Video Game / Pikmin 2

Return to the planet of the Pikmin!

Pikmin 2 is the second installment in the Pikmin series, released for the Nintendo GameCube in April 29, 2004 in Japan, August 30, 2004 in North America, October 8, 2004 in Europe and November 4, 2004 in Australia. The game would later see two Updated Rereleases: New Play Control! Pikmin 2 on the Wii in 2009^note 2012 in North America (which allowed for free aiming with the Wii's pointer controls); and a HD remaster on the Nintendo Switch in 2023 (based on the Wii version).

Following the events of the first game, Olimar returns to Hocotate to find Hocotate Freight up to its eyeballs in debt and inches from bankruptcy. But it turns out that the bottlecap he brought back from the Pikmin planet turns out to be worth a considerable amount of money. To save the company, he's sent back to the planet in search of the rare treasures it's now known to hold, alongside the junior employee Louie and a sapient ship.

The game features a number of changes from its predecessor. The object-collecting mechanic is expended upon: instead of 30 ship parts, Olimar and his team must track down a total of 201 treasures. The player also has access to multiple captains: first Olimar and Louie, and later the President of Hocotate Freight — which additionally allowed the game to feature a multiplayer mode. Three additional types of Pikmin are also added to the game: heavy, strong and slow Purple Pikmin; White Pikmin who are immune to poison, toxic themselves and swift diggers; and the rare Bulbmin who are immune to all elemental hazards.

Pikmin 2 soon became even more critically acclaimed than its predecessor, gaining rave reviews for its improved length, reliability, clever challenges, and unique style. Alas, the series hit a snag there and went on a hiatus with only the vaguest clues that it was still around, with Miyamoto giving rather vague hints to a third game in the series. This state lasted for nine years before Pikmin 3 was revealed at E3 2011.

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This game provides examples of:

