quite a few of the RTS elements from 1 even if the controls and mechanics are largely the same. It is not a stretch to say many of the RTS elements are gone completely and that these decisions were made BECAUSE lots of people found those elements of Pikmin 1 stressful. "Pikmin has never catered to RTS audiences" (19:20) Oh, come on dude. You acknowledge that the RTS elements of 1 are different from most RTS games, but even ackowledge that part of that is because Pikmin isn't a PVP game. The time limit is there in place of a person and largely is what made that first so unique and resonate with so many people. It's not like the time limit wasn't a decision made to add urgency to a single player experience because Bingo Battle in Pikmin 3 has NO time limit because it's a PvP experience, like you admit most other RTS games fall under. If RTS was never a part of Pikmin's appeal, Nintendo would have never gone back to 1's formula when making Pikmin 3 and most certainly wouldn't be putting restrictions on the formula now that they're returning to some of 2's mechanics in Pikmin 4, with you now being limited to 3 Pikmin types at once, presumably to add more strategy to the game since caves are returning. "Its strange he'd make an exception for the submerged castle" (22:30) Not really? For reasons I've mentioned before and will mention later, Pikmin 2 has a whole lacks any sense of urgency and the resource management you claim brings RTS elements to the caves is easily circumvented through the overwhelming strengths of Purple Pikmin. Of course the one single moment in the entire game that actually urges you to act quickly and optimize your play would be an exception in a game completely devoid of them. Of course that moment would feel like a breath of fresh air to fans of 1 and 3. "The vast majority of caves have unique assets and gameplay mechanics" (24:00) As someone who's fully completed this game three times, 90% of these differences can be chalked up to enemy placement or enemy variety. The most variety you'll get is "Oh, this one has snagrets" or "Oh, this one has dweevils". Rarely ever will you get unique geography or mechanics that force you to rethink your strategy, hence why the Submerged Castle is the one exception to this rule. I don't think a train set being in one cave or one sublevel having one corner that looks like a treehouse as radically changing the gameplay from cave to cave. None of these caves offer anything that comes even close to the uniqueness of Twilight River's lilypads, Distant Tundra's luminescent mushrooms, or the Final Trial's puzzle-solving. When the ONLY difference across every single cave is where enemies are placed and what enemies exist, of course it's going to get repetitive and the level design will become seemingly nonexistent. At what point does the game placing you in identical environments with nearly identical challenges stop being fun.
"It's contradictory for him to respect others opinions but say Pikmin 2 is a betrayal to the series" (28:50) How lol? Him being passionate with his criticisms of a game does not at all mean he can't respect those who enjoy the game. He's not saying their opinions are invalid - just that he vastly disagrees with people who see it as their favorite in the series. Again, operating under your logic, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE can think Breath of the Wild strayed too far off the Zelda formula while respecting those who do like it. They have to think every fan of it isn't a real fan of the series and that their opinion of the game is completely invalid! This is another criticism that is less about engaging with Schafrillas honestly and moreso treating his opinions as an attack on people who enjoy Pikmin 2 and acting like it's impossible he's approaching the review from a place of good faith. You're attacking him for those things when you're committing those exact same crimes yourself except being drastically more disingenuous and judgemental. - "Why are you complaining about boulders and other instakill elements when patrolling the floor is part of the strategy? I just don't think making a player waste minutes patrolling a floor merely to get rid of all the bullshit elements is either a good design decision or one developers intended players to do. I really doubt they put all this random, extremely dangerous garbage everywhere for players to get rid of it all with no risk by exploring the whole sublevel beforehand. If that's supposed to put the real-time strategy elements into the caves like you say they do, I think that's a really boring and uncreative way of carrying over the RTS elements into the cave, as if smart players are going to approach these situations as actual challenges with their Pikmin instead of eliminating all the bomb rocks with Olimar beforehand or spending 10 minutes punching Bulborbs to death to avoid the bullshit bottomless pits, because that's TOTALLY what the developers intended. They totally wanted their players to realize the optimal strategy is just to avoid playing the game altogether, abandon their Pikmin, and eliminate the biggest threats by themselves. - Electricity being instakill is okay Just because you can observe a hazard beforehand doesn't mean that it being instakill is a good design choice. Why is it the only hazard to work that way other than to artificially inflate the utility of Yellows, which is also what the first game did (making Yellows the only type to carry bomb rombs)? Even Nintendo was aware that this wasn't a good choice by making Electricity unable to kill in the next game, which was admittedly an overcorrection. - Restarting the sublevel makes it fresh. I just don't constitute different enemy or treasure placement as enough changes to make replaying a cave feel fresh. I've 100% completed Pikmin 2 three times and not once did I ever feel like the RNG elements contributed to my experiences feeling different when the core level design of each sublevel remains the same. - "He's complaining about the very same urgency he said he wished there was more of" (34:40) This is not the same type of urgency that Pikmin is known for, and it's not a good kind of urgency either. Frustrating enemy placement, awkward level design, and constantly yanking the player's chain is NOT the same kind of urgency that made Pikmin 1's RTS elements so enjoyable. - "Stone spray is fine because it's consumable" (37:00) If a powerup still completely invalidates a challenge, I don't think that's a good design decision. Pikmin 3 still kept the spicy spray because, while it does give you an advantage in fights, you still have to avoid getting your Pikmin eaten, and you still have to engage with the enemy. "Swarm in Pikmin 3 is more overpowered than purple spray" (38:30) - I do not agree with this at all lmao. Yeah, having a big squad with you while swarming is going to make most fights pretty trivial; however, you still need to have a big squad with you, just like in Pikmin 1 (even if the enemies in 3 have less health). There's still the danger of Pikmin being attacked or affected by hazards (which happens in the very clip you show to demonstrate how broken swarming is). None of those things exist with purple spray. You don't need to have a large squad for it to be effective at all. This is largely off-topic as well, but saying 2 has more balanced strategy than 3 is totally out of pocket lol. The "Go Here" functionality and having 3 captains completely dwarfs whatever RTS elements 2 ever had. "Purple spray is okay because you have to grind for a long time to get multiple" Okay, but the game has no day limit and no sense of urgency whatsoever, so the player is totally free to do this with no punishments or downsides whatsoever. Even in Pikmin 3, a game where getting all fruit gives you quite a bit of time, you'd still be wasting your limited number of days doing this, while in Pikmin 2, there would be no downside to doing this whatsoever aside from your own personal time. You cannot compare this to grinding in JRPGS (40:00), because even if you're overleveled to drastically decrease the challenge of an enemy, you still have to ENGAGE with the challenge. None of this is true with purple spray. "The game has obstacles in place to prevent Purple overuse" (41:10) There being a couple enemies you have to fight regularly without abusing purples does not mean you aren't going to use Purples for 90% of fights. Just because out of 10 enemies in a sublevel, you use Purples for 9 of them and Blues for the 1 Wollywog, doesn't suddenly mean "The game balances use of each type and encourage different strategies!". That's not the game organically encouraging mixing Pikmin types - that's the game forcing you to arbitrarily switch to 1 type for an enemy then go back to using the overpowered option for every regular fight. And with the "well electricity is instakill so you don't want to use purples", like my previous comment, forcing you VERY BRIEFLY switch to another type doesn't constitute good balance; additionally, with the Purples' stun ability, even these enemies that are supposedly in place to stop Purples being insane don't even do their job since the strengths of Purples can circumvent those hazards anyway. "You mean like most encounters in Pikmin 3" (42:10) For one, this is whataboutism. Even if you think 3 has this issue, which I disagree with, that doesn't suddenly mean it's not an issue in 2 either. Secondly, I don't the issue is NEARLY as bad in 3. Sure, enemies have less health across the board, but there are still plenty that still make you engage with them. The spiders in Twilight river, for example, are particularly dangerous. I like to lure them from their web with a stray Pikmin, then throw a couple rocks since they don't get stuck in their web as easily. Even Bulborbs, who are pretty easy with a big enough squad, can have their eyes targeted to better dispose of them. So, so few enemies in 2 have that level of interactivity because Purples actually discourage engaging with enemies because their strengths absurdly dwarf whatever advantage an enemy might have. Seriously, even diehard Pikmin 2 fans admit that Purples are busted. I feel it's not hard to see at all how badly they break the game's balance. "The usefulness of Purples are balanced out by only having them in limited numbers" (45:30) - Not when even one Purple can stun an enemy like a Bulborb. At that point, even 1 Purple Pikmin can trivialize most combat encounters. It's not that he's not acknowledging their flaws (which he obviously does). Do you think that, even in the clip where he lists off their intended weaknesses, he just doesn't understand that they're weaknesses lol? No, it's because their overwhelming strengths vastly outweigh the offchance that their slow speed might result in one being eaten. It's fine if you personally think they aren't OP, but this is a pretty agreed upon point that Purples are busted even among people who love 2, so saying "Wow he can't even put two and two together even when he's listing off their weaknesses" is so rude and dismissive of his actual criticisms.
"Not having an item that needs 100 Purples would be a missed opportunity" (46:30) Sure, I agree with this. But if you're going to include that in your game, at least offer an easier way to get Purples, even if it's only unlockable at the end of the game to preserve balance for the rest of the game. Making it extremely frustrating to grind out Purples isn't fun regardless if the concept of a super heavy treasure is neat. Also, you say it's "optional", but you HAVE to have it if you even want to see the game's actual ending. You literally cannot beat the game if you don't get it! "Him resetting when a Purple dies while saying they're overpowered is hypocritical". (48:20) No, it's not. One single Purple Pikmin dying doesn't mean the vast majority of your playthrough isn't overwhelmingly Purple Pikmin dominated. Purples could kill everything in one hit, but if the Doomsday Apparatus still existed, it would STILL be INEVITABLE that ONE might eventually die and you'd need to reset. That's not an admission of guilt like you're claiming it is. "I play games I like" (48:50) What a snobbish, condescending thing to say. This moment in particular really goes against your claim that you're attempting to be cordial and fair towards his points. I guess because he has lots of criticisms towards Pikmin 2 he's not allowed to enjoy it? Or him being frustrated with parts of a game doesn't mean it's not weird he'll still play through all of it? You don't need to flex your superiority for enjoying a game he doesn't like as much as you lol. "Grinding for Purples likely takes less than an hour" (49:30) It still wastes time. If it took less time and was more friendly towards the player while still being a challenge, why wouldn't that be a better alternative than what exists now? At least with the bitter sprays, which you say contradicts his points, he's working towards something that will extend and benefit him past one moment of the game. "Never play any good game again" (50:30) This is where your critique goes past a simple response to his video and moreso feels like a passive aggressive judgement of him. No one wanting to have an actual discussion and engage with someone honestly is going to say something akin to "Lmao, stay away from the good games! preceded with an hour's worth of saying his logic is fundamentally flawed and he's willingly reinforcing his lack of enjoyment with the game lol. Using the "it has a little something for everyone" IGN clip is hilariously out of place considering it's the first positive comment he's made in a while in this criticism video. Again, it screams of you trying to dismiss anything he's saying, good OR bad. The fact that he's willing to say at least one positive thing about the game and you instantly spin it to "Wow, his opinions are all over the place" is so dishonest and reeks of being unwilling to engage with him honestly. "He's just getting mad about a bunch of things that aren't necessarily true" is basically your entire attitude this video, treating personal issues with the game as things that are verifiably false and deserve to be judged lol. The way you engage with him in this video is not conductive to civil discourse, but instead incredibly opinionated and dismissive of what he's trying to say. You treat his opinions as "these things are so easy to factually say aren't true". Well, obviously that's not so simple if I can also deconstruct/disagree with the vast majority of your counterclaims that you insist are factual and easily observable in the game. I don't have any issue with your own opinion of the game. I enjoy all 3 Pikmin games, but your attitude and treatments towards Schafrillas is laughably disrespectful, and most notably, arrogant. Even when you're acknowledging points that you admit are a difference of opinion, you can't help but laugh at him or look down on him in some way. "We're going to be looking at all of the WRONG things" was a horrible way to start this video and immediately set the tone in terms of how honestly you were going to engage with his arguments.
the day limit and the day/night cycle are not the same thing, and the existence of the later (in overworld only) doesn't dismiss the criticism over the lack of the former and arguing that it does is bad faith
Thank you. You perfectly put into words what I love about Pikmin 2 while simultaneously dismantling every strange argument I've seen talking it down. Pikmin 2 is my favorite game in the series by a wide margin and one of my favorite games ever because of the caves and the treasures.
You pretty much put into words what my thoughts were on that video against Pikmin 2 and also made me truly realize the exact reasons why I love Pikmin 2 so much
"Maybe you just don't like RTS games" is also a really weird argument to make off the back of complaining about the time limit being removed when a lot of if not most RTS games don't even have a hard set time limit to begin with. You could play a single match for several realtime days if you want, though mileage may vary depending on how resources work. Really baffling reasoning.
I just put down Pikmin 2 for the time being because I realized I was forcing myself through it just to get to 3. The dungeons were becoming tedious and something I dreaded doing, which just isn't a feeling you typically want. That said, I will return eventually to complete the game, but I'm just too excited for 3 and 4. 2 is absolutely a fun game, but I feel as though some of Scahfrillas' gripes with the dungeons were valid.
The whole limited time in the day thing is completely pointless if you have unlimited days, effectively resulting in an unlimited time limit in the end. Also, most of the ways pikmin 2 balances things whether it be purple pikmin, making caves harder, or anything related to difficulty often results in the balancing feeling very artificial. For example, they tried the make the caves harder so their solution to that was to drop bombs, boulders, enemies from the sky, and spam enemies in certain caves. That kind of difficulty “balancing” feels more like something from a kaizo mod than a natural difficulty curve. Purple pikmin are not balanced at all. Sure, you don’t have an abundance of them, but you aren’t going to have more than 20-25 in your squad at a time, and you will never lose more than maybe 3 or 5 in a cave, and that’s almost never due to enemies. Enemies cannot kill purple pikmin, because purples are so strong that they can and will kill enemies before they have a chance to attack. And since you don’t need as many purples in your squad as you do with say blues or yellows, they don’t have a reason to be as scarce as they are. If you have paid off the debt, and you are exploring the wistful wild or any other cave you haven’t went through yet, why wouldn’t you 100% the game? And to 100% the game, you NEED the doomsday apparatus, requiring 100 purple pikmin. And I shouldn’t have to go through the tedious process of going through the subterranean complex several times just to get more purples, I should have enough purples by the time I find the doomsday apparatus. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met anyone who ever thought about the heaviest thing they could carry in a pikmin game. Unless you’ve played the game already, you can’t possibly prepare to get 100 purples to carry the doomsday apparatus, and that goes for all of the other bullshit the game throws at you.
There's a lot of issues with purple pikmin but Schafrillas doesn't give any good points on them! Remember I'm debunking his arguments in defense of pikmin 2, not really making my own. Also the time limit in the day isn't pointless because things shift around, regress and reset between days. Like the bugs eating wooden bridges or bulbears starting to appear in areas, as well as obviously enemies respawning after a couple days. There are a number of things that regress progress if you can't strategies effectively in a day. Again to note- Pikmin 1's day limit is extremely generous. By day 5 the avg pikmin 1 player will already be playing with the same ease a pikmin 2 player would bc it's so easy to get like 3 or even 4 parts a day
@@HidinginPrivateeah, but he’s saying that you have unlimited time to do things such as kill enemies and rebuild bridges. Even if you mess a day up, you have an unlimited amount of days to fix that mistake, while in pikmin 1 you only have 30 days and no more. -edit: what he said about the caves not being different is heinous, I personally think every cave is unique in their own way and are different enough to not be called “the same”.
Having to scout every inch of a sublevel to trigger any falling rocks or bombs is easily the worst thing about the dungeons. It’s not clever or hinted at and it’s very annoying to go trough every area at least twice. Yes, if you know the game, you know which sublevels are safe. But if you are playing it blind, you won’t have any clue. Aside from that, having the time management completely kicked from the underground entirely defeats the purpose of walls and pikmin carrying time. Instead of doing something else with your time, since it’s not limited anymore, you could just wait. Removing this, but adding the limited numbers is not what Pikmin was designed around and it shows heavily.
You don't have to run through every inch, but you should have flower pikmin, and a smaller squad. Running guns a blazing with 100 leaf pikmin CAN'T be considered the games fault. Most games don't have Day or time limits but still take time to do things...curious. one thing that comes from travel time is that they have to traverse through a level, part of that is making a safe path back to base and moving slow enough to be susceptible to hazards. Even ignoring that huge reason carrying time makes sense- you also have to note that nearly everything is sped up considerably from pikmin 1. Getting new pikmin, breaking down walls, tripping and the amount of time and ways pikmin can get distracted. All of this is made much faster and less frustrating from 1 to 2
@@HidinginPrivate In other RTS the time limit is the enemy. With every second that you don’t use optimally, the opponent grows stronger. This is not the case in Pikmin. The opponent is time. If you could stay in the overworld for as many minutes as you please, you wouldn’t have any incentive to work multiple things at once. The limited time in a day makes the player care about how they spend it, similarly to other games where you care about your time since you don’t want the opponent to overwhelm you. The caves invalidate this. I get that this is a controversial topic that we probably won’t ever agree on. But you have to agree, that this isn’t a perfectly designed element that doesn’t need changes.
