The story picks up where the first game ended - you return to your home planet and find out that the President of your company is in dire need to pay off his massive debt of 10,100 coins. He discovers that the bottle cap you have brought back from the planet you crash landed on in the first game is worth 100 coins - or in other words, a year's salary. He sends you back to the planet to collect as many items as possible to pay off the debt.

It's not too hard to figure out you're on the planet Earth since you will discover items like Snapple caps, batteries, rubber duckies, and crayons. On the planet, you're reunited by little tiny aliens called Pikmin. You can gather Pikmin by blowing your whistle and they'll follow along behind you. Pikmin don't do well at all on their own, so they rely on you to tell them what to do.

Pikmin work best in groups, so it's your duty to make as many as possible. By killing enemies and hauling them back to their little Pikmin ships, called "onions," you can sprout more Pikmin seeds. These seeds are Pikmin themselves with their little leaf-antenna poking out of the ground. You can yank these guys out anytime you want, but the longer you leave them in the ground the more they will bloom. Once a Pikmin has a fully bloomed flower on its head - it will be faster and stronger than normal.

The whole strategy of this game is making as many Pikmin as you can to defeat enemies and uncover treasures in an effort to pay off your debt. You'll discover there are different types of Pikmin that are each have their own unique abilities. Red Pikmin are immune to fire and are the best fighters. Blue Pikmin are immune to water, and Yellow Pikmin are immune to electricity and can be tossed much higher than any other type.

New to this sequel are the purple and white Pikmin. The purple ones are basically Sumo-Pikmin that have the strength of 10 pikmin and are incredibly heavy - so tossing them has the possibility of stunning enemies. Unfortunately, these guys are incredibly slow. The white type can dig up items that are underground and are immune to poison. They are also the quickest of all types.

You fight really large scary bosses. All this guy did was roll over and he took out 90 of my Pikmin...
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Unlike the main three colors, the new purple and white types do not have their own individually colored onion base. Instead - you can toss any Pikmin into black or white flowers to transform them into these new types. Each flower can only transform a maximum of five Pikmin each, and once they're gone, they're gone forever. So these new types are not only rare and valuable. Using an army of 30 purple Pikmin is incredibly effective, but one wrong move against the enemies and you've lost some very valuable troops. They're not as expendable as the main trio of colors.

The game runs on a system of night and day. Night is when all the creatures are awake to eat your Pikmin, so you're not allowed to be on the surface of the planet. This means that your trips during the day are limited. You have roughly 15 minutes to do all that you need to do for that day.

There are only four areas to be explored in this game, but you earn the different types of Pikmin as you travel through the levels, so you'll need to go back to take care of areas you couldn't before. But there's a lot more than just the four areas since this game has introduced "caves". Each area has three or four caves to be explored.

Caves are basically dungeons. By completing one floor, you advance to the sublevel beneath it - lower and lower until you meet the final floor where the boss lurks. The bosses are a little too recycled from the previous game, but they shake things up towards the end and make them frightening. These dungeons are a nice addition to the game since each floor is completely free from any time limit or day/night restrictions. You can take your time planning out your attack against the enemies in the area.

The items you collect, and the enemies you defeat are collected in a nicely organized catalogue.
Note: This is a japanese screenshot
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Pikmin 2 is an incredibly polished game. The menus are very well made and very slick. They even took the time to give you a menu screen of all the items collected, and all the enemies defeated. You can zoom in on each item and learn about it with what your character has written in his journal about it. For the enemies, you can view it in its enviornment and even throw Pikpik Carrots to see how it will react to Pikmin.

What's even better is when you collect all the types of items in a group you can read the "sale's pitch" for the way it will be sold at your planet back home. And your partner Louie even gives detailed instructions on the best way to cook each enemy into a delicious meal.

This is an incredibly nice addition considering that the last game only had about 30 items to be collected, and there was no way to really view them up close. It seems everyone gets a kick out of what your character, Olimar, names each item. For instance, a Checker Cookie is named a Succulent Mattress, a glove is a Five-man Napsack and a Snapple cap is an Abstract Masterpiece.

The game has a highscore menu that includes how many days it took you to collect all the items, how many Pikmin you created, and how many were lost to enemies, electricity, water, etc. New to this game as well is the battle mode where you can play against a friend or work together cooperatively. I remember Paco telling me about how they should make a versus mode during the first game, and we were a little unsure if that would really work - but they proved certainly can in this sequel. This was surprisingly well made, well balanced, and incredibly fun. The objective in versus mode is to collect four yellow marbles on the field, or steal your opponent's single marble located at their base. Taking a quick-to-grab cherry back to your base allows you to spin the roulette and drop a certain enemy on your opponent or upgrade your Pikmin. Nintendo also helped the replay value of this mode by including ten different maps to battle on. Very cool and very fun.

The only real draw backs to this game is that it's still a little difficult to select only a certain group of Pikmin. You have to seperate from your entire group and they'll divide into little pockets of each color. Then using your whistle, you can grab the colors you want. But sometimes the division of the Pikmin is a little too close, and you'll unknowningly grab one extra Pikmin from another group. You'll race into battle and lose him to the element you were trying to sort everyone away from. A little irritating.

As I said earlier, the day system is continued in this game, but it seems really out of place now. In the first Pikmin, your ship crashed and lost all of its parts, and you had to collect a certain amount of them before (if I can still remember correctly) 30 days was up. This kept the game feeling very frantic and added some nice replay value. But in this game, there's no limit to the number of days you have, so having to start and stop all the time would break up your work flow. Thankfully, the addition of caves, which basically pause time altogether helps solve some of this problem.

Pikmin is a cute game, but don't be fooled. It has a lot of depth as far as strategy goes. It keeps things simple by not adding 10 more colors of Pikmin types, and makes playing the game challenging and rewarding.

Verdict: A very polished game. Highly Recommended.