• 13 Is Unlucky:
  • The Submerged Castle has exactly 13 treasures, and is home of the dreaded Waterwraith, an unstoppable, incredibly lethal Eldritch Abomination that drops from the ceiling and terrorizes the characters and their Pikmin after a few minutes have passed on any given floor.
  • The Hole of Heroes is the other cave that has 13 treasures, and it is a massive area containing almost every enemy in the game, with its later floors acting as a Boss Rush. It is the longest cave by sublevel count and intended to be one of the most difficult. It is also the only cave in the game to have less treasures than it has floors.
• Absurdly Short Level: Challenge Mode consists of thirty miniature caves that are essentially bite-sized versions of caves from the main game, with restrictions added for challenge. Many are no more than one or two sublevels long, when all caves except the first in Story Mode are at least five sublevels. Of note are Dweevil Nest, which only has Dweevil enemies that can be taken care of pretty quickly, and Snack Pit, which is just a single room with Breadbugs and their King Mook. Both of them can be completed fairly fast, with the intended challenge being to get as much of the treasures as possible in a short amount of time.
• Acquired Situational Narcissism: When Olimar and the President return to the planet, Olimar can get a series of emails from his children detailing how their mother has begun changing for the worst ever since she received Olimar's special bonuses, becoming overly demanding of her children's performance and neglecting them to enjoy the high life. Thankfully, she snaps back to her old self after she blows her newfound fortune on lottery tickets.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: In the Switch version, the President's emails are reworded to sound nicer and more patient with Olimar. Spam letters are more polite as well.
• Alien Blood: The Titan Dweevil gushes turquoise coloured goop when you manage to kill it.
• Alien Sky: In the opening animation, Hocotate's daytime sky is filled with faintly visible stars and dominated by the planet's rings and its huge moon.
• Alliterative Name:
  • The Hole of Heroes, the Dream Den, and the Cavern of Chaos. All three of these caves are in the area Wistful Wild.
  • The Perplexing Pool.
  • One treasure, the Eternal Emerald Eye.
• All There in the Manual: The manual explains the reason why the landscape in caves is (usually) randomly generated and why time above ground does not pass while you're in them. It's because of a strong magnetic field.
• All the Worlds Are a Stage: The last main area is the Wistful Wild, and its three dungeon caves are amalgamations of the themes seen in several previous caves over the course of the game. The second cave (Hole of Heroes) combines this with Boss Rush, as it brings back several bosses as well. The surface area of Wistful Wild itself invokes Nostalgia Level instead, being a fusion between Impact Site and Final Trial from the first game.
• A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...: While the trope was subtly hinted in the first game, this game makes it more explicit due to the presence of man-made products and certain features from the playable mainlands. It turns out the the Pikmin world is Earth All Along.
• Ambushing Enemy:
  • Creeping Chrysanthemums stay buried underground, leaving only their eyestalks, trunk and mouth above the surface. These look a lot like the Chrysanthemums' harmless relatives, the Margaret flowers that they're often found amongst (the only differences are that Chrysanthemum flowers lack leaves and the smaller two flowers have an eye each in their center), and as such it can be very difficult to realize that one of these things is around until a seemingly harmless plant bursts out of the ground and starts gobbling up your Pikmin.
  • In caves, it's common for enemies to cling unseen to the ceiling and fall down when players or Pikmin pass beneath, something especially dangerous when the ambush is triggered by a line of unsupervised Pikmin carrying spoils back to the ship. Enemies encountered in this manner can range from harmless wogpoles to common nuisances such as dwarf bulborbs to potentially very dangerous foes such as wollywogs, armored cannon larvae, volatile dweevils or bulbears.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: The American version of Pikmin 2's boxart consists of Olimar throwing Pikmin onto a Hermit Crawmad, which is clearly trying to fight back and also a lot larger than the in-game enemy gets. The European/Australian boxart consists of a few Pikmin on a branch, one holding on and trying to climb up, and a couple holding berries. And a barely visible Bulborb in the background.
• Antepiece: The first two sublevels of White Flower Garden serve as the introduction to the "metal" floor theme, the one theme that has Bottomless Pits^note While all cave floors have "bottomless pits," this is more of a death zone that goes beneath the ground, and cannot be entered without a glitch that pushes characters or creatures out of bounds. Both sublevels have small, simple, and straightforward layouts that make it unlikely that any player's Pikmin will fall to their deaths unless the player is curious about them. Later caves that feature pits throw in tricky enemies who are either airborne (running the risk of throwing Pikmin off the ledge to hit them) or could throw a Pikmin off the side, and have more complex layouts with several holes in the middle. Subterranean Complex is mostly made of metal floors, all far more challenging than the "tutorial" given in White Flower Garden.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The 30 day time limit has been removed, allowing you to take as much time as you need to repay the debt.
  • The game autosaves when entering a new floor in a cave. This allows you to reset the game and start the floor over should things go awry.
  • Pikmin are granted Mercy Invincibility after being exposed to any elements they aren't immue to, giving you extra time to rein them in without them being exposed again.
• Anti-Grinding: Some dungeons that contain Violet or Ivory Candypop Buds will only have them spawn if you have less than 20 of their corresponding Pikmin type (Purple and White respectively). This was likely done to prevent players from continuously entering certain caves to mindlessly grind out Purple and White Pikmin.