“It shows heavily”? “Not what Pikmin was designed around”? Bro, Pikmin has numbers, it’s about numbers, there are numbered pellets for delineating weight requirements for carry capacity, weight of corpses, the fun flow of group control and how that changes depending on amount of units at any given time in and out of combat, how destructible walls increase in speed destroyed by *number* of Pikmin on it. I have extremely serene moments in 1 and 3 where I just… play. I just play Pikmin, kill, increase numbers, ohhh look I’m carrying x fruit back home at once or i found and I am now carrying a ship part with 45 blues! I forgor the time, and still have fun. You can have differences in tastes here, absolutely, but I love the experimental design here at hand for caves where unit numbers take dominance over time before death
The only thing I don’t like about having to have 100 purples is that you literally have to grind for them. If you never lose a single purple and only visit each cave once you’ll still only have 65 purples….which is a bit annoying. But yeah I do see his loops and contradictions….
I will say the subterranean complex method is the most popular but I hate it. If you do submerged castle instead it's much faster plus you can get bulbmin and turn them into purples. 10 purples a run, & only took me like 25min to get 50 purples. But yes and forced grinding for an objective is something I don't like almost as a rule!
@@HidinginPrivate yeah subterranean complex is the fastest since you can just rush it with 1 pikmin and use the royal candypop buds and you end with 15 purples a run which are like not even 7-10 minutes per so like just under an hour of doing it for 100, sucks but it is the most optimal way to do it
Ive been recently playing pikmin for the first time, because you know, they are all available on switch now. I waited way too long to actually start pikmin 1 though because hard time limits stress me out, but when i started playing i very quickly realized that it just... didn't matter. Even a noob like me was able to beat the game on day 20, with 10 days left, and 5 of those were spent farming pikmin at the crash site without getting ship parts. The day limit in pikmin 1 is just as pointless as it is in pikmin 2 because it's so generous that it might as well not be there
When he means unique mechanics, I think he means stuff that is noticeably different from the surface that sets them apart from just doing all this above ground, considering Bulbmin are just all Pikmin with all resistances, the themes only affects the enemies and layouts, and most of the enemies could either be done above ground, or don’t bring a unique spin to justify having so many caves.
exactly. So many commenters here acting like Schaff is some boogey man and this guy made every single right point. but he actually made tons of non points, through the rest of the response too. I think it's just partially nostalgia/ the mindset of "I liked this game tho! Anything that criticizes it must be WRONG!"
I think the electricity issue is a matter of consistency, electricity is the only hazard in pikmin 2 that insta kills your pikmin, and the other hazards only scatters them
Well I assume they realized electricity wasn't busted enough in Pikmin 1, so they made it insta-kill in Pikmin 2, but thought it was too OP, so they changed it to only stun in Pikmin 3.. so there was a lot of trial and error and figuring out what people wanted They should be stuck with Pikmin 1's electricity, which stuns Pikmin for a few seconds, and kills them if you don't whistle them in time. I think that would be the beat way to do it, and I hope to see it work like that in Pikmin 4.
Pretty sure Pikmin 1 doesn’t have electricity, but funnily enough Pikmin 4’s electricity actually works the way you wanted (stuns, but lethal if you leave them shocked for too long)
@@QizLizWiz Pikmin 1 has the code for electricity, they just never implemented it I believe, but it's cool they fixed the inconsistencies with electricity in 4.
@@HidinginPrivatevery not true. They make taking out enemies slower so having too much ice Pikmin becomes inefficient and the three Pikmin type limit keeps them in check since you’ll want other Pikmin for their utility
I think one thing you need to remember that Pikmin 1/3 and 2/4 and different takes on the same type of game. So saying something like "2/4 is WAY better than 1/3" just means you PREFER that type of Pikmin experience, not that it's better!
I only ever really sort of agree with one of Schaff's points in that video: the rocks falling out of the sky feels kinda bullshit. Other things falling out of the sky doesn't bug me as much, but for some reason the rocks always make me mad. I don't even fall for them since my first playthrough, but there's some visceral part of my brain that reacts badly to rocks fall everybody dies.
It's such a shame that Schrafilla's video on Pikmin 2 has given the game such a bad reputation because it's a small game and his video was filled with misinformation
Yeah I mentioned Pikmin 2 being my favorite video game and my first response from someone was they thought it was the weakest one kinda shows how one RUclipsrs opinion completely changed pikmin 2s reputation from being a fantastic game to its worse then Hey! And Pikmin bloom.
The only thing I disagree with is the thing about the 100 purple treasure, I found it incredibly tedious to collect that many purples. Outside of that as a huge Pikmin 2 fan I appreciate this video. While I like Schafrillas, I could not disagree harder on his Pikmin 2 take.
Wow I didn't even realize Pikmin had this negative perception, maybe it's because I played it first but 2 has always been my favorite followed by 1 and 3 in that order.
I stopped watching this guy way back but this video sums up my issues with him. He says all the big key youtuber reviewer words without understanding what he’s talking about at a core level. Just so pretentious while being so wrong.
21:34 This is kind of a nit pick however i feel like "Only 1 cave with a unique gimmick" is kind of forgetting the other instance, albeit minor, Glutton's Kitchen. This cave is primarily themed around the breadbugs mechanics. You start by finding the breadbug, these fairly harmless creatures that rival the pikmin in the sense that they too carry treasures back to a base. overtime this gets built on by adding different hazards and obstacles, and finally reaches the climax with the giant breadbug, the only boss that doesnt even attack you. Instead, you have to dodge electricity and take advantage of the mechanics you learned before in order to trick it into getting damaged. There are some similar instances throughout the rest of the game, though they are more minor. The Hole of Heroes functions as a boss rush, and the Dream Den lacks any method of making new pikmin throughout the entire dungeon.
There is also the frontier cavern, it contains tons of enemies you have fought throughout the game, slowly including harder and harder enemies. The entire cave is like a final exam for everything you have learned from the awakening wood and perplexing pool.
Maybe.... it's because Schaff liked the time based aspect of the Wraith. And what you and this guy mentioned, don't have anything to do with time management at all???? How do you people make these points? This is like, if a guy liked a film or game because of X reason. And then you "rebut" him by saying, "Erm, what about this thing I like for Y and Z reason?? WHY didn't you mention that? You made a mistake!!"
@@absolutezerochill2700 I'm literally just pointing out that there's an objectively incorrect thing he says, I'm not trying to discredit him or something. I even started the comment stating it's a nitpick lmfao. He can have the opinions that he wants to but his statements that are meant to be factual are not factual, which implies he's either misinformed or intentionally trying to manipulate the truth (which I doubt). Maybe I'm misinterpreting your comment because it seems to have many grammatical flaws that make it confusing to me, but if that's what you meant I do not understand your point here
well yes, it is mainly based off of his preferences, as he says "cool" unique mechanic. And he's already established that he prefers the time management aspect of the series. Which is why all your examples and the one in the video simply don't apply to his definition. besides i don't think you can technically say he's objectively wrong bc, well breadbugs are seen elsewhere and boss rushes and final trial sort of areas where you can't resupply have been done in other games before. I haven't quite seen anything like the water wraith in games. As a side note, he has changed the title to be more opinionated, as opposed to objective. Which i think is the right move since most of his points are based on his preferences.@@Goomba456
I went into this video hoping to gain new appreciation for Pikmin 2, but all the focus on picking at technicalities and getting super lawyery over Schaffrillas's experiences with the game just made all of the game's flaws stick out more in my eyes.
I haven't played Pikmin 1/2 yet (I've played 3/4), but what I can tell is that Pikmin 3 is a sequel of Pikmin 1 and Pikmin 4 is a sequel of 2. Since 4 is my favorite so I am pretty excited to play 2 one day!
I don't think "corners were cut" is talking about the content in the game, it's talking about the way the game overall was designed. It's incredibly easy to design a level if you already have one pre-made (See: every 2D Mario that reuses aspects of the original 1-1), and the fact that the dungeons are randomly generated means that the devs only had to design smaller segments that could be fit together rather than putting that same effort into building levels from the ground up. It doesn't matter how much content is actually there if what content _is_ there is placed into a recycled area or tossed into a dungeon that was designed by a computer rather than a human. For people who get most of their enjoyment off of exploring new areas, it's extremely disappointing. It's like if they added 90 more stars to Mario 64, mirrored/flipped Peach's Castle, changed the colors on each floor, changed the overworld secrets, randomized the level layouts, and sold it as Mario 64 2. It wouldn't be as fun of an experience because the core design is just _inherently weaker_ than the original by copying off of it. It would make the fun of the game hinge on getting a good seed for each level, which isn't everyone's cup of tea.
Nah. If you took out all the dungeons and made new areas JUST with unique assets you could still prob get 4/5 entire above ground areas. The models are what takes time and effort and the models are still there is spades. It's not exactly the same but as someone who has used blender to create terrain vs unique models- one takes far more time than the other even without considering they had to spend time in R&D developing an entirely new random generation system in the code that I have NEVER seen make a game breaking level.
@@HidinginPrivate I’m not saying cut the dungeons - I personally think dungeons are gold quality on paper - but from a design perspective it feels like by implementing dungeons the way they did, and adding as many treasures as they did, the overworld quality was sacrificed. The “cut corners” were the topside areas - it’s not enough to just change where base camp is, add monsters, and add new treasures because the world still _feels_ like Pikmin 1 with a new seasonal coat of paint. With how the dungeons are made, it kind of kills the exploration aspect.
I'm sorry, but this is not a very well put together defense tbh. Calling his video bad and dogwater because you disagree is not a very good argument. You haven't really faced all his problems head on, but instead brought up other points like: -He doesn't like there being no day limit. You basically said it doesn't matter. -He complains that the dungeons have no time limit. You talk about an entirely different thing about your amount of Pikmin and not gaining more. -He talks about not liking rocks 'randomly' falling from the sky, and you just talk about how it's not technically random. And then you say how you can just not bring everyone at once, and scout out the area beforehand. But you left out the part of his video where he acknowledges that you can do this, but says it's not a good way to design a game. Overall, you DEFINITELY should have scripted this video.
Pikmin 2 is my favorite game of all time and when the Schaffrillas video came out it was kinda weird because I felt like he was kind of ignoring so much of what made the game so good. I love Schaffrillas but sometimes he can make some wild statements. You were probably to harsh to him in some areas but I think overall you made really good points
I was trying to be about as harsh as he was in his video. He has no hesitation calling things dumb, or thoughtless & levying that criticism at the creators of one of my favorite games so I tried to match his tone. Sorry if I was ever too harsh though. I also enjoy Schaff's content in general, his bojack series is nice especially but yeah his pikmin 2 video wasn't it imo
You sound like someone that is resentful and personally offended that someone popular didn't like one of your favorite games, and instead of trying to understand why they have the opinions they do, you went on the attack to try and "objectively" dismantle every one of their opinions. I see no attempt to understand Schafrillas in good faith here. This is not a United Nations political debate, this is just an opinion about a video game, but you treat it more like the former. I like Pikmin 2. And you've made some good points. But it is very uneven game, and feels a bit cheaply made. The game feels rushed because they reused the above ground layouts from the first game, and because you'll be seeing many of the cave aesthetics haphazardly mashed together and reused before a single playthrough is over, especially in Wistful Woods. In addition, the optimal way to do things often just isn't very fun. Running through an entire cave floor by yourself as Olimar to activate all the traps, and then rocket punching the mortar and boulder-spewing enemies to death keeps my pikmin alive, but it isn't fun. Never using my purple pikmin because I want to keep them alive for collecting the weight at the end without grinding caves I've already done isn't fun. Because there is no day limit, there is no ingame tradeoff for spending entire days growing pikmin and or farming berries, which imo isn't very fun. The difficulty of the game encourages you to cheese the game this way, but it just isn't very FUN. Again, I think it's a game with a lot of quality content. Prime Nintendo made it. I actually like how punishing some of the cheap shit in this game is because it keeps me on my toes. But it comes off as half-baked and haphazardly planned, and is just not as satisfying to play as the first game for me. People don't have to be lying or tricking people in order to have these opinions.
@@unusualusername8847 I grew up on Age of Empires 2, Age of Mythology and Command & Conquer: Generals, with some exposure to Warcraft 3, Red Alert 2 and Tiberium Sun. Still love me some AoE 2.
i think you misinterpreted a lot of what Schaff was saying, but that’s also because Schaff kinda misused using certain words like “realtime strategy, when he was just referring to the removal of the day limit. plus the problems with Pikmin 2 are so convoluted and weird that it has lots of differing sides of extremes without much middle ground. Pikmin 2 is a complex game, as it’s very difficult and very easy in various ways, but some of those ways are just not that well thought out or implemented properly. Schaff understood that there were lots of contradicting game design elements that were either tedious or pointless because of how complicatedly redundant they are. these design choices may not all be game breaking or makes the game unplayable, but these points he states do hamper on the overall experience. but not once has Schaff said that it’s a bad game. it has many flaws, but nothing to make it unplayable or not worth while, which is why he titles his video “Pikmin 2 is the WEAKEST of the series” and not “Pikmin 2 is BAD”. it appears as if you just couldn’t understand what he was talking about, so you just got progressively annoyed with the video. maybe next time you should actually script your criticism and check it twice, instead of just live reacting to what he had to say? Schaff maybe didn’t double check his script, but at least he had one! no hate towards you tho- this video was just kinda annoying to listen to :/
and just a little add-on here: i’m not saying all this because i wanna defend Schaffarillis. i love his videos, and he’s a cool dude and all, but i am saying all this because i just don’t think you understand game design all that well. and as an aspiring game designer, listening to you misunderstanding Schaff’s criticisms on objectively poor game design choices was annoying
Well said! Another person who loved the game but shared several of Schaff's criticisms was Antdude. Hiding in Private really digs into Schaff's definition of real-time strategy, but it doesn't change the fact that many people consider the randomly generated dungeons and hazards (with a few exceptions, of course) to be annoying. It's not some isolated opinion, and this video really didn't do anything to sway me (someone who also still enjoys the game) from that perspective. I respect his opinion and think there's a case to be made here, but it could have done with a lot less "I'm not mad" energy.
@@jesseburgener442 I think some people find the random generated levels a bit off just because they get in direct contrast of pikmin 1 and 3 exquisite level design, is really not a big deal but you can feel the downgrade when the set pieces are put together with some random enemies in there, it doesn't feel like an ecosystem anymore as much as just a level, which is fair criticism and doesn't mean you can't enjoy these random levels but is indeed a case to be made about what method is better based on how is implemented. As topsyturby2010 pointed out this video is annoying to listen and is msotly from that "I'm not mad" energy you described but also an arrogant attitude, if at least HIP points were not strawman arguments I could root more for him but this video makes a huge disservice as a pikmin 2 defense, it would be infinitely better a video about how pikmin 2 is great despite its flaws, because there are lots of things to discuss, instead is just a "why schaff is wrong about a subjective opinion"
Pikmin 2 is my favorite entry in the series, by far, so me saying this is in no way a jab at 2's quality or place in the series. But Schaff makes a very valid point about the day limit being removed. For some reason you acknowledge he meant Day Limit but focus on his phrasing of "time limit" (which days are a measure of time anyway so his phrasing was not *incorrect*) and instead rant for a bit about how there's still only 13 minutes in a day. You do start actually discussing the day limit later, which is good, but the argument that the Day Limit means nothing because you can finish the game without it mattering anyway is... Not a good argument. It's still a strong narrative motivator to play well, and adds a lot to the charm and world. It can not make much of a difference to you, but saying he must be bad at Pikmin 1 and 3 in order to care at all is highly antagonistic for no reason. And as for Pikmin 2 still having a time limit so you do still have to be efficient... No you don't. Everything remains exactly as you left it between days. All sundown means is you have to wait through cutscenes and menus to get back to what you were doing. You will never be punished for not getting a treasure back "in time" (in theory), so i'm not really sure what your point is there Edit: Finished the whole video and wow. What was that disclaimer at the start about understanding opinions and dispelling "facts"? Because you shit on every opinion he had and barely ever spoke facts
I love Pikmin 2- I must fight against this slander. Please share, discuss & support this video!! I wanna live!!
In seriousness though, it's perfectly fine if some people think Pikmin 2 is 'the weakest.' I can understand why people would prefer it less or more to either Pikmin 1 or 3 based on what they enjoy. Heck, I even still agree with a couple broader criticisms Schaff makes- I just think his arguments are bad & tend to over exaggerate. Anyways if you read all this- have a good one!
same bro
pikmin 2 is the best out of the pikmin games BY FAR. hopefully pik4 will live up to it.