• Background Music Override: When the Waterwraith drops in to attack on the early floors of the Submerged Castle, the cave's music halts and is replaced with a very tense theme until you escape down to the next floor.
• Big Eater: Louie has cooking instructions for his Piklopedia entries. It's also deconstructed as his eating habits caused the plot of the second game, and he lied about how those carrots disappeared to save his butt.
• Bizarre Alien Locomotion: The Waterwraith usually moves around on stone rollers which it uses to crush your Pikmin, making it an extremely dangerous enemy. It is capable of walking normally on its back legs like a person if its rollers are destroyed.
• Blackout Basement: Caves are almost entirely shrouded in pitch blackness outside of a small circle centered on the player. Combined with the narrow confines and winding tunnels of these areas, exploration is typically a matter of carefully feeling one's way along the tunnels while trying to identify enemies and treasures hidden in the gloom. This lasts until you get the Stellar Orb — a lightbulb — after defeating the Man-at-Legs, which lights up caves and allows you to see your way around like normal.
• Bland-Name Product: The treasures in the Switch version have generic branding that evoke what their original branding was.
• Bleak Level:
  • The Wistful Wild is autumnal and features moody, "wistful" background music. which even Olimar makes notes of during his treasure logs.
  • Submerged Castle is a dark sewer with an ominous music track and an unexplained, paranormal, invincible boss that stalks the player until the final floor. It is the only cave in the game where the player cannot just take comfort in having an army of Purple and Red Pikmin for offense, as only Blue Pikmin can enter it, giving a feeling of defenselessness.
• Blob Monster: The Waterwraith is a roughly humanoid mass of water moving on a pair of stony rollers.
• Bombardier Mook: Careening Dirigibugs are hovering creatures that cannot attack Pikmin directly, and instead produce an endless supply of bomb-rocks from their mouths to toss at Olimar and Pikmin mobs below. They must have their balloons popped by Yellow Pikmin — other Pikmin types cannot be thrown high enough to reach them — to bring them to the ground where they can be dealt with.
• Book Ends:
  • Most of the areas here are the areas from the first game, but after time has changed them. The Wistful Wild is what's become of both the Impact Site and Final Trial. The entrance to the final dungeon is located where Olimar found his first ship piece, the Main Engine, in the first game, and the landing site is where the Emperor Bulblax was fought.
  • The final sublevel of the final Challenge Mode level consists of a fight against three Emperor Bulblaxes. The Emperor Bulblax itself was the final boss of the first game, and it also serves as the final boss of Challenge Mode.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • The Gatling Groink uses a powerful bombing attack with a wide blast radius, capable of killing many of your Pikmin in a single hit. It can fire a long way and usually has a wide "territory," meaning it's capable of reaching your Pikmin almost anywhere. Your captains can't really kill it on their own, and it has a shield that prevents it from being attacked from the front at all. To make matters worse, its health actually begins to regenerate once you "kill" it — so it'll just come back unless you have your Pikmin quickly take it back to your ship, which does it in for good.
  • The Adult Bulbear, unlike most enemies, will actively pursue your Pikmin once it runs into them and won't stop until it's killed, and it can take quite a beating. It does the same health regeneration thing as the Gatling Groink, so you have to take it to the ship quickly, or you have to do the whole thing over again. It's also likely that you'll have to deal with Dwarf Bulbears along with the Adult, which will only increase Pikmin casualties. And in order to get 100% completion you have to, in a Challenge Mode level, defeat 3 of them without any Pikmin dying.
• Boss-Only Level: Some of the Challenge Mode missions consist merely of fighting a boss, and thus have only one floor each instead of two to five like many of the others. Examples include #15 (Cavernous Abyss, where the Raging Long Legs is) and #16 (Snack Pit, home of the Giant Breadbug).
• Boss Rush: The Hole of Heroes has you facing off against just about every previous boss in the game. Oddly, this isn't the final dungeon, and the Very Definitely Final Dungeon itself has no bosses other than the final one.
• Bottomless Pits: Several caverns feature rusted metal platforms fastened above an endless chasm. If you throw any Pikmin over the edge (which is very easy to accidentally do), or they are tossed over by enemies, they will die. On the plus side, you can goad enemies into walking over the edge as well, which will instantly kill them. If they have a treasure, then it will simply reappear on the ground nearby.
• Bowdlerise:
  • The treasure earned after defeating Segmented Crawbster, a weird doll head, is worth 666 Pokos in the Japanese version. Since that number is strongly associated with Satan in Western religions, the worth was raised to 670 in the international versions of the game.
  • One of the spam mails is implied to be some sort of dating service, with the speaker claiming to be lonely and wanting to "meet someone like you." The Switch port changes the mail entirely to a message about cheering up a sad friend.
  • The Arboreal Frippery was changed from green to red in the European version, presumably because it looks like a marijuana leaf. The Switch version uses the red leaf in all regions.