@@thegreengoose2274 agreed bro
Cry some more
Ok. My opinion on the pikmin games are: 1 is prob the best. 2 is prob the most unique. 3 is prob my fav. Hey isnt as bad but if we are looking at it like a pikmin game then yeah....its not good. And bloom........who? Jk its an ok app but yet again, not pikmin like. Now 2 is my least fav, and before anyone says anything, no i am not a fan pf this dude. Rarely heard of the crab person. But Lemme t3ll all the probles i have with the trilogy. Pi,min 1 felt.....simple. not that it is bad but sometimes i felt like the same things were happening. With 2 i dont like the caves and no, its not becuase of the absent time limit. It's becuase well.....if we talk aboht layout, then it is always fun and cool but it definetly lowers the difficulty. And 3..........it's easy. Listen. An ewsy game isnt bad becuase its easy, but i feel like even when i play on the hardest difficulty where the game mustnt hold back, i still feel like yhe game holds back. Hey.........where do i begin. The sun time limit is gone which makes you consider if it even is a pikmin game. Performance for the og 3ds is terrible, the game feels like its struggling to decide whether it is a platformer or not, you have the same pikmins from 3 without them removing or adding any, and the story feels bland. With bloom i dont realy have a problem. It is just a fun excercise app if you like cute things or pikmin, buuuut if you want an ACTUAL pikmin yame on mobile then no.
My canon event was losing 70 purple pikmin to a falling bomb when I was 11.
Devastating.
Bitter spray petrifies bombs.
@@asra-5180 Gee, I guess with that information he'll just HOP IN HIS FUCKING TIMEMACHINE AND GO BACK AND SOLVE THAT HUH
What they do? You prob just saved like 80 purple pikmin
@@littlesporeling For later playthroughs.
@@littlesporeling just turn off the gamecube and reboot the game trust
I love how Schaffrillas takes criticism, instead of making an angry response video or starting beef, he instead considers the other person's points and promotes the video on his community tab! It shows just how mature he is!
I found this video randomly tbh
@@nicholasaugello2534 yeah same-
Unless you don't like Rio 2. Then he laughs at you, deletes his original video, and then re-uploads it to add a section shitting on the people who don't like Rio 2 because what the fuck are you doing getting this heated over someone saying they like Rio 2?
@@faultyvideos2215 I though it was because people were harrasing him, to be honest he is one of the most mature "critics" or content creators because he can accept the other point of view. Also, maybe that whole Rio incident had to do with the recent events he was in and some people were laughing at him.
@@valordelink yeah, it was harassment, but it was harassment that was, for some fucking reason, based in hating Rio 2 of all things. Schaffrillas has had some controversial opinions, some of which he's even gone back on like his Better Call Saul video, but of all the takes of his to garner so much backlash that he'd delete the video it came from, the take that he likes Rio 2 (not even that he thinks it's a good movie, just that he likes it) is certainly not one I had on my bingo card.
Glad to see others defending my favorite entry in the series. I like shaffrillas as well but man sometimes he just misses hard and this was a miss.
Same and agree. Thanks for supporting the vid
@@HidinginPrivate *video not vid. I do not understand the concept of wanting to shorten a word that is already short enough as it is. I find it ridiculous. However, I do understand wanting to shorten long words.
@@SuperPlacido1It would have been much wiser of you to place a comma before the word "but" rather than a period. If you wanted to make that a separate sentence like you did, I would suggest using the word "however" followed by a comma. Please, worry about proper use of conjunctions and correct English rather than the shortening of words, which could also be considered slang.
@@Tuxum Thanks a lot! Finally someone smart enough to help me with my English! It feels good! ^^ (English is not my mother tongue! My mother tongue is French!) Have a great week-end! ^^
@@SuperPlacido1 protip: english speaking people find it very irritating when you correct them on shortenings or slang because it is considered haughty and pedantic
I think what pikmin 2 does exceptionally well is show that the pikmin gameplay style can work in more than one scenario. it's not *just* a style you can use for a good puzzle/rts game, it can also make for a fun dungeon crawler
I'd give anything for a good pikmin roguelike entirely because of 2. I hope 4 puts something like that in a bonus mode.
I have been struggling to find a good way to word this for awhile now, well said
@@329link Give Pikhacker's Colossal Caverns a try! It puts every enemy/boss/treasure on a MASSIVE randomized sublevel and has tons of fun game options! It's definitely the kind of gameplay you're looking for!
then again, schaff was definitely right about the themes and gameplay............
Perfect timing with Pikmin 1-2 getting a switch re-release and Pikmin 4 getting a release date
Better timing than I even hoped! Gonna respond to these c9mments while playing Pikmin2 on switch!!
Pikmin 4 has had a release date since February.
Pikmin 4 already had a release date…
I’m hoping to get Pikmin 2 for Switch as well once I can afford it.
@@prestonandtom9337 perhaps they meant getting a full trailer
The only thing I know about Pikmin is that a whole lot of Pikmin were killed by Captain Falcon while they were harassing a BOB during the Subspace Emissary campaign in Super Smash Bros Brawl but I agree with everything you just said.
Lmao well you bring some very important information to the table and we can mourn their loss
Captain falcon is a monster, thats why i daily destroy him in smash with olimar
his name is ROB 😭😭😭
@@chainswordcs I guess I somehow got confused with the yellow elite rangers from Halo Reach.
bob is my favorite nintendo character
I actually kind of liked the fact that the dungeons were semi randomized. Made it feel like an RTS Diablo dungeon
The random generation is my favorite aspect of the game! 🥰
Always requires new strategies and highly revs up the replayability! There's always more to explore!
@@EntoneTori ok.
"I kinda wish the Puple pikmin had their own dedicated onion"
Me: *fell off my bed"
Hope you didn't hurr yourself
Pikmin 3
Aged well
I hope your dandori is up to par then, we finally got purple and white onions.
Wouldn't that make purples *MORE* overpowered schaff???
A thing I feel like people forget about pikmin 2 is that even though you don’t have a finite number of days to complete the game, you still sorta get punished by extra world spawns as the game goes forward
For example in perplexing pool past day 32 or so a bulbear will show up actively patrol the overworld as well as beady fuckin long legs appearing if you study the trunk in the wrong place
So I’m a way, punishment for wasting days still very much exists
To add on this, in Pikmin 2's over worlds, I at least always preferred to spend a day clearing out enemies and getting general pathways cleared for treasure collection later, and the as we all know enemies respawn after three days, so if I don't manage my time in quickly killing enemies and then collecting treasure I'll have to worry about the enemies I spent time killing respawning and getting in the way again.
You also get scolded by The President and sometimes other characters in the mail for wasting time
@@Stibly
It goes to a whole other level when the mails run out of things to say and literally spam you with the same exact messages forever x)
That Beady Long Legs is the reason I consider Pikmin to be a horror series, I try to warn people of it whenever relevant.
Holy shit the "Strawberries arent Fruits" bit is literally something I feel strongly about 90% of the RUclipsr community and their tendency to hide behind "RESPECT PEOPLE'S OPINIONS" and Ive never been able to put it into words until now
I understand what he was going for but funnily enough strawberries are not technically fruits. They are pseudofruits lol.
Also, "Strawberries are fruits" is more objective than something like "this mechanic is unfair", which is in a gray area between fact and opinion
@orca042 Technically, fruit is both a botanical and a culinary term. So strawberries are fruits in the food sense of the word.
@@orca042The yellow "seeds" are the true fruits! ;)
Agreed
Thank you for this video!! Pikmin 2 has always been my fav in the series and it’s been annoying seeing it get the reputation it does nowadays.
Sure thing! Thanks for supporting the vid!
I’ve noticed this a lot in Schaff’s videos talking about video games, but I feel like he approaches game criticism in much the same way you would for film or literary criticism.
On a surface level, this isn’t a problem at all- he’s dignifying games as an artistic medium and judging them on their merits to tell a meaningful story. But, that’s also the problem: Video games are NOT films or books or static paintings. A lot of what makes a game good is how its gameplay tells the story.
The fact that THE major criticism against the dungeon crawling system was bad aesthetics and removal of the day cycle without considering the gameplay shift to resource management is one tell of this. It’s kinda clear that Scaff doesn’t really know much about game design, which is fine yknow. Pikmin 2 could, theoretically, be an objectively better game than Pikmin, but there would still be people who prefer Pikmin out of personal taste. But, you gotta know what you’re talking about or else you’re not going to make a convincing argument.
EDIT: On the enemy revival mechanic, THIS is what I mean! Schaff is positive about urgency in Pikmin when it’s a nebulous story element but NOT when it’s an active gameplay element like enemy revival or frustrating enemies. It’s the exact kind of take that someone who mainly reviews film rather than games would make. Story is an element that make games more entertaining, but gameplay is GOD in *games*. A good story does not a good game make
Agreed and for a game the story will usually always go last unless it is a certain case like a visual novel, text based adventure, etc. and it can survive if an area is lacking in some departments like aesthetics, audio, and as said earlier story, as long as it does not hinder the gameplay.
To hit home on the day limit thing in Pikmin 1 and 3 it really is just mainly an artificial time limit for story purposes yet in actual gameplay especially in 3 your hardly in any danger of that time limit normally. Granted yes having a compelling narrative will increase the game’s age it doesn’t solely make the game. The story needs to be built around the gameplay itself not the other way around.
Gameplay is king, story is the advisor, they are both helpful to have, if you're advisor is bad no big deal, but if the king is bad then its fucked
A lot of people complain that Olimar doesn’t have as much personality or character in Pikmin 2 as in the first game, but those who say that probably have never read through Olimar’s journals in the Piklopedia
Olimar has a tooooooon of personality in pikmin 2
Olimar's "Unlike the rest of my family, I can actually appreciate good music" kills me everytime x)
Thank you so much for making this video. I really hope he sees it. When I was watching the original video, I couldn't go a minute without getting extremely irritated. It's not because he doesn't like the game, I couldn't care less about that. Everyone likes different things. It's the fact that he's a RUclipsr with almost 2 million subscribers, has almost no real arguments, and most certainly turned tens of thousands of people off of an amazing, relatively small game.
For some reason, this dilemma reminds me of the Dark Souls trilogy, and how the second title is usually the most disliked due to hearsay and not being the original or newest title.
While some complaints are grounded, the game is otherwise still fairly good compared to its adjacent titles.
It reminds me of the dkc trilogy as the 3rd game is hated for no other reason than it's different and while some claims have some truth to them other claims are just stupid because one guy decided he was going to get pissy because he could not beat a level made a hate video on it and spawned a group of gremlins who never played the game but hate it even though saying kiddy Kong is weird is not a argument
it's sad that this happens in so many franchises, from games to books to movies. I'm all for people venting about their personal preferences, but when you dress your pet peeves up as objective truths, you're robbing anyone who believes you of the opportunity to form their own opinion.
@@theluiginoidperson1097Same shit happens with Bioshock 2 since to this day there is hearsay that it is "the worst one" and isn't talked about as a masterpiece like 1 and Infinite is. I still remember thinking it was going to be bad when I first played it and ended up enjoying it more then the first game.
Guess sequels to great games get a bad rep.
@@theluiginoidperson1097 The thing is, the situation regarding Ds2 is genuinely really weird. First came the initial critque from Matthewmatosis that did paint the game in a bad light, but wasn't overly scathing or "charged" with rage similar to Schrafillas. Basically he critisized for not being a "bad" game but for doubling down on what made Ds1 annoying to play at times, such as hordes of tough enemies the game's combat system isn't neccesarily geared for or "bosses" that are just rooms of normal enemies and with the main bosses being completely and utter pushovers outside of the dlc, which also came with it's fair share of issues such as the infamous frigid outskirts. So as result, HBomberguy made a response video but instead of properly backing up his claims with objective evidence and finding flaws within specific critiques, he created strawmen to make Ds1 look shitty before going on some abstract speech about how the Iron Keep is Great from a "thematic" standpoint while sprouting out nedulous jargon. Not to mention, he barely gives mention to what many consider Ds2's strongest attribute which is it's dlcs which led some Ds2 fans to claim that it was a shitty defense and that the game deserved a better video. His fate would later be sealed as Mauler put out his ten hour long response series tearing apart every single sentence of HBombersguys video which completely destroyed his credibility as a Ds2 "defender" and unfortunately, the reputation of the game itself. Thankfully, I feel like nowadays the opinions have cooled down significantly for both sides despite some Elden Ring hate being a thing for a couple weeks post launch. But as of right now in 2023, I can't help but feel like most fans are just really grateful to Fromsoft as a company and glad that they can keep putting quality titles, especially with the release date of Armored Core 6 around the corner and the awesome trailers that game had. The Pikmin fandom is way less volatile than something like the Souls fanbase or god forbid the Zelda fandom which is just the definition of fickleness. From what I've seen, most Pikmin 2 hate stems from Schrafillas and the people that watch him cause most people still seem to really like Pikmin 2. Saw some ranking videos on the Pikmin games and several of them have Pikmin 2 as number one, not to mention some articles that ranked the games. Ds2 wishes it could have that much popularity.
Not speaking on the quality btw. Just explaining some parts of the Ds2 situations and what people thought about it.
I think you really highlighted how unfocused his video was. It's clear that there are a lot of different aspects of the game he didn't like, but especially in regards to his comments on the game design, he doesn't know how to identify why he didn't like them. In a logically consistent way anyways.
Great video.
Thanks! Yeah I feel like he had a lot of perfectly valid opinions of personal taste but then felt the need to justify his feelings objectively and started tripping over himself
I think Schaffrillas doesn't fully know why he doesn't like 2. He has this idea of what pikmin "should" be and is holding 2 to that on top of just not liking some things.
The point on the underground breaking immersion hardly feels like a point because nothing about it breaks the flow of the game. the alternative is make time still pass in caves, but then I think his complaint would be there's not enough time to get all the treasure, or you are stuck in a sub area without an exit when night hits.
That point is entirely based on the vibe and Idea of pikmin, but puts no thought into the gameplay ramifications.
The rest of the video seems to become "I don't like X, let me try to make reason".
The only point I semi agree with is the lack of a day deadline. I think having the boss' life in your hands with money milestones (Or louies life afterwards) would be cool. But thats just retroactive thinking and not a point against the game design.
I believe pikmin 1&3 and pikmin 2 appeal to totally different types of players. Pikmin 1&3 requires puzzling through fast micromanagement. Pikmin 2 is more for the people who like combat and collecting. The game requires greater mechanical skill (not as much if you play wii motion controls) and has more collectables.
I love pikmin 2s caves for its ability to create immensely difficult situations you have to carefully puzzle through to get out unshaved.
With the wii version, I think the difficulty of pikmin 2 is roughly the same as the gamecube version, you throw you pikmin slower in exchange for more accurate and easy tosses, It is much easier to make the mistake of throwing a pikmin into danger in the gamecube version, but you can throw pikmin crazy fast if you can tap fast enough. (this is kinda why challenge mode in the gamecube version is so much easier than the wii version.)
I completely disagree, pikmin 1 is embarrassingly easy to 100 percent (I'm terrible at rts games and can do it within the time limit with a few days to spare, I did it on my first playthrough even) and pikmin 3 does not require quick micromanagement in the slightest outside of bosses....and if that's your point pikmin 2 also requires quick micromanagement against bosses. Pikmin 2 just focuses on a different kind of urgency. Pikmin 3 is the worst of the worst when it comes to making things easy and slow. If you gather the fruit readily available to you right around the beginning of any area you can sustain yourself for the entire playthrough 😅
I think the weirdly popular opinion that pikmin 2 is slow compared to 1 or 3 is just wrong. Unless you're talking about playtime in general, and not game play.
@@rosel2452 pikmin 2 is as fast as you make it yourself. You can do the safest and slower strategy in every situation, peeling groups of enemies by attracting them one by one. But you can also decide to fight them all at once, resulting in faster gameplay.
Reading the silly item descriptions was some of the most fun I had with Pikmin 2 as a kid, and just the silly items overall (crayons, chocolates, jewelry, toys, all with silly misinterpretive names). Somehow prefering the limited (but still fun) ship parts of Pikmin 1 just seems weird. It was like he wanted to cover as much of his negative thoughts on the game as possible, even if it was only a minor complaint, like I feel in this case.
Yeah I agree. I'm glad he atleast also recognized how fun the piklopedia is bc I love that feature and was so sad when they took it out in the original pikmin 3
But then it got added on pikmin 3 deluxe 😊
This is why I bounced off of Pikmin 3. Juice just isn't fun to collect. There's nothing interesting about it, and there's no room for funny flavor text. I don't want to collect fruit, I want to collect weird artifacts.
I loved Louie's piklopedia entrys I love that the humor is how to cook the monsters.
While I think this response could've been tightened up a bit with a script, this is still a good showcase of someone going on about a game they don’t like, but can't articulate why. Sometimes something doesnt click with people and that's ok! Aesthetics are important to me too so like if the rust floors and tile floors don't do it for him + the length of time being in the dungeons is draining on him, that's totally fine and understandable. His reasoning is just wack and all over the place. It would help if he mentioned what specifically he meant by like game menchanics and such because yeah, Pikmin 2 does a lot of things differently and adds a lot! It'd be great if he elaborated on a lot of things.
Yeahh I definitely would have been much more succinct and solid if I scripted it but like... I hate this video so much, there's no way I could hate myself enough to spend another month making a response to a video he clearly didn't think twice about. It was also fun experimenting with this style!
@@HidinginPrivatetbh pikmin 2 is my least favourite since its the most tough
Agree I honestly love Pikmin 2 more than either 1 or 3 since it feels balanced for the most part. I can do a lot of different things, the game doesn't get dull and the sheer amount of enemies and new features means that you should have a wide array of pikmin to handle them.
Yeah I get what you’re saying. Another pikmin guy, Arlo, brought up the spectrum of “function vs feel” during his pikmin 1 review video. Essentially it was the idea that an individual gamer exists somewhere on the spectrum, and where they are on it determines what they value in a game. A “feel” person is more about the vibes of a game, chasing after the feeling a game offers like the feeling of being a stranded space explorer or a heroic adventurer. A “function” person is more likely to value the actual design and mechanics of a game, how each mechanic fits together to make the game into a rewarding challenge.
Schaff is definitely much more of a feel guy, all of his criticisms stem from the feel of the game. He criticizes the removal of a day limit because it doesn’t make him feel like his days are literally numbered, he criticizes the story because it makes him feel less like he’s on a meaningful adventure, and he criticizes the caves because they don’t feel quite right to him because it removes the clock and are a bit too tricky and strategical that he feels powerless to control his own fate. This makes sense, he’s a film reviewer. Of course he would value his games based on the story they tell.
Pikmin 1 was much more of a “feel” type of game, it hammered home the aesthetics of being in a strange new world and having to try to survive while your imminent doom looms over you. When it came to function it was very simplistic, with only 3 pikmin types and not too many moving parts, with the hardest part being said time management.
2 twists this by doubling down on function, creating these elaborate caves that you have to crawl through with heavy tact unless you risk you losing your only pikmin, it adds an item system where you have to strategically use rare items at the right time in order to minimize risk, it adds new pikmin with their own relationship to the player completely unique to the first three and even goes back and gives the original three more depth with new resistances.
This is why his video feels so scattered and confused, this is a someone attempting to reconcile with a game that’s not built for his tastes. He’s trying to compare two games that are on drastically different sides of the feel-function spectrum and thus his points completely fall flat.
@frowner_and_co weakness disgusts me
When you paused it after he was talking about the balance of purple pikmin and just went "what" that was literally my same EXACT emotion and reaction to what was said lol
There was a few times I was taken aback lol. I think that is one benefit of reacting and responding rather than writing a scripted response. You get a lot more genuine moments like that lol
Same LOL
@@HidinginPrivate I feel like his script must have used ChatGPT or something because it's so incoherent. He complained about how OP purples are that it breaks the game, then says how he would never want to use them because of rarity which is literally game balance. It was either ChatGPT or he's just stupid...
No, it makes sense.
If you just throw 10 purples at an enemy, you're not going to lose any. Because they're stupid ppl in combat.
But then if they get hit by a falling boulder or bomb rock, artificial difficulty, they die and it sucks because of how valuable they are.
@@s.i.m.poster6823 You can scout rooms to trip most falling rocks. Do you think in a way it's an admission of him as a player being bad, or does it lean more towards artificial difficulty? I'm think more towards the former, but can understand the latter.
I don't like falling rocks and bomb dweevils, but they didn't make me rage quit the game. Single reset after realizing what dungeon I'm in. I feel like his video is very exaggerated for the sake of entertainment.
15:50 they actually do explain in game that time doesn't pass because of the strong magnetic fields of the underground.
I think they explain it in the game booklet too. They also state that as the reason why the caves are randomized.
I like Pikmin!
another good reason: it would have been frustrating if time DID pass
@@gay4sswhovian I mean, pikmin isn't really made to be realistic, it just has some realistic features. The game makes no sense and it is pretty goofy, just making it more appealing. I really don't think nintendo made something like the Man-At-Legs because it was "realistic." I do agree that the explanation could have been better, like They can't see the sky underground so they never decide to count how much time they are down there in actual days and instead in time. And if they realize it's dark out, they will wait until the same time they entered because then they know it's safe to leave.
@gay4sswhovian my head Canon is that the plasma wraith is toying with olimar still. Remember, pnf 404 isn't quite our earth obviously. So there's weird stuff and creatures everywhere. So a higher power messing with olimars concept of time makes sense (I say concept because maybe olimar could be down there for way longer than he thinks idk)
@@alexanderleonardi3625 Pikmin 4 says you are wrong.
I appreciate you defending this game, because it just seemed like such an oddball take considering most people love this one the most. It also made me kind of nervous to approach this one since RTS games really aren't my thing. I loved Pikmin 3 and with this new re-release and some restored confidence I'll be going through all of them in order in anticipation of Pikmin 4! 😁
...no, i dont think they do
Glad to see more love to Pikmin 2
Also imo
Schaff opinions on movies for me are on point and very good i enjoy them a lot but his videogame takes always felt pretty weak to me like the guy really knows how to analyze movies and how to express that but when its about games yeah his quality drops a lot
Yeah I agree. I don't always agree with Schaff but generally I don't have an issue and chalk it up to difference of opinions. In this case though he goes beyond that and just sorta says... wrong things
Well, games are a bit complex
So, I wanted to add when he is talking about the underground sections. He mentions that sometimes treasure could be in water, so you need blue pikmin to get it. Then if you reset it can spawn outside of water. What I heard is "I'm bad at preplanning my pikmin line up, so when the games gives me something I knew could potentially be here I didn't prepare."
If a cave has water as a hazard, the player should always bring 30 blues. This is because most treasures are between 5-25 and 5 extra blues is insurance in case a few die.
Honestly I pm always go 20b 20y 20r 15w 15p then improvise with some extras how I think they would work on a hunch. That tends to be my go to
@@HidinginPrivate Honestly I go by the 'one white pikmin' approach and only bring between 5-10, since there arent any dangerous poison enemies
5:55 😐 this is the stupidest man I’ve ever seen he thought that guy was talking about the independent time limit of each day
Something that isn’t random in the caves that I hate is in the cave where the emperor bulblax is the final boss of it, and right at the end is a treasure that you need a combination of blue and red pikmin to get. What I hate about that specific one is that the game doesn’t tell you that there is water at all, so I initially went in without blues, meaning I then had to do the whole cave again after I had just finished it. That was a completely random nitpick but I wanted to mention it
No hate but this is genuinely the most condescending defensive game I've ever heard
Yeah, to me it feels very mean spirited almost
The grind for farming purple pikmin is a lot easier than how Schaffrillas is describing it. He leaves out important stuff that makes this grind a lot more forgiving: First, you don't have watch the entire cutscene when moving on to the next floor. Since you can skip these cutscenes, the time to wait until moving to the next floor is really narrowed down to the "saving" screen. Second, and more importantly, you do not need to repeat the same combat and the risk of losing pikmin in order to go to the next floor. You can leave your pikmin at your base, enter the exit hole by yourself, and you won't leave any of your pikmin behind. You are essentially skipping all of the enemies, hazards, and puzzles in Subterranean Complex up until floor 8, making it near impossible to lose your pikmin and your progress. The fact that Schaffrillas and his gameplay doesn't mention these shortcuts may either be that he didn't know about them, or that he's exaggerating about the grind being very tedious than it actually is
I think I recall Chuggaaconroy (one of the bigger LPers for Nintendo content and certainly another major influence on the image of several games) actually recommended just running the Dungeon with 3 Pikmin. Since none of the exits in the SC require Pikmin to reach (no walls or such to block the captains), you'd basically run to the exit to speed to the 8th floor, toss those 3 Pikmin into the Queen Candypop buds to turn 3 into 27, and then turn 15 of those 27 into Purples (not to mention you can do this with White Pikmin on Floor 4 in the same run at no net loss or impediment) while having Eggs to Flower those Pikmin immediately.
The grind takes about 15 minutes per run (for the time to run to the cave entrance and zip to the exit 7 times per run) and doesn't require putting many resources at risk while increasing your pool overall, be it the Whites and Purples or the Buds just growing your overall number. Yes it does add some time overall to get the Doomsday Apparatus but it's not as dramatic or risky a grind as I think the original video suggests (unintentionally or otherwise). Pikmin 2 is just a game that focuses more on Resource Management than Time Management overall, which fair if that's not his style, but it's more a difference of preference than one being weaker in design than the other.
I recently played pikmin 2 for wii and replayed 1 on switch yesterday and I actually believe that pikmin 2 is the game that truly made pikmin great. The game is not only much longer, but it also has a great story and the different pikmin types give you so much to think about.
In pikmin 1 reds are your go-to, blues are needed for water parts, and you need like 15 yellows for bombs, thats mostly it.
In 2 you not only have the added hazards for yellow making them much more useful, but you also have the limitedness of whites and purples, you have to decide if you want to risk taking out those pikmin, and you actually have to care for them, theyre not easily replacable, which is what a pikmin should be.
The caves can be tedious at times, but I actually love the challenge, and I felt so achieved when I beat pikmin 2, it took me quite a while to strategize under and overground. It's really an awesome game.
I used to think pikmin 1 was leagues better on the overworld but now I disagree. Not to hate on pikmin 1, but much of the progression is finding bombs and/or waiting for next days to get more bombs, and waiting for bridges to be built and walls to be destroyed. And I get the idea of doing something else while letting them work, but I still beat the game in 15 days, You really need to force yourself to beat it in 10 days or less to have a very strategized challenge (if youre good).
I also beat pikmin 3 twice last week and it was also very easy. Even on super hard, and getting every fruit.
I have a new found appreciation for the challenges and controls of 2. I miss swarming and the precise whistle of 1/2.
Amazing video, ive never been able to put it into words on why pikmin 2's systems and nuances make sense. while at the same time you disproved one of the most lazy and popular critique videos of this game
I really hope this video gets more traction actually incredible stuff
Wow this completly changed my mind. I was staying far away from Pikmin 2, but now I really wanna play it. Thank you
Please do! It's fun! Definitely the most difficult but it has so much to offer-
Also it’s on Switch now
@mincraftotalwar I’m telling you, Pikmin 2 is worth it. It is by far my most favorite Pikmin game, and will be one of the only ones I will go back and play again above Pikmin 1 & 3
ITs harder than the first but still great. No game is perfect but Pikmin 2 went for more quality content and grew on Pikmin 1. Funny the things Pikmin one was harped on got removed or fixed in 2...then that got harped on. Just proof that you can't please everyone.
How to say "I can't form an opinion" without actually saying it
You missed something important: without pikmin 2, we wouldn't get the masterpiece that is Bikmin 269 .
Mere words could not express how happy I was to see someone finally make a video like this. Thank you for your contribution.
Yes the "insta-kill" hazards that appear without warning... that conveniently have a timer (bomb rocks) or a shadow (falling rocks) to warn you that they are coming so you have a few moments to avoid it before they actually do damage... Like yeah, I can see how it would be considered random and unfair, if you didn't know about those ahead of time, but that's why you scout out the area, that's why you _strategize._
And for the record, I never, _not once_ used the auto-save reset feature to cheese my way out of my own mistakes. If some Pikmin die, I don't just reset I keep going. But I've never had to worry about losing an entire squad of Pikmin because _I know what I'm doing._ It sounds to me that Schaffrilas just has a skill issue.
I definitely reset a lot as a kid but yeah that's why I'm like "almost all hazards are instakill" bc pikmin don't have health bars- they either die or don't with exception of like water, fire & poison. You have plenty of time to react to bombs and rocks, but the amount of time you are alloted changes based on how fast your pikmin move which actually positively gives a balancing reason to the leaf vs flowers. Silly!
I will play devils advocate a little. If you are used to the smoothness of pikmin 3’s control style, it is a little frustrating when you try to avoid a rock and your turns are not as sharp as the new title/s. I’m new to pikmin 2 but I still like it so far tho (beat the game already btw)
To be fair, as someone that also scouts ahead... it's not very fun to do that. It's just kinda taking a lap around the area to disable all the traps (the ones that don't require Pikmin to be with you to set off, anyway) then switching to the other captain to actually get stuff done.
Part of me likes the thrill of the random traps and tricky enemy placements, it can ABSOLUTELY be unfair. A Bulbear ate my Pikmin THROUGH A WALL.
@@whomdunit2457 The point is the traps can be avoided, and that can be more enjoyable than the frustration of losing Pikmin to some people. If you enjoy throwing caution to the wind, that's a viable playstyle.
@lasercraft32 Fair, they can indeed be avoided, but I'd argue that some (Mainly falling rocks and Volatile Dweevils) are more punishing than others. Even if they can technically be avoided, they're still pretty annoying regardless of how I play.
really good video
while dismantling every single "point" Schaffrillas made in his video, you also gave words to the reasons why I like the gameplay in Pikmin 2 so much that I wasn't able to articulate myself
Bro put point in quotes like Schaff never made a single point in the whole video.
Also, this guy makes a lot of non points too.
like 21:20 . What's the *point* of this "rebuttal" ?
Schaff mentions one thing he thought was cool and wanted more of. This guy mentions bulbmin as if that was what Schaff was looking for and wanted, but thought he somehow missed him.
Maybe Schaff didn't mention them bc they really didn't affect any of the problems with the game that he had.
it's like if this was a movie review, a guy thought a movie was bad, but he liked one scene bc of the pacing or something.
then someone makes a response thats like "uhhh what about this character who I thought was really cool?" like, okay, that's fine, but how does that invalidate or disprove his point?
It's such a power move to make a video longer than the previously biggest Pikmin 2 video
Isn’t there a 6 hour long video about unused content or smth?
There is a 4 hour long video reviewing the entirety of Pikmin 1
I choose to see the Pikmin series as games about resource management, NOT specifically time management (time just happens to be a very relevant resource). Pikmin 2 just places more focus on Pikmin management than the other games (limited amount of Pikmin in dungeons, purples and whites can only be obtained in dungeons by converting other Pikmin types, all the new hazards that need different Pikmin types). Also, in a sense, dungeons do have a time limit -- you have until you run out of Pikmin to clear the dungeon. (It may be a little unconventional to think of it that way, since your timer doesn't decrease in regular intervals, but it is still a limiting factor.)
Your take is correct and was given a name in Pikmin 4. Dandori.
As somebody who’s currently playing through all of the mainline Pikmin games in preparedness for Pikmin 4 I stumbled onto this while playing the second game. Homie definitely just tried being angry and trashed the game for the sake of being an angry reviewer. How this is still a thing in this day and age amazes me.
You picked it apart really well and it kept me entertained the entire way while you were never abusive in your deliver. Great video.
Kisses.
That’s crazy forest naval is the best area in Pikmin 1. It’s crazy how I disagree with basically every point he made
Who?
@@lianiburnett1477 seeing as how the whole comment is against a point Scrafillas made. I think Scrafillas’s opinion is opposite of mine
It's crazy how Scrafilla hated the forest naval when his whole video is about how perfect Pikmin 1 is....When it was legit just a tech demo game.
bro he said it as ugly not bad (tbf kinda is but i like it)(
He said it was ugly, not that he necessarily hated it.
And I mean... It is NOT pretty to look at.
Loved everything you had to say. I needed a positive video about Pikmin 2 after realizing it has been dunked on by the community; I just learned it was so divisive in the last year. 😅 Great video! 🙏
46:36 You know what? Carrying the Doomsday Apparatus actually just takes almost half a day and you can STILL manage to beat the WHOLE area in one single day. I actually managed to do that when I beat it on the Switch!
Also, thank you very much for this video! Very very important!
All my purples were flowers and when I did it on switch it took just over a quarter of the day! Lol
@@HidinginPrivate Hey, you're actually right! It takes only like a quarter of the day! I don't know what I was on.
My favorite part about the Purple Pikmin bit is how he says by the time he gets to Wistful Wild, he only has 65 Purples, while also saying he resets whenever he looses them.
Despite the fact that you can get over 100 Purples by the time you reach Wistful Wild without grinding for them.
No joke, I had 95 purple pikmin when I first landed in the wistful wild
Pretty sure at most you can get 99 (you can just a few extra Pikmin in the starting cave if you have less than 20 purples, which is why it’s an odd number) before grinding in the 2 main purple candy pop bud caves, still 1 away from the total without grinding, but is still 1 trip anyways! You probably could get more than 100 if you miss some treasures and have to go back to some caves, but that is unlikely if you aren’t new to Pikmin since you get the treasure gauge instantly.
I guess losing one or two purples per cave area doesn’t feel like a reset-worthy number but it stacks up in the long run
I really should replay Pikmin 2 because I honestly do not remember getting anywhere near 100 Purples naturally, while going as fast as I could up to that point.
And I belong to the "1 Dead Purple = Instant Reset" club x)
no... i don't think so. Maybe if you play 100% OPTIMALLY but in actuality, even experienced gameplay, you need to grind.
Pikmin 2 is definitely my favorite of the series with its new ideas and the gosh dang piklopedia but it definitely had a lot of the flaws that schaff brings up. He just doesn’t present those flaws in the best way. I think you both have valid points about this wonderful game and franchise. Pikmin 3 is still way too easy though.
This video would be significantly better if it wasn't structured like a 2015 rant takedown. The vitriol in your voiceover and script undermines what you're actually saying about Pikmin 2. This video that could just be about the positives of Pikmin 2 not only requires watching a lengthy video on another channel, but also sitting through entire sections of his vid repeated, along with frankly obnoxious complaining just to hear any counterpoints.
Even as a response, this video could easily be restructured into a 15 minute script.
This video is already so much more condescending and rude in one minute than the entirety of the video it critiques.
It isn't, though.
it is though@@ThisguySL
Important thing to note is that culturally, in Japan, debt is considered to be a worse fate than death, because debt will follow you past the grave and will torment your loved ones after you die as the debt can be passed onto them. You don't dispel personal debt through Bankruptcy in Japan, especially if your loan is with shady people (such as All-Devouring Black Hole Loan Sharks).
That cultural element doesn't really carry across... The idea is, basically, even if Olimar were to kill President and Louie in a hostile takeover of Hocotate Freight, the debt would just be passed onto him. Even if Olimar killed himself, the debt would be passed onto his family.
Debt is a MUCH bigger deal in Japan. It's why their economy is stagnant- people are legitimately terrified of debt.
Well that puts a lot more things into perspective with 2’s plot :p
Hi! fun fact, the art he used at 2:29 is actually my art, he didn't credit me in the video, or in any of the descriptions or anything, i also noticed other pikmin art in the video that wasn't credited to my knowledge as well. 300k views and no artist credit :D
Oh dang. I wasn't aware either. You have a twitter or smth?
@@HidinginPrivate Yes! I can send more info if you'd like. Its also like the 4th result when searching up olimar's family on google so that's probably where he got it lmao
firstly, Goop Videos edited this. Secondly.... Goop probably just put that there after looking up "Olimar Family" on google and pasted the image. I don't think it's especially necessary since he's not getting money or attention due to YOUR art, it's B roll footage. Not only that, it's 3 second B roll footage.
Love how he changed the title from "weakest one" to "my least favorite" lol
Dang I just saw that! Wow
@@HidinginPrivate ig it switches it to less an objective standpoint and a subjective one
which i mean, is probably true, and I respect it
> "No day limit? Waaa there's no urgency or strategy anymore! This game is bad."
> Enemy introduced that adds urgency and strategy to the game
> "WTF this enemy is so cheap and annoying! This game is bad."
Literally
Silly man deconstructs silly man’s argument
True
I’d love to see your own Pikmin 2 video where you go into tons of details and share your own opinions! Maybe talk about some missed opportunities too if there are any to you?
I think he makes some good points, as I also feel like bitter spray and purple pikmin are OP at times, I feel like he takes everything else and runs with it in the wrong direction.
Honestly I love both of these takes. I think Schaffrillas was valid, but it’s important to not let one person's opinions dictate your own. I love yours and Chuggaaconroy's love of this game just as much as I love Schaffrillas ragging on it.
As long as you enjoyed I guess! I got introduced to Pikmin initially through Chugga haha
@@HidinginPrivateme to lmao. I loved his Pikmin 2 videos
@@HidinginPrivateatching Chugga as a kid is what got me into the franchise and made me force my parents to buy a Pal version of Pikmin 2 for the Wii for it not to work and make me beg for a GameCube copy.
Saying "it’s important to not let one person's opinions dictate your own." right after exclaiming how you love both takes is extraordinarily funny
Uh, What? (To my knowledge) Chugga hates Pikmin 2. He actively said his LP made him hate it *more*
I mean, at least it didn't become his total eclipse of the Sticker Star. But he really didn't look upon it thaaaat favourably during (or after) his LP.
Pikmin 2 is my favorite, so I was interested in this video.
Buuut a lot of your counter arguments are pretty weak and feel like they're missing the point of the criticisms or grasping at straws.
The plot counterpoint just is flat, there was SOME dark humor in pikmin 1 but it was not the focus at all, those pointless ship parts were still things Olimar needed to complete his ship afterall, but were nice to note as not needed to take off. (The piggy bank was his LIVES SAVINGS too, that's important even if not needed) In any case these pointless ship parts were a background detail to the overall oppressive plot.
Pikmin 2 is just FULL on dark comedy, to the point of undermining the very serious stuff you ignored from Pikmin 1s plot that took center stage, olimar talking of his family, lamenting lost pikmin, fearing for his life. It IS natural to feel whiplash if you come from 1 and go straight into 2 on that regard. There being a few silly pointless parts in 1 does not help that.
The daily time limit really barely matters, you have no reason to try an get more than 1 treasure a day, treasures remain where they've been moved to the next day, every bit of progress you made in a day stays done. And you are literally fine getting just 1 treasure in a day, then spending the next couple days farming. The daily time doesn't matter at ALL outside of consistency between games, I know when I was young I felt 0 pressure from that clock and so did literally everyone.
Time not passing in caves is just a continuation of this point, the pressure of running out of pikmin is a seperate thing, it's less real time strategy and more just try not to freakin die a bunch. In fact pikmin 1 gave you MORE reason to worry about losing pikmin because u only had limited farming days. Pikmin 2 just makes you trudge through the cave again, and while that can provide it's own pressure, it's more an annoyance rather than a worry.
Im pretty sure the comment about "Cut corners" is referring to them cutting corners specifically for the overworld, he even specifies "here" which I can see. They are a lot less designed to challenge you to get through, and more just designed to gatekeep you until you get the right pikmin. You can easily clear out every overworld in a day in 2, compared to 1 where that is a lot more challenging to pull off. Also every overworld spot DOES feel smaller to me, except maybe the perplexing pool.
He was deadass wrong about the dungeons aesthetics though.
The macro time limit was a big thing in pikmin 1, it is the reason I hear of a large majority of people struggling with it when they were little, it is the reason you tried to gather as many parts as you could a day, it is the reason you couldn't just farm pikmin forever and never run out of resources, downplaying that just comes off as disingenuous at worst or uninformed at best.
I'll give you that in 3 the time limit doesnt really matter though, and that's a common complaint WITH 3.
Also other RTS games have the time limit BE the other players, namely if you can get a strong army before they do, it's just not an upfront time limit, but a moreso implied one, that still makes you have to hurry.
I'll continue this in another post but to cap off this first post I have a minor conspiracy that there WAS intended to be a time limit in caves at a point. Namely because there's a time limit in challenge mode for cave runs, as well the weird fog that comes out of caves. The time limit in challenge mode really gives the impression of a feature they had in the game but decided not to use so they applied it to the extras mode. I imagine the air down there was likely intended to be too dangerous for the captain's suits to filter out for a long period, or perhaps would kill all their pikmin after a time, but they probably couldn't find a right balance for it, or it didn't feel right.
Most of the dungeons DONT have real gameplay differences, they have different themes and enemies but, it doesn't really matter that much in most cases.
Most floors are just enemies kind of randomly scattered about alongside treasures randomly scattered about, there's no setup or specific challenge present for a lot of cave floors, meanwhile gathering every treasure in 1 and a lot in 3 have a lot of specific challenges to overcome to reach them, challenges that arent "a wollywog happens to be nearby better kill it first" (Which even in 1 that'd be more of a problem cause of limited time to deal with things, ignoring all the wollywogs in the forest navel is a common thing people try to do, and is an active challenge to accomplish)
Sure you might need to deal with a different [this kills pikmin of the wrong type] hazard but that doesnt really matter outside of bringing the right resources, which I discussed in the last post is different from any real time strategy pressure, and moreso just a checkbox you try to keep filled.
And the different enemies offer some variance, but without specific setups to make them pose a challenge, with them just scattered about randomly, that tends not to matter at all. You can just plow through them cause you use purples as well.
I played pikmin 2 without purples and a LOT more of the enemies ARE actually a threat then, but most people on their first playthrough aren't gonna realize that, or think to actively not use a thing given to them.
Now there are SOME cave floors that do offer specific challenges still, outside of the water wraith, a good few in fact, namely in the later game, but those tend to be ones that have set layouts rather than being randomly generated. A LARGE majority of floors don't offer much unique, no specific challenge to overcome, random enemies that there's no rhyme or reason to their placement and random traps to disable. (The shower room is especially egregous with this)
Challenge mode ACTUALLY majorly fixes this especially though, with a LOT more specific setups to gather treasures, and setups based on your time limit making things difficult to manage. Tanky enemies really put the pressure on you in that mode rather than just enabling you to cheese them, and the fact that you dont have purples always makes every challenge they want to pose a problem, actually pose one.
The game doesnt do much interesting with the proceedural generation. the actual GOOD floors, which you use as a point, are the ones not generated. Which doesnt undermine his point as the caves majority ARENT that preset floors.
The point of him saying they're only "slightly different" is that most floors are just as I stated above, random mish mashes. And they continue to be random mish mashes. The advantage of procedural generation is supposed to be to offer random unique challenges with every playthrough. If the levels are just stuff thrown about every time, they're gonna both be thoughtless and barely different. This is something that seperates good rougelike games from bad ones too, random generation needs a very delicate hand to not just vomit up the level design equivalent of TV static every time. SURE the tv static is different every time you turn on the TV but no one's gonna notice or care cause its still just a mess of grey and black.
The caves would be so much better if they weren't randomly generated (Which they wont be in 4 thank god)
His complaint of pikmin potentially running out is silly though.
The argument of the game being cheap is definitely a weak point on his end. I majorly agree with your counterpoints there. Although I can understand those elements FEELING cheap in the heat of the moment, like when a Bulbear just randomly drops on your head or a bomb rock appears after your pikmin start carrying something. Your point is overall good there though, I would say those elements he pointed out COULD be a bit better presented in the game itself.
As for purple stuff however, I feel you are just wrong on every regard, it's hard to find any even diehard pikmin 2 fan that actually defends purples or bitter sprays, it feels a bit grasping to even try to defend it.
Comparing bitter sprays to elemental hazards just feels beyond disingenuous. They instantly disable ANY POTENTIAL ENEMY rather than just letting you be able to fight a specific enemy with less risk. Also bitter sprays are NOT DIFFICULT AT ALL TO OBTAIN? They are in the third area and you run into them before even getting yellows? You can then freely farm them from then on!
And you can't just get 1 or 2 in a day in pikmin 2.
Pikmin 2 days are 13 minutes, the berries respawn every 2 minutes.
So you're getting about 6 a day if you're farming, and that's not counting if you got some from caves or flint beetles which are both moderately generous with them.
Enemies are a joke and basically just walking "elemental hazards" in 3 though.
Downplaying how many you can get a day doesn't help your point, much like how him over playing instant death hazards doesn't help his.
They didnt re-add the purple sprays in any future pikmin games so far for a reason you know.
Forced water hazards are rare as hell in pikmin 2, especially ones that have enemies that only stay in the water.
20 purples are insanely easy to get in the first few caves too, first cave gives you 10, then from there it just needs 2 more flower encounters.
Honestly you can't defend purples whilst also bringing up how enemies in 3 can just be instakilled easily as a counter complaint.
There's only one enemy with electricity as a potential threat to purples, and even then they have the longest windup ever, you really don't need to be that careful especially since the purple stun lock. All other elements can just be whistled off them easily, letting you not even have to give a moment of thought to them with purples. You literally need like only 5-10 purples to obliterate almost every enemy.
The point is, the limitations they tried to employ, didn't even matter much for the majority of the game. Purples literally invalidate so much of the only thing the caves have going for them, COMBAT, in comparison, especially to their white cousins. Which also drags down caves further, you barely have to worry about losing pikmin with your purple squad around if you play with the smallest of caution towards things falling from the ceiling and electricity.
Purples are seriously so busted, when I was young I did not notice there was an actual difference between how Orange and Red Bulborbs acted. The difference feels however STAGGERING if you're not using purples.
The disparity from how many purples you need to invalidate 95% of enemies and how many you need for the doomsday apparatus is immense.
Doomsday apparatus is just bad in general, if you're going in blind you dont even know you'll need purples for it, and because it forces a grind even if you 100%ed everything before hand.
You can get 100 purples in an hourish for sure in subterrainian complex, but it's a bunch of time you feel FORCED to do it, and FORCED to tread through a bunch of stuff you already did, compared to just sitting near your spawn point easily grabbing sprays. It's inherently more frustrating by accidental design.
As for the conclusion, again, I'm not gonna defend pikmin 3's choices there, I think they messed up a good bit too. Pikmin 2 has it's flaws, I think it has a LOT of good for it too though, and playing without purple stuff recently made me love a lot of it all over again. The enemies become engaging which makes even the more random samey cave floors actually pose some challenge. The collecting is in general great, there's a lot of neat ideas, there's just conceptual issues between the cool stuff, that matter different amounts to different people.
Don't defend Purples or bitter sprays though-
@@JammyJam5588 Damn son, you could probably make an entire separate response video with all this material. It's so rare to see someone in the comment section actually be thorough and concise with their defenses. Based.
Doing gods work here.
Edit: Now I’m actually like halfway in and this is exactly what I expected an animation RUclipsr to sound like trying to argue game design. I’m so sorry you had to sit through this alone.
It was fun it's alright. The support makes it nicer too
did you just call this guy an animation youtuber??
okay...
This video was very well done and had some really good arguments about 2 that I hadn’t even thought of. That bit about Pikmin resource in caves being functionally the same as a time limit really struck me!
I freaking love Pikmin 2, heck I left a whole dang essay in the comments of his video on why I love it. I wanted to share some of my thoughts:
1- I think you could have been nicer in how you presented the argument. Even though his logic was silly, it kinda felt like you were mocking him a bit, and whether that was deserved or not, it does cloud your point. Less people will be open to listening to you if you’re too harsh.
2- your arguments about purples and bitter sprays were very good, the logic was all there (and quite brilliant, again I had never thought of some of those points), but you have to admit, they *are* very busted and *do* kill the balance of the game. The game does give you a lot of bitter sprays through eggs and various other methods. The easiest play through of Pikmin 2 I ever did was my no-death run, because I used purples, I never use them on a normal play through. I get the sense you knew that, but just didn’t mention it because you were focused on the logic behind it, which is fine, I just feel like your overall argument would have seemed more reliable if you did mention some of the game’s flaws. In the same vain, you do have to admit the caves do get a bit repetitive and blend together a bit. Although every aspect varies cave to cave, the way you handle it rarely does. I still think they’re amazing, but there’s a lot more potential they didn’t tap into.
3- I really appreciated your point on Pikmin 2’s story being a natural extension of Pikmin 1’s dark humor. I also just wanted to add that it’s also an extension of Olimar’s character. Olimar is characterized by being a normal guy, stuck in absurd, ridiculous and tragic situations, but still overcoming all the odds by raw determination. That has only been more emphasized through 2 with it’s RIDICULOUS and completely unhinged situations you find yourself in. (1 definitely emphasizes the tragic part, while 2 emphasizes the ridiculous part) Not to mention how brilliantly Louie and the President (and even Olimar’s family) are used to emphasize this. Olimar is the ONLY sane thing about 2, and that contrast is also a natural extension of the strong contrasts found all throughout the series, that’s especially prevalent in 1 and 2.
There is not a single aspect of Pikmin 2 that isn’t unhinged and crazy, except for Olimar. Everything ties back into his character so brilliantly. I’d even go as far as to say more than in Pikmin 1, if not just because there’s more in 2.
Honestly I absolutely love Pikmin 2 as its my favorite Pikmin game by far! I’ve played this one so much on the Wii!
Personally I love the lack of day limit of the campaign. Pikmin 3's need for fruits (and consequently implied time limit) stressed me for nothing, even if I had ton of backup juice. I wish once you had all fruits you didn't had that timer so you could wander around without worrying and appreciating the scenery and pikmins. And take pictures n such.
Something I find weird that neither of these videos really try to bring up is that Pikmin 1 and 2 both take the basic Pikmin formula in essentially opposite directions and are tonally very distinct from one another.
Pikmin 1 is, at its core, a game about *time* management. The entire game takes place in basically 3 regions small enough to explore in a matter of minutes, and every ship part is in the same spot every time. Pikmin 1 is short and fast enough that you can easily memorize and craft a faster route through every day, both before and during the days themselves - how many Pikmin can I afford to assign to these tasks?
That's why Pikmin 1's 30-day timer is an integral part of the experience. Even if it's not actually a threat, its mere presence means that playing Pikmin 1 *well,* means playing it *quickly.*
Pikmin 2 is, at its core, a game about *resource* management. Everything is so numerous, expansive, and unpredictable that trying to memorize where everything is is a fool's errand, so exploring is an integral part of Pikmin 2's gameplay loop. Purples and Whites are rare, elite units that represent a much greater risk/reward dynamic than other Pikmin, because losing them is much more severe. Likewise, the sprays are a consumable resource that represent a cost-benefit analysis - is this a good, safe opportunity to use my rare, valuable resources effectively?
That's why Pikmin 2's difficulty doesn't come from a time limit, but from brutally powerful enemies that can murder dozens of Pikmin if you're not careful. Playing Pikmin 2 *well,* means playing it *safely.*
You can see from how Schaff plays through Pikmin 2 (like taking an entire squad into a rock-filled tunnel, throwing Reds into a body of water to build a bridge early, killing a Fiery Bulblax with only Purples) that he's more concerned about playing quickly than safely. I doubt sending a captain alone through a sublevel to preemptively set off all the traps even crosses his mind as an effective strategy, because that's not as time-efficient as getting everything on the first pass, even if it is safer. We also know that he really likes Persona, a JRPG series whose main innovation on the JRPG formula is implementing time management as a gameplay feature via the Confidant system, so maybe he just gains more enjoyment from games by doing everything as quickly as possible.
I also wouldn't be surprised if Schaff tries playing through Pikmin 2 in only one or two sittings, which is a valid strategy for the other two Pikmin games. If that's true, then it's no wonder he hates how samey the caves feel.
Schaff's complaints about Pikmin 2 honestly remind me of how old-school Paper Mario fans complain about every game past SPM. They both go from "I don't like this entry because it doesn't appeal to my tastes" to "This entry is a betrayal of everything the series stands for and that's why it's terrible!" Just because Pikmin's most iconic feature is its day timers, doesn't mean that a Pikmin game has to use time pressure as a core part of its play experience.
Honestly the moment I realized that Sachfrillas didn’t know what he’s talking about when he suggested Purple Pikmin have an onion, that or saying purple Spray is an instant win button when Charging in Pikmin 3 is basically that.
Also Pikmin 2 has the best writing in the series because it gives small sub plots to the NPC’s as you go through the game, hot take but Olimar’s family are more interesting characters than Alph or Charlie in the original Pikmin 3 since that lacked the piklopedia.
he's only saying they should have an onion because the Doomsday exists. I'm sure he'd rather have the treasure removed than an Onion added.
Also, no, charging in Pikmin 3 is not an instant win button. You actually have to time it and you'll probably lose some pikmin if it's a tougher enemy/there's more than one.
I think the point that Schaff dances around that I've seen expressed by even Chuggaaconroy is that the dark humor of Pikmin 2 infects some of the difficulty to such a degree that you're less likely to play the game with your mistakes and more likely to reset the game because of a catastrophe. The value of a full squad AND the pressing need for certain types of pikmin in a dungeon to find treasure makes reseting way more worth it. The design philosophy has changed from "how do I manage my time in a day with limited mistakes" to "how do I survive this without any mistakes because I can just reset whenever a catastrophe occurs, because they will, even if you scout ahead." Pikmin 2 really wants you to fail at points, which can be a bit mean spirited and lead to some players willingness to delve into tedium to mitigate that issue.
This change in philosophy I see is also represented in the jump from Dark Souks 1 to 2. Ds1 wants the player to be responsible for most of their mistakes in the gameplay with deliberance and measure, while Ds2 wants players to deal with hordes of enemies over haphazard level design for the sake of the game feeling hard and tedious.
don't pretend the game is hard to the point you necessarily have to lose pikmin. Play better, get focused, and you won't lose many troops. If you can't do that then maybe the game isn't made for you
@@pikminologueraisin2139 that's not what i'm saying. I'm saying the Pikmin 2 feels more obsessed with killing the player’s pikmin and causing catastrophe so bad that it forces a reset because of it. The existance of bomb rock traps, gattling groinks, the water wraith, all feel like they're poking fun at the player, it isn't about playing the game good enough that you don't have to loose Pikmin- which I know you can- it's the idea of wandering into something you didn't know was there and poof you're done. You can strategize, scout ahead, and use the potions, but the change in philosophy is more what I'm pointing out. There was never a point where I felt like I had to reset playing Pikimin 1 other than feeling "I could have done that better." Doesn't mean I don't enjoy Pikmin 2- I'm playing it right now!
Don't leave a dismissive comment without reading what I wrote a little more critically next time. The get gud or "focused" response doesn't apply when I'm just talking about game design. Pikmin is personal goal based, and not everyone going into it is going to have game knowledge so those catastrophic accidents will occur. If anything I find them funny.
@@adsventuresome7511 Yeah I'm with you on this one... I think Pikmin 2 would have turned out MUCH better if instead of having that random element and many short floors, caves had larger floors without any randomness in layout. That way it would have been easier to design more compelling challenges than just "rocks fall, everyone dies" while having each floor be larger and less numerous would have helped make them more memorable, more fun to fully explore, and help discourage the all the resetting across so many Pikmin 2 players.
@@pikminologueraisin2139 I'm a veteran pikmin player, I can 100% 0 pikmin death 1 in 9 days, 2 in 11-12, and 3 in 10 days, and I can safely say pikmin 2 is the worst of the 3 games.
The process of optimization is what makes pikmin so appealing. Being able to improve, grow, and beat the games in fewer days.
Pikmin 2 is easily the worst designed, as the most optimal way of playing 2 is exceedingly dull. Scouting out caves is boring, and wastes 2-3 minutes per sublevel. It's not interesting or challenging, it's just boring.
Like, imagine playing Mario Kart but instead of the countdown at the beginning of a race being 3 seconds, it could be anywhere between 3 seconds to 120 seconds. You wouldn't call that interesting, nor engaging. It's just unnecessary.
And if you don't want to play pikmin 2 optimally, then you can look forward to a very frustrating experience, with excessive resetting. Any game that compels players to reset the game excessively, even during casual playthroughs, is probably doing something very wrong.
And likewise a game probably shouldn't be sporadically hovering between 2 extremes, in this case boredom or frustration.
For another nail in the coffin, Pikmin 2 also handles its other hazards very poorly. The hazards in 2 are basically like those wooden block puzzles for babies. You just match the hazard to the pikmin color and nothing else. Doesn't matter if one sublevel has fire geysers everywhere, and another has poison pipes. Doesn't change how you overcome the hazard. The only difference is the color used.
Pikmin 2 is just bad game design central. I myself can still like it for what it's worth, but I'd most definitely don't want any of 2's design to ever return.
@@bluetoad6848 Scouting ahead isn't the optimal way to play Pikmin 2, it is the safest way. The optimal/fastest way is to bring a squad that is big enough to get things done but small enough for you to manage without losing all of them to a trap.
For example, in Subterranean Complex Sublevel 5; you could take 1 White and very safely scout all the falling bomb rocks out before collecting everything, or you could take 25 Whites and utilise swarming to dodge the bomb rocks whilst collecting all the treasures in one fell swoop.
Also, what you said about hazards in Pikmin 2 applies to hazards in every Pikmin game ever. In Pikmin 3, 3 of the 5 Pikmin types have dedicated walls that only they can remove, fire geysers are still around and Blue Pikmin are the very definition of the wooden block puzzle in every game they are in. The Blues thing also hurts the most in Pikmin 1 than any other game because there are only 3 Pikmin types and thus proportionately more bare-bones wooden block puzzles.
Honestly, I actually still agree with a lot Schaffrilla's critiques of the game even after watching your video. Still, I love your videos man, so it was still a joy to watch this one, even if you didn't particularly convince me otherwise.
No disrespect to you as a person, and of course I respect your opinion, but I take a really big issue with you treating Schafrill as this poorly articulated narcisissist. You claim his opinions, at times, are "argued for verifiably false reasons" when 95% of the time, your arguments aren't debunking what he's saying but rather communicating that it's "not as big of a deal" as he thinks it is. Especially with you putting a ton of attention on the "maybe RTS games aren't for you", saying his reasoning/logic is "crazy stupid" (39:50) is laughably disrespectful. You are not only committing the same flaws in your argument that you claim he is, but arguably being more disrespectful and ignorant to actual discourse.
You said in a tweet you were mostly "cordial" to him, but that's simply not true and there's so many instances of blatant disrespect throughout this video. I'm not even a diehard Pikmin 2 hater or even Schafrillas fan, but I hate it when people are so dismissive of other people's opinions. This entire video is littered with passive aggressiveness and poor attitudes. You condescendingly laughing and scoffing at his criticisms in real time and saying things like "Wow, his logic is just totally twisted" isn't engaging with his argument in good faith at all. You're being incredibly disrespectful and childish over someone who disagrees over a game.
- "Co-Op would have ruined the balance of the game" (1:30)
Balance the game around it, then. Pikmin 3, while being made a tad easier with friends, is SO MUCH fun in co-op. Replaying the campaign with my brother is one of our most special memories; additionally, it reinforces the RTS elements and brings in a brand new element of communicating with another real person to be efficient and produce strategies, which only enhances Pikmin 3's already great RTS elements. Pikmin 2 could have that it as well.
- "Many of Olimar's ship parts aren't necessary for survival" (4:20)
But Pikmin 1 still has that fundamental human connection and tells a story about WANTING to survive. This is especially prevalent in Olimar's logs at the end of each day. If humans' persistence to survive and flourish wasn't a huge them in this game, the developers wouldn't have gone out of their way to so heavily characterize Olimar as someone who wants nothing more to survive and see his family again. I don't think it's "weird" to say that Pikmin 2's treasures are less compelling at all because they have absolutely nothing to do with Olimar's motivation as a character or his journey from the last game. You act like him complimenting the humor is contradicting his point, but admitting something has good humor is not at all the same as thinking the overall narrative of a game is unsatisfying.
"It's weird he would talk about the removal of the day limit" (6:25)
Not really. This is a massive complaint that is incredibly common amongst people who aren't huge fans of this game. I feel like you're dancing around his point because you're not telling the whole truth here. Do days end in Pikmin 2? Yes, but the consequences behind that are entirely different now. There's no hard 30-day limit from Pikmin 1 or the more friendly limit in Pikmin 3. Now, you're free to waste as much time as you want, which is inherently & fundamentally contradictory to Pikmin's RTS elements. So much of the motivation behind strategizing behind each day has evaporated completely because, now in Pikmin 2, playing efficiently is now almost entirely a self-imposed challenge, a direct betrayal of the ethos of the first game.
"Caves are limited by your Pikmin count" (7:00)
I agree that this is the intended appeal behind caves; however, the absolutely horribly balanced Purple Pikmin destroy whatever appeal this was supposed to have, as I'll get into with my later comments. That aside, this doesn't change the fact that the appeal behind caves is just fundamentally different than the appeal of Pikmin as a whole. Caves, even when operating as intended when Purples aren't making every enemy encounter trivial, are more about being careful and knowing best how to approach fights. That's an entirely different form of strategy compared to the "how do I manage and split up my squad in order to get the most done with the time I have?" form of strategy that 1 and 3 employ.
"That strategy remains the same in 2" (8:30)
I don't want to say this is factually wrong because that's not conductive to discussion and puts a halt to disagreeing opinions, but I want to say that this is an extremely generous and biased view towards how the time limit works in 2. Fundamentally, it is not the same as 1 or even 3's because wasting time lacks any real consequences in 2. Not finishing a task or having to waste a day to go back and finish something aren't punishments for the player's failure to optimize their play at all anymore. I don't consider bridges being reset a consequence at all because, by nature of the game's design, you have unlimited time to rebuild those with next to no incentive to act faster the next day.
Also, I do not agree AT ALL that there's more urgency in 2. How is the urgency artificial in 3 just because it's an easy game? There's story, character, and gameplay motivation just like there is in 1. The only difference is the day limit is much more forgiving; still, that's far and away vastly more than what 2 accomplishes because there is at least a consequence to wasting time in 3. Even if you have tons of juice left, wasting a day and getting nothing accomplished means you now have a more finite supply of juice than before you wasted that day. For reasons I've already explained, Pikmin 2 has no sense of urgency. Players can be as inefficient as they want and the most punishment they'll receive is maybe some Pikmin 2 deaths, that of which only matters so much anyway when they have infinite time to restore their Pikmin population.
"I don't know how bad he is at Pikmin, but I was able to finish Pikmin 1 with half the days remaining" (9:30).
First off, this is one of the first comments in your video that shows your tendency not to engage with what he's saying, but question the validity of his statements with some sort of personal judgement or condescending comment. Saying "Schafrillas doesn't sound like he's that good at Pikmin so his criticisms are questionable" is an incredibly condescending and disrespectful thing to say. His opinions are valid regardless if he's as much as a Pikmin Speed God as you, even thought that may not even be true considering I think he says he's beaten the game in less than half the days just like you.
Regardless, the game actually INCENTIVIZES you to play efficiently, even if it's just through a high score system. But that only exists in the first place because that 30-day threat is initially scary at first, and part of the appeal of the game was seeing how much you could improve your efficiency to the point where the 30-day limit is no longer a factor at all. There isn't anything like this in 3. There's no story or gameplay motivation at all to act efficiently or want to optimize/improve your play over multiple playthroughs.
"You're admitting that the above-ground portions are as long as Pikmin 1's". (11:45)
You are misinterpreting his point. He's not complaining that there's LESS above ground content in 2, but that the ratio between cave exploration and surface exploration is vastly unbalanced. It doesn't really matter how much of a good time you have on the surface - if you only spend 15 minutes up there for every hour you're in the caves, that's going to be disappointing if you're a fan of 1 and 3 most likely.
That choice alone makes 2 feel like a very different game than 1 and 3, hence 2 being dubbed the black sheep of the series.
"How can you say corners were cut when theres so many new things?" (12:30)
Pikmin 2 could have 100% new assetts, mechanics, and features, but if they were repeated a million times with not a lot of variety, like the caves fall victim to, it would still get old. For example, I love Tears of the Kingdom, but under your logic, absolutely no one could have the opinion that the same map being reused was corner-cutting because the Runes are completely new and there's 1000 differently placed Koroks.
In a way, the logic you're operating under here is "bigger = better".
"I'm not going to criticize someone for having a different opinion" (14:50)
But you'll laugh at their opinion as you watch their review and tell them to "stop playing good games".
This is going to come across as maybe too aggressive or rude, but this feels like moral grandstanding considering some of the disrespectful comments you've made already and the overwhelming negative comments you're about to make towards him later.
"Nearly every dungeon has some sort of unique setpiece" (15:30)
You're right, but they rarely ever are incorporated into the dungeon's theming at all. I remember getting to a sublevel that had some treehouse elements and thinking "Wow, I wish 90% of the caves weren't reusing copy/pasted textures and geography. These things you're mentioning feel like the exception rather than the rule. At least on the surface, each area had a unique aesthetic with new things to see consistently. Having 4x the caves as there are surface areas meant that there was going to be much less visually variety, and the occasional new texture does very little to help the overwhelming abundance of repeated environments and mechanics.
"There is as much time-management in 2 as there is in 1 and 3" (16:20)
Once again, I feel like this is being extremely generous towards 2. By nature having no day limit, so much of the incentive to act quickly and efficiently is gone completely for the reasons I've already mentioned. A core element of 1 and 3 isn't here at all; thus, as I mentioned previously, any semblance of RTS in Pikmin 2 is more-or-less up to doing self-imposed challenges, which simply isn't how 1 or 3 operate at all.
Also, acting like he's mainly concerned with the story reasons for the RTS elements is silly and a misportrayal of his point. The time limit in 2 is fundamentally different. Just because the days end DOES NOT MEAN that it operates identically to 1 and 3, because 2 DOES NOT punish the player for wasting time or not optimizing their play, at least nowhere near to the degree that 1 and 3 do, so saying his argument is a "strawman", completely invalidating his reasons (and a lot of people even though you act like these complaints are strange and uncommon in this review) for personally disliking two's omission of RTS elements
"There is MORE variety in caves due to limited resources" (17:23)
This would be true if caves accomplished their intended purpose at all, but that's not true considering Purples' ability to stun and do double damage completely negates any incentive to weigh your options on each sublevel. The game eventually gets so desperate for some semblance of difficulty and balance that caves begin to throw bottomless pits, bomb rocks, and falling rocks everywhere, as if that's some sort of solution or safety net against Purple Pikmin.
"He's stretching how big of a deal this all is. This game performs borderline identically to 1." (18:00)
This is such a cheap, easy, and disrespectful way to dismiss someone's opinion. It's not a stretch to say these things considering these are the most common complaints people have with Pikmin 2. Sure, the game's mechanics and controls are largely the same, but the framing within those mechanics are entirely different due to the addition of caves and lack of any real incentive to act quickly or efficiently. Even if you love those games, I think it's dishonest to pretend those differences from the first game don't exist and saying people's complaints are "strange" or "illogical" for pointing them out and having a problem with them.
"He's asking Pikmin 2 to be less interesting and less novel" (18:35)
For reasons I've repeated multiple times previously, Pikmin 2 fundamentally removes quite a few of the RTS elements from 1 even if the controls and mechanics are largely the same. It is not a stretch to say many of the RTS elements are gone completely and that these decisions were made BECAUSE lots of people found those elements of Pikmin 1 stressful.
"Pikmin has never catered to RTS audiences" (19:20)
Oh, come on dude. You acknowledge that the RTS elements of 1 are different from most RTS games, but even ackowledge that part of that is because Pikmin isn't a PVP game. The time limit is there in place of a person and largely is what made that first so unique and resonate with so many people. It's not like the time limit wasn't a decision made to add urgency to a single player experience because Bingo Battle in Pikmin 3 has NO time limit because it's a PvP experience, like you admit most other RTS games fall under. If RTS was never a part of Pikmin's appeal, Nintendo would have never gone back to 1's formula when making Pikmin 3 and most certainly wouldn't be putting restrictions on the formula now that they're returning to some of 2's mechanics in Pikmin 4, with you now being limited to 3 Pikmin types at once, presumably to add more strategy to the game since caves are returning.
"Its strange he'd make an exception for the submerged castle" (22:30)
Not really? For reasons I've mentioned before and will mention later, Pikmin 2 has a whole lacks any sense of urgency and the resource management you claim brings RTS elements to the caves is easily circumvented through the overwhelming strengths of Purple Pikmin. Of course the one single moment in the entire game that actually urges you to act quickly and optimize your play would be an exception in a game completely devoid of them. Of course that moment would feel like a breath of fresh air to fans of 1 and 3.
"The vast majority of caves have unique assets and gameplay mechanics" (24:00)
As someone who's fully completed this game three times, 90% of these differences can be chalked up to enemy placement or enemy variety. The most variety you'll get is "Oh, this one has snagrets" or "Oh, this one has dweevils". Rarely ever will you get unique geography or mechanics that force you to rethink your strategy, hence why the Submerged Castle is the one exception to this rule. I don't think a train set being in one cave or one sublevel having one corner that looks like a treehouse as radically changing the gameplay from cave to cave. None of these caves offer anything that comes even close to the uniqueness of Twilight River's lilypads, Distant Tundra's luminescent mushrooms, or the Final Trial's puzzle-solving. When the ONLY difference across every single cave is where enemies are placed and what enemies exist, of course it's going to get repetitive and the level design will become seemingly nonexistent. At what point does the game placing you in identical environments with nearly identical challenges stop being fun.
"It's contradictory for him to respect others opinions but say Pikmin 2 is a betrayal to the series" (28:50)
How lol? Him being passionate with his criticisms of a game does not at all mean he can't respect those who enjoy the game. He's not saying their opinions are invalid - just that he vastly disagrees with people who see it as their favorite in the series. Again, operating under your logic, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE can think Breath of the Wild strayed too far off the Zelda formula while respecting those who do like it. They have to think every fan of it isn't a real fan of the series and that their opinion of the game is completely invalid!
This is another criticism that is less about engaging with Schafrillas honestly and moreso treating his opinions as an attack on people who enjoy Pikmin 2 and acting like it's impossible he's approaching the review from a place of good faith. You're attacking him for those things when you're committing those exact same crimes yourself except being drastically more disingenuous and judgemental.
- "Why are you complaining about boulders and other instakill elements when patrolling the floor is part of the strategy?
I just don't think making a player waste minutes patrolling a floor merely to get rid of all the bullshit elements is either a good design decision or one developers intended players to do. I really doubt they put all this random, extremely dangerous garbage everywhere for players to get rid of it all with no risk by exploring the whole sublevel beforehand. If that's supposed to put the real-time strategy elements into the caves like you say they do, I think that's a really boring and uncreative way of carrying over the RTS elements into the cave, as if smart players are going to approach these situations as actual challenges with their Pikmin instead of eliminating all the bomb rocks with Olimar beforehand or spending 10 minutes punching Bulborbs to death to avoid the bullshit bottomless pits, because that's TOTALLY what the developers intended. They totally wanted their players to realize the optimal strategy is just to avoid playing the game altogether, abandon their Pikmin, and eliminate the biggest threats by themselves.
- Electricity being instakill is okay
Just because you can observe a hazard beforehand doesn't mean that it being instakill is a good design choice. Why is it the only hazard to work that way other than to artificially inflate the utility of Yellows, which is also what the first game did (making Yellows the only type to carry bomb rombs)? Even Nintendo was aware that this wasn't a good choice by making Electricity unable to kill in the next game, which was admittedly an overcorrection.
- Restarting the sublevel makes it fresh.
I just don't constitute different enemy or treasure placement as enough changes to make replaying a cave feel fresh. I've 100% completed Pikmin 2 three times and not once did I ever feel like the RNG elements contributed to my experiences feeling different when the core level design of each sublevel remains the same.
- "He's complaining about the very same urgency he said he wished there was more of" (34:40)
This is not the same type of urgency that Pikmin is known for, and it's not a good kind of urgency either. Frustrating enemy placement, awkward level design, and constantly yanking the player's chain is NOT the same kind of urgency that made Pikmin 1's RTS elements so enjoyable.
- "Stone spray is fine because it's consumable" (37:00)
If a powerup still completely invalidates a challenge, I don't think that's a good design decision. Pikmin 3 still kept the spicy spray because, while it does give you an advantage in fights, you still have to avoid getting your Pikmin eaten, and you still have to engage with the enemy.
"Swarm in Pikmin 3 is more overpowered than purple spray" (38:30)
- I do not agree with this at all lmao. Yeah, having a big squad with you while swarming is going to make most fights pretty trivial; however, you still need to have a big squad with you, just like in Pikmin 1 (even if the enemies in 3 have less health). There's still the danger of Pikmin being attacked or affected by hazards (which happens in the very clip you show to demonstrate how broken swarming is). None of those things exist with purple spray. You don't need to have a large squad for it to be effective at all. This is largely off-topic as well, but saying 2 has more balanced strategy than 3 is totally out of pocket lol. The "Go Here" functionality and having 3 captains completely dwarfs whatever RTS elements 2 ever had.
"Purple spray is okay because you have to grind for a long time to get multiple"
Okay, but the game has no day limit and no sense of urgency whatsoever, so the player is totally free to do this with no punishments or downsides whatsoever. Even in Pikmin 3, a game where getting all fruit gives you quite a bit of time, you'd still be wasting your limited number of days doing this, while in Pikmin 2, there would be no downside to doing this whatsoever aside from your own personal time. You cannot compare this to grinding in JRPGS (40:00), because even if you're overleveled to drastically decrease the challenge of an enemy, you still have to ENGAGE with the challenge. None of this is true with purple spray.
"The game has obstacles in place to prevent Purple overuse" (41:10)
There being a couple enemies you have to fight regularly without abusing purples does not mean you aren't going to use Purples for 90% of fights. Just because out of 10 enemies in a sublevel, you use Purples for 9 of them and Blues for the 1 Wollywog, doesn't suddenly mean "The game balances use of each type and encourage different strategies!". That's not the game organically encouraging mixing Pikmin types - that's the game forcing you to arbitrarily switch to 1 type for an enemy then go back to using the overpowered option for every regular fight.
And with the "well electricity is instakill so you don't want to use purples", like my previous comment, forcing you VERY BRIEFLY switch to another type doesn't constitute good balance; additionally, with the Purples' stun ability, even these enemies that are supposedly in place to stop Purples being insane don't even do their job since the strengths of Purples can circumvent those hazards anyway.
"You mean like most encounters in Pikmin 3" (42:10)
For one, this is whataboutism. Even if you think 3 has this issue, which I disagree with, that doesn't suddenly mean it's not an issue in 2 either. Secondly, I don't the issue is NEARLY as bad in 3. Sure, enemies have less health across the board, but there are still plenty that still make you engage with them. The spiders in Twilight river, for example, are particularly dangerous. I like to lure them from their web with a stray Pikmin, then throw a couple rocks since they don't get stuck in their web as easily. Even Bulborbs, who are pretty easy with a big enough squad, can have their eyes targeted to better dispose of them. So, so few enemies in 2 have that level of interactivity because Purples actually discourage engaging with enemies because their strengths absurdly dwarf whatever advantage an enemy might have.
Seriously, even diehard Pikmin 2 fans admit that Purples are busted. I feel it's not hard to see at all how badly they break the game's balance.
"The usefulness of Purples are balanced out by only having them in limited numbers" (45:30)
- Not when even one Purple can stun an enemy like a Bulborb. At that point, even 1 Purple Pikmin can trivialize most combat encounters. It's not that he's not acknowledging their flaws (which he obviously does). Do you think that, even in the clip where he lists off their intended weaknesses, he just doesn't understand that they're weaknesses lol? No, it's because their overwhelming strengths vastly outweigh the offchance that their slow speed might result in one being eaten. It's fine if you personally think they aren't OP, but this is a pretty agreed upon point that Purples are busted even among people who love 2, so saying "Wow he can't even put two and two together even when he's listing off their weaknesses" is so rude and dismissive of his actual criticisms.
"Not having an item that needs 100 Purples would be a missed opportunity" (46:30)
Sure, I agree with this. But if you're going to include that in your game, at least offer an easier way to get Purples, even if it's only unlockable at the end of the game to preserve balance for the rest of the game. Making it extremely frustrating to grind out Purples isn't fun regardless if the concept of a super heavy treasure is neat. Also, you say it's "optional", but you HAVE to have it if you even want to see the game's actual ending. You literally cannot beat the game if you don't get it!
"Him resetting when a Purple dies while saying they're overpowered is hypocritical". (48:20)
No, it's not. One single Purple Pikmin dying doesn't mean the vast majority of your playthrough isn't overwhelmingly Purple Pikmin dominated. Purples could kill everything in one hit, but if the Doomsday Apparatus still existed, it would STILL be INEVITABLE that ONE might eventually die and you'd need to reset. That's not an admission of guilt like you're claiming it is.
"I play games I like" (48:50)
What a snobbish, condescending thing to say. This moment in particular really goes against your claim that you're attempting to be cordial and fair towards his points. I guess because he has lots of criticisms towards Pikmin 2 he's not allowed to enjoy it? Or him being frustrated with parts of a game doesn't mean it's not weird he'll still play through all of it? You don't need to flex your superiority for enjoying a game he doesn't like as much as you lol.
"Grinding for Purples likely takes less than an hour" (49:30)
It still wastes time. If it took less time and was more friendly towards the player while still being a challenge, why wouldn't that be a better alternative than what exists now? At least with the bitter sprays, which you say contradicts his points, he's working towards something that will extend and benefit him past one moment of the game.
"Never play any good game again" (50:30)
This is where your critique goes past a simple response to his video and moreso feels like a passive aggressive judgement of him. No one wanting to have an actual discussion and engage with someone honestly is going to say something akin to "Lmao, stay away from the good games! preceded with an hour's worth of saying his logic is fundamentally flawed and he's willingly reinforcing his lack of enjoyment with the game lol.
Using the "it has a little something for everyone" IGN clip is hilariously out of place considering it's the first positive comment he's made in a while in this criticism video. Again, it screams of you trying to dismiss anything he's saying, good OR bad. The fact that he's willing to say at least one positive thing about the game and you instantly spin it to "Wow, his opinions are all over the place" is so dishonest and reeks of being unwilling to engage with him honestly.
"He's just getting mad about a bunch of things that aren't necessarily true" is basically your entire attitude this video, treating personal issues with the game as things that are verifiably false and deserve to be judged lol.
The way you engage with him in this video is not conductive to civil discourse, but instead incredibly opinionated and dismissive of what he's trying to say. You treat his opinions as "these things are so easy to factually say aren't true". Well, obviously that's not so simple if I can also deconstruct/disagree with the vast majority of your counterclaims that you insist are factual and easily observable in the game. I don't have any issue with your own opinion of the game. I enjoy all 3 Pikmin games, but your attitude and treatments towards Schafrillas is laughably disrespectful, and most notably, arrogant. Even when you're acknowledging points that you admit are a difference of opinion, you can't help but laugh at him or look down on him in some way.
"We're going to be looking at all of the WRONG things" was a horrible way to start this video and immediately set the tone in terms of how honestly you were going to engage with his arguments.
Thank you for this well articulated response. I think you did a great job in being an actually fair critic.
the day limit and the day/night cycle are not the same thing, and the existence of the later (in overworld only) doesn't dismiss the criticism over the lack of the former and arguing that it does is bad faith
Thank you. You perfectly put into words what I love about Pikmin 2 while simultaneously dismantling every strange argument I've seen talking it down. Pikmin 2 is my favorite game in the series by a wide margin and one of my favorite games ever because of the caves and the treasures.
You pretty much put into words what my thoughts were on that video against Pikmin 2 and also made me truly realize the exact reasons why I love Pikmin 2 so much
Pikmin 2 is amazing! Just replayed the switch remaster after uploading this and I loved every second!
"Maybe you just don't like RTS games" is also a really weird argument to make off the back of complaining about the time limit being removed when a lot of if not most RTS games don't even have a hard set time limit to begin with. You could play a single match for several realtime days if you want, though mileage may vary depending on how resources work. Really baffling reasoning.
I just put down Pikmin 2 for the time being because I realized I was forcing myself through it just to get to 3. The dungeons were becoming tedious and something I dreaded doing, which just isn't a feeling you typically want. That said, I will return eventually to complete the game, but I'm just too excited for 3 and 4. 2 is absolutely a fun game, but I feel as though some of Scahfrillas' gripes with the dungeons were valid.
Doing the exact same thing, but I really do wanna beat pikmin 2 before I get to 4
Pikmin 2 is probably my favorite of the series, but I agree that the dungeons overstay their welcome a bit when you're trying to 100% it
The whole limited time in the day thing is completely pointless if you have unlimited days, effectively resulting in an unlimited time limit in the end.
Also, most of the ways pikmin 2 balances things whether it be purple pikmin, making caves harder, or anything related to difficulty often results in the balancing feeling very artificial. For example, they tried the make the caves harder so their solution to that was to drop bombs, boulders, enemies from the sky, and spam enemies in certain caves. That kind of difficulty “balancing” feels more like something from a kaizo mod than a natural difficulty curve.
Purple pikmin are not balanced at all. Sure, you don’t have an abundance of them, but you aren’t going to have more than 20-25 in your squad at a time, and you will never lose more than maybe 3 or 5 in a cave, and that’s almost never due to enemies. Enemies cannot kill purple pikmin, because purples are so strong that they can and will kill enemies before they have a chance to attack. And since you don’t need as many purples in your squad as you do with say blues or yellows, they don’t have a reason to be as scarce as they are. If you have paid off the debt, and you are exploring the wistful wild or any other cave you haven’t went through yet, why wouldn’t you 100% the game? And to 100% the game, you NEED the doomsday apparatus, requiring 100 purple pikmin. And I shouldn’t have to go through the tedious process of going through the subterranean complex several times just to get more purples, I should have enough purples by the time I find the doomsday apparatus. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met anyone who ever thought about the heaviest thing they could carry in a pikmin game. Unless you’ve played the game already, you can’t possibly prepare to get 100 purples to carry the doomsday apparatus, and that goes for all of the other bullshit the game throws at you.
There's a lot of issues with purple pikmin but Schafrillas doesn't give any good points on them! Remember I'm debunking his arguments in defense of pikmin 2, not really making my own. Also the time limit in the day isn't pointless because things shift around, regress and reset between days. Like the bugs eating wooden bridges or bulbears starting to appear in areas, as well as obviously enemies respawning after a couple days. There are a number of things that regress progress if you can't strategies effectively in a day. Again to note- Pikmin 1's day limit is extremely generous. By day 5 the avg pikmin 1 player will already be playing with the same ease a pikmin 2 player would bc it's so easy to get like 3 or even 4 parts a day
@@HidinginPrivateeah, but he’s saying that you have unlimited time to do things such as kill enemies and rebuild bridges. Even if you mess a day up, you have an unlimited amount of days to fix that mistake, while in pikmin 1 you only have 30 days and no more. -edit: what he said about the caves not being different is heinous, I personally think every cave is unique in their own way and are different enough to not be called “the same”.
Having to scout every inch of a sublevel to trigger any falling rocks or bombs is easily the worst thing about the dungeons.
It’s not clever or hinted at and it’s very annoying to go trough every area at least twice.
Yes, if you know the game, you know which sublevels are safe. But if you are playing it blind, you won’t have any clue.
Aside from that, having the time management completely kicked from the underground entirely defeats the purpose of walls and pikmin carrying time. Instead of doing something else with your time, since it’s not limited anymore, you could just wait.
Removing this, but adding the limited numbers is not what Pikmin was designed around and it shows heavily.
You don't have to run through every inch, but you should have flower pikmin, and a smaller squad. Running guns a blazing with 100 leaf pikmin CAN'T be considered the games fault.
Most games don't have Day or time limits but still take time to do things...curious. one thing that comes from travel time is that they have to traverse through a level, part of that is making a safe path back to base and moving slow enough to be susceptible to hazards. Even ignoring that huge reason carrying time makes sense- you also have to note that nearly everything is sped up considerably from pikmin 1. Getting new pikmin, breaking down walls, tripping and the amount of time and ways pikmin can get distracted. All of this is made much faster and less frustrating from 1 to 2
@@HidinginPrivate In other RTS the time limit is the enemy. With every second that you don’t use optimally, the opponent grows stronger. This is not the case in Pikmin. The opponent is time. If you could stay in the overworld for as many minutes as you please, you wouldn’t have any incentive to work multiple things at once.
The limited time in a day makes the player care about how they spend it, similarly to other games where you care about your time since you don’t want the opponent to overwhelm you. The caves invalidate this.
I get that this is a controversial topic that we probably won’t ever agree on. But you have to agree, that this isn’t a perfectly designed element that doesn’t need changes.
“It shows heavily”? “Not what Pikmin was designed around”?
Bro, Pikmin has numbers, it’s about numbers, there are numbered pellets for delineating weight requirements for carry capacity, weight of corpses, the fun flow of group control and how that changes depending on amount of units at any given time in and out of combat, how destructible walls increase in speed destroyed by *number* of Pikmin on it. I have extremely serene moments in 1 and 3 where I just… play. I just play Pikmin, kill, increase numbers, ohhh look I’m carrying x fruit back home at once or i found and I am now carrying a ship part with 45 blues! I forgor the time, and still have fun.
You can have differences in tastes here, absolutely, but I love the experimental design here at hand for caves where unit numbers take dominance over time before death
The only thing I don’t like about having to have 100 purples is that you literally have to grind for them. If you never lose a single purple and only visit each cave once you’ll still only have 65 purples….which is a bit annoying. But yeah I do see his loops and contradictions….
I will say the subterranean complex method is the most popular but I hate it. If you do submerged castle instead it's much faster plus you can get bulbmin and turn them into purples. 10 purples a run, & only took me like 25min to get 50 purples. But yes and forced grinding for an objective is something I don't like almost as a rule!
@@HidinginPrivate yeah subterranean complex is the fastest since you can just rush it with 1 pikmin and use the royal candypop buds and you end with 15 purples a run which are like not even 7-10 minutes per so like just under an hour of doing it for 100, sucks but it is the most optimal way to do it
Ive been recently playing pikmin for the first time, because you know, they are all available on switch now. I waited way too long to actually start pikmin 1 though because hard time limits stress me out, but when i started playing i very quickly realized that it just... didn't matter. Even a noob like me was able to beat the game on day 20, with 10 days left, and 5 of those were spent farming pikmin at the crash site without getting ship parts.
The day limit in pikmin 1 is just as pointless as it is in pikmin 2 because it's so generous that it might as well not be there
When he means unique mechanics, I think he means stuff that is noticeably different from the surface that sets them apart from just doing all this above ground, considering Bulbmin are just all Pikmin with all resistances, the themes only affects the enemies and layouts, and most of the enemies could either be done above ground, or don’t bring a unique spin to justify having so many caves.
exactly. So many commenters here acting like Schaff is some boogey man and this guy made every single right point. but he actually made tons of non points, through the rest of the response too.
I think it's just partially nostalgia/ the mindset of "I liked this game tho! Anything that criticizes it must be WRONG!"
I think the electricity issue is a matter of consistency, electricity is the only hazard in pikmin 2 that insta kills your pikmin, and the other hazards only scatters them
Well I assume they realized electricity wasn't busted enough in Pikmin 1, so they made it insta-kill in Pikmin 2, but thought it was too OP, so they changed it to only stun in Pikmin 3.. so there was a lot of trial and error and figuring out what people wanted
They should be stuck with Pikmin 1's electricity, which stuns Pikmin for a few seconds, and kills them if you don't whistle them in time. I think that would be the beat way to do it, and I hope to see it work like that in Pikmin 4.
Pretty sure Pikmin 1 doesn’t have electricity, but funnily enough Pikmin 4’s electricity actually works the way you wanted (stuns, but lethal if you leave them shocked for too long)
@@QizLizWiz Pikmin 1 has the code for electricity, they just never implemented it I believe, but it's cool they fixed the inconsistencies with electricity in 4.
@@gusteen3292 Oh, interesting
@@NaterSquib the electricity in 3 was a joke lol
"theres no day limit"
8 year old me seeing a long legs drop from the sky:
I agree with your opinion with everything EXCEPT the bitter spray. I think Schaffrillas was right about the bitter sprays being way too op
That's fine ofc, they did bring back bitterspray with ice pikmin tho. It's virtually the same effect
@@HidinginPrivate ice pikmin are way more balanced, they are not instant and you actually need to use a specific type of pikmin
@@HidinginPrivatevery not true. They make taking out enemies slower so having too much ice Pikmin becomes inefficient and the three Pikmin type limit keeps them in check since you’ll want other Pikmin for their utility
broooo thank you ive been waiting for a video in defense of ARGUABLY THE BEST GAME IN THE SERIES for a while now.
I think one thing you need to remember that Pikmin 1/3 and 2/4 and different takes on the same type of game. So saying something like "2/4 is WAY better than 1/3" just means you PREFER that type of Pikmin experience, not that it's better!
I only ever really sort of agree with one of Schaff's points in that video: the rocks falling out of the sky feels kinda bullshit. Other things falling out of the sky doesn't bug me as much, but for some reason the rocks always make me mad.
I don't even fall for them since my first playthrough, but there's some visceral part of my brain that reacts badly to rocks fall everybody dies.
Pikmin 3 Bingo battle trauma memories :)
It's such a shame that Schrafilla's video on Pikmin 2 has given the game such a bad reputation because it's a small game and his video was filled with misinformation
Yeah. Hoping this can push back a bit on that front
Yeah I mentioned Pikmin 2 being my favorite video game and my first response from someone was they thought it was the weakest one kinda shows how one RUclipsrs opinion completely changed pikmin 2s reputation from being a fantastic game to its worse then Hey! And Pikmin bloom.
Objects falling from the sky has 3 different flags to trigger. Captains passing under, Pikmin passing under, and an object being carried under.
You should've used the "that was his mistake!" clip that Schaffrillas loves to use so much.
Missed opportunity dang
@@HidinginPrivateTHAT WAS YOUR MISTAKE
bruh
You know what the statement, "but, that just means real time strategy games aren't for them," reminds me of?
"ThAt WaS hIs MiStAkE"
I wonder if Schaff will do a similar review to this one in Pikmin 4, since caves are back and purple Pikmin are “OP” again
The only thing I disagree with is the thing about the 100 purple treasure, I found it incredibly tedious to collect that many purples. Outside of that as a huge Pikmin 2 fan I appreciate this video. While I like Schafrillas, I could not disagree harder on his Pikmin 2 take.
Thank you for shedding light on so many holes in the video.
Thanks for supporting it!
Finally a voice to express all the issues I had about that particular video.
I have come out of the woodwork
Wow I didn't even realize Pikmin had this negative perception, maybe it's because I played it first but 2 has always been my favorite followed by 1 and 3 in that order.
It doesn't. It just has a loud/incompetent vocal minority.
I stopped watching this guy way back but this video sums up my issues with him. He says all the big key youtuber reviewer words without understanding what he’s talking about at a core level.
Just so pretentious while being so wrong.
21:34 This is kind of a nit pick however i feel like "Only 1 cave with a unique gimmick" is kind of forgetting the other instance, albeit minor, Glutton's Kitchen. This cave is primarily themed around the breadbugs mechanics. You start by finding the breadbug, these fairly harmless creatures that rival the pikmin in the sense that they too carry treasures back to a base. overtime this gets built on by adding different hazards and obstacles, and finally reaches the climax with the giant breadbug, the only boss that doesnt even attack you. Instead, you have to dodge electricity and take advantage of the mechanics you learned before in order to trick it into getting damaged.
There are some similar instances throughout the rest of the game, though they are more minor. The Hole of Heroes functions as a boss rush, and the Dream Den lacks any method of making new pikmin throughout the entire dungeon.
There is also the frontier cavern, it contains tons of enemies you have fought throughout the game, slowly including harder and harder enemies. The entire cave is like a final exam for everything you have learned from the awakening wood and perplexing pool.
Maybe.... it's because Schaff liked the time based aspect of the Wraith.
And what you and this guy mentioned, don't have anything to do with time management at all????
How do you people make these points?
This is like, if a guy liked a film or game because of X reason.
And then you "rebut" him by saying, "Erm, what about this thing I like for Y and Z reason?? WHY didn't you mention that? You made a mistake!!"
@@absolutezerochill2700 I'm literally just pointing out that there's an objectively incorrect thing he says, I'm not trying to discredit him or something. I even started the comment stating it's a nitpick lmfao. He can have the opinions that he wants to but his statements that are meant to be factual are not factual, which implies he's either misinformed or intentionally trying to manipulate the truth (which I doubt). Maybe I'm misinterpreting your comment because it seems to have many grammatical flaws that make it confusing to me, but if that's what you meant I do not understand your point here
well yes, it is mainly based off of his preferences, as he says "cool" unique mechanic. And he's already established that he prefers the time management aspect of the series. Which is why all your examples and the one in the video simply don't apply to his definition.
besides i don't think you can technically say he's objectively wrong bc, well breadbugs are seen elsewhere and boss rushes and final trial sort of areas where you can't resupply have been done in other games before. I haven't quite seen anything like the water wraith in games.
As a side note, he has changed the title to be more opinionated, as opposed to objective. Which i think is the right move since most of his points are based on his preferences.@@Goomba456
@@Goomba456 also i don't think I put that many errors in my first comment, but I'll edit it to make it easier, I think.
In defense of Schaffrillas, he gets no defense. Pikmin 2 is the best one in the franchise.
I went into this video hoping to gain new appreciation for Pikmin 2, but all the focus on picking at technicalities and getting super lawyery over Schaffrillas's experiences with the game just made all of the game's flaws stick out more in my eyes.
I haven't played Pikmin 1/2 yet (I've played 3/4), but what I can tell is that Pikmin 3 is a sequel of Pikmin 1 and Pikmin 4 is a sequel of 2. Since 4 is my favorite so I am pretty excited to play 2 one day!
I don't think "corners were cut" is talking about the content in the game, it's talking about the way the game overall was designed. It's incredibly easy to design a level if you already have one pre-made (See: every 2D Mario that reuses aspects of the original 1-1), and the fact that the dungeons are randomly generated means that the devs only had to design smaller segments that could be fit together rather than putting that same effort into building levels from the ground up. It doesn't matter how much content is actually there if what content _is_ there is placed into a recycled area or tossed into a dungeon that was designed by a computer rather than a human. For people who get most of their enjoyment off of exploring new areas, it's extremely disappointing.
It's like if they added 90 more stars to Mario 64, mirrored/flipped Peach's Castle, changed the colors on each floor, changed the overworld secrets, randomized the level layouts, and sold it as Mario 64 2. It wouldn't be as fun of an experience because the core design is just _inherently weaker_ than the original by copying off of it. It would make the fun of the game hinge on getting a good seed for each level, which isn't everyone's cup of tea.
Nah. If you took out all the dungeons and made new areas JUST with unique assets you could still prob get 4/5 entire above ground areas. The models are what takes time and effort and the models are still there is spades. It's not exactly the same but as someone who has used blender to create terrain vs unique models- one takes far more time than the other even without considering they had to spend time in R&D developing an entirely new random generation system in the code that I have NEVER seen make a game breaking level.
@@HidinginPrivate I’m not saying cut the dungeons - I personally think dungeons are gold quality on paper - but from a design perspective it feels like by implementing dungeons the way they did, and adding as many treasures as they did, the overworld quality was sacrificed. The “cut corners” were the topside areas - it’s not enough to just change where base camp is, add monsters, and add new treasures because the world still _feels_ like Pikmin 1 with a new seasonal coat of paint. With how the dungeons are made, it kind of kills the exploration aspect.
I'm sorry, but this is not a very well put together defense tbh. Calling his video bad and dogwater because you disagree is not a very good argument. You haven't really faced all his problems head on, but instead brought up other points like:
-He doesn't like there being no day limit. You basically said it doesn't matter.
-He complains that the dungeons have no time limit. You talk about an entirely different thing about your amount of Pikmin and not gaining more.
-He talks about not liking rocks 'randomly' falling from the sky, and you just talk about how it's not technically random. And then you say how you can just not bring everyone at once, and scout out the area beforehand. But you left out the part of his video where he acknowledges that you can do this, but says it's not a good way to design a game.
Overall, you DEFINITELY should have scripted this video.
Then he also claims that schaf's opinion is factually incorrect. Like what?
Pikmin 2 is my favorite game of all time and when the Schaffrillas video came out it was kinda weird because I felt like he was kind of ignoring so much of what made the game so good. I love Schaffrillas but sometimes he can make some wild statements. You were probably to harsh to him in some areas but I think overall you made really good points
I was trying to be about as harsh as he was in his video. He has no hesitation calling things dumb, or thoughtless & levying that criticism at the creators of one of my favorite games so I tried to match his tone. Sorry if I was ever too harsh though. I also enjoy Schaff's content in general, his bojack series is nice especially but yeah his pikmin 2 video wasn't it imo
@@HidinginPrivate yeah that’s totally fair he was ripping into 2 really hard. Good video though, makes me hyped to play the Switch release haha
He definitely hasn’t played “hey, Pikmin”
You sound like someone that is resentful and personally offended that someone popular didn't like one of your favorite games, and instead of trying to understand why they have the opinions they do, you went on the attack to try and "objectively" dismantle every one of their opinions. I see no attempt to understand Schafrillas in good faith here. This is not a United Nations political debate, this is just an opinion about a video game, but you treat it more like the former.
I like Pikmin 2. And you've made some good points. But it is very uneven game, and feels a bit cheaply made. The game feels rushed because they reused the above ground layouts from the first game, and because you'll be seeing many of the cave aesthetics haphazardly mashed together and reused before a single playthrough is over, especially in Wistful Woods.
In addition, the optimal way to do things often just isn't very fun. Running through an entire cave floor by yourself as Olimar to activate all the traps, and then rocket punching the mortar and boulder-spewing enemies to death keeps my pikmin alive, but it isn't fun. Never using my purple pikmin because I want to keep them alive for collecting the weight at the end without grinding caves I've already done isn't fun. Because there is no day limit, there is no ingame tradeoff for spending entire days growing pikmin and or farming berries, which imo isn't very fun. The difficulty of the game encourages you to cheese the game this way, but it just isn't very FUN.
Again, I think it's a game with a lot of quality content. Prime Nintendo made it. I actually like how punishing some of the cheap shit in this game is because it keeps me on my toes. But it comes off as half-baked and haphazardly planned, and is just not as satisfying to play as the first game for me. People don't have to be lying or tricking people in order to have these opinions.
Maybe real time strategy games aren't for you.
@@unusualusername8847 I grew up on Age of Empires 2, Age of Mythology and Command & Conquer: Generals, with some exposure to Warcraft 3, Red Alert 2 and Tiberium Sun. Still love me some AoE 2.
@@quibquiberton4184 Pfft. That's it?
@@unusualusername8847 👌
i think you misinterpreted a lot of what Schaff was saying, but that’s also because Schaff kinda misused using certain words like “realtime strategy, when he was just referring to the removal of the day limit. plus the problems with Pikmin 2 are so convoluted and weird that it has lots of differing sides of extremes without much middle ground. Pikmin 2 is a complex game, as it’s very difficult and very easy in various ways, but some of those ways are just not that well thought out or implemented properly.
Schaff understood that there were lots of contradicting game design elements that were either tedious or pointless because of how complicatedly redundant they are. these design choices may not all be game breaking or makes the game unplayable, but these points he states do hamper on the overall experience. but not once has Schaff said that it’s a bad game. it has many flaws, but nothing to make it unplayable or not worth while, which is why he titles his video “Pikmin 2 is the WEAKEST of the series” and not “Pikmin 2 is BAD”.
it appears as if you just couldn’t understand what he was talking about, so you just got progressively annoyed with the video. maybe next time you should actually script your criticism and check it twice, instead of just live reacting to what he had to say? Schaff maybe didn’t double check his script, but at least he had one!
no hate towards you tho- this video was just kinda annoying to listen to :/
and just a little add-on here: i’m not saying all this because i wanna defend Schaffarillis. i love his videos, and he’s a cool dude and all, but i am saying all this because i just don’t think you understand game design all that well. and as an aspiring game designer, listening to you misunderstanding Schaff’s criticisms on objectively poor game design choices was annoying
Well said! Another person who loved the game but shared several of Schaff's criticisms was Antdude. Hiding in Private really digs into Schaff's definition of real-time strategy, but it doesn't change the fact that many people consider the randomly generated dungeons and hazards (with a few exceptions, of course) to be annoying. It's not some isolated opinion, and this video really didn't do anything to sway me (someone who also still enjoys the game) from that perspective. I respect his opinion and think there's a case to be made here, but it could have done with a lot less "I'm not mad" energy.
@@jesseburgener442 I think some people find the random generated levels a bit off just because they get in direct contrast of pikmin 1 and 3 exquisite level design, is really not a big deal but you can feel the downgrade when the set pieces are put together with some random enemies in there, it doesn't feel like an ecosystem anymore as much as just a level, which is fair criticism and doesn't mean you can't enjoy these random levels but is indeed a case to be made about what method is better based on how is implemented.
As topsyturby2010 pointed out this video is annoying to listen and is msotly from that "I'm not mad" energy you described but also an arrogant attitude, if at least HIP points were not strawman arguments I could root more for him but this video makes a huge disservice as a pikmin 2 defense, it would be infinitely better a video about how pikmin 2 is great despite its flaws, because there are lots of things to discuss, instead is just a "why schaff is wrong about a subjective opinion"
Pikmin 2 is my favorite entry in the series, by far, so me saying this is in no way a jab at 2's quality or place in the series.
But Schaff makes a very valid point about the day limit being removed. For some reason you acknowledge he meant Day Limit but focus on his phrasing of "time limit" (which days are a measure of time anyway so his phrasing was not *incorrect*) and instead rant for a bit about how there's still only 13 minutes in a day.
You do start actually discussing the day limit later, which is good, but the argument that the Day Limit means nothing because you can finish the game without it mattering anyway is... Not a good argument. It's still a strong narrative motivator to play well, and adds a lot to the charm and world. It can not make much of a difference to you, but saying he must be bad at Pikmin 1 and 3 in order to care at all is highly antagonistic for no reason.
And as for Pikmin 2 still having a time limit so you do still have to be efficient... No you don't. Everything remains exactly as you left it between days. All sundown means is you have to wait through cutscenes and menus to get back to what you were doing. You will never be punished for not getting a treasure back "in time" (in theory), so i'm not really sure what your point is there
Edit: Finished the whole video and wow. What was that disclaimer at the start about understanding opinions and dispelling "facts"? Because you shit on every opinion he had and barely ever spoke facts
That would've been a GREAT opportunity to make it 2 player for the story mode.