  • Olimar's notes on the Love Nugget mentions that it releases "stimulating pheromones". Olimar entertains the idea about having his wife eat it. In the Switch port, his entry was changed into him and his wife using it to cook a memorable meal instead.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: The swamp floors in the caves each consist of an open room filled by a large pool of water, dotted with flat stumps and spindly shoots and surrounded by patches of soil beaches. The party lands on a stump near the middle, and use of aquatic Blue Pikmin is necessary to navigate between the emerged areas and fight the amphibious Water Dumples and froglike Wollywogs that pupulate these floors.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": While the treasures you find may be the most mundane of objects for us players, they have very convoluted names in-game — a rubber duck's head, for instance, is called the Paradoxical Enigma. Only averted with the Key, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Call-Back: Just like the first game, shooting stars appear on the area selection screen when you unlock the final level.
• Cartoon Bomb: One of the last treasures players can get is the "Comedy Bomb." Subverted in that the Titan Dweevil uses it to poison your pikmin, not blow them up.
• Christmas Episode: One of the caves in the game is the Frontier Cavern, in which most of the treasures are composed of various Christmas decorations. Fittingly, the cave is located in the winter-themed Valley of Repose.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: Two bosses.
  • The Waterwraith is completely invincible until you reach the final floor of its dungeon, where you acquire the type of Pikmin needed to defeat it. Once you deplete its health enough, you hear the "boss victory" music start up... until it gets back up off the ground and runs around panicking, completely vulnerable and no longer capable of hurting you or your Pikmin. At this point, you hear a very freaky version of the boss music that resembles "Psycho" Strings, and you have to chase after it and kill it to beat the dungeon properly.
  • In order to beat the final boss, the Titan Dweevil, you have to knock four weapons/treasures off of it. After knocking off all four, its exoskeleton crumbles, and you're left to beat on the defenseless, fleshy, squirming monster as the music builds towards a climax until it melts and frees Louie.
• Conspicuous Consumption: The ship is plated in gold after paying off the debt, presumably for no other reason than because the company struck it rich with the treasures Olimar and Louie collected. Oddly this occurs when the debt is payed off (when there would be little money left over) and before obtaining the large surplus of Pokos from collecting the remaining treasures in the post-game.
• Cool Starship: Partway through the game, when the company's debt is paid off, the ship receives an upgrade that mainly consists of plating it with gold.
• Color-Coded Multiplayer: The 2-Player Battle has Player 1 as Olimar leading Red Pikmin, and Player 2 as Louie leading Blue Pikmin. To even the playing field, Olimar's Red Pikmin do not have the extra attack power, and the only fire and water hazards come from Fiery and Watery Blowhogs summoned through the Roulette Wheel.
• Creepy Doll: One of the treasures in the game is the head of a creepy baby doll called "The Silencer". In the Japanese version, it is worth 666 Pokos (changed to 670 in the international releases) and its eyelids blink if it's moved around.
• Damage-Sponge Boss:
  • The Raging Long Legs. It's much slower than its relatives, but it has twice as much health as the final boss. All you need to do is attack it, wait until it stops raging, and then attack it once more.
  • The Titan Dweevil offers one of the longest battles in the series, as you also have to disable and extract the treasures attached to it, one by one. The boss itself is surprisingly bulky, but it's defenseless once you knock out all of its treasures.
• Deadly Dodging: The easiest way to clear out areas with Cannon Beetle Larva (which shoot rocks out at you) is to lure them into shooting every other enemy in the vicinity. It also spares your pikmin from being steamrolled by the rock projectiles in the process.
• Deadly Gas: Poison takes the form of clouds of purple mist, which lie close to the ground and will suffocate any Pikmin who stumbles into them, except for the poison-immune White Pikmin (captains, who are protected by their full-body spacesuits, are also safe). This gas is released by half-buried pipes found scattered around the game and is also produced by a number of enemies, such as the flatulent doodlebugs, the poison-venting munge dweevils, or the Titan Dweevil boss by means of one of the weapons it carries about.
• Death from Above: In some of the later dungeons, bomb rocks, falling boulders, and even enemies can fall out of nowhere. It's usually a good idea to have a captain scout out the cavern's dead-ends and narrow corridors before bringing your army through.
• Degraded Boss: The Burrowing Snagret — the boss of the third dungeon you visit — appears as a regular enemy later on in the game (and not that much later), and often in pairs. The Emperor Bulblax, which was the Final Boss of Pikmin (2001), appears also as a boss in one dungeon, but later on occur as mere mini-bosses and in pairs. The Beady Long Legs, the boss of what is likely to be the fourth dungeon, appears in the overworld after Day 30.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Holding holding down X (C in the Wii version) lets your captain lie down on the ground and be picked up by Pikmin. Dweevils can pick up anything Pikmin can to use as disguises/shields. On rusty metal stages with bottomless pits, if there are any Dweevils around, you can goad one into picking you up, and there's a chance it might walk over the low walls with you on its back. In the rare event that this happens, the captain is simply teleported back onto the stage no worse for wear (the Dweevil isn't so lucky, though).
  • The Submerged Castle is programmed so that only Blue Pikmin can enter. Even if you manage to move some non-Blue Pikmin out of bounds near the cave, whistle them back into your party, and access the cavern's entrance before they re-enter the playing field and fall into the water, only the Blue Pikmin will actually enter the cave with you.
  • Queen Candypop Buds and "multicolored" Pellet Poseys normally cycle between red, yellow, and blue, or red and yellow if Blue Pikmin have not been obtained. If a glitch is used to get Blue Pikmin before Yellow Pikmin, they will only cycle between red and blue without Yellows, which is impossible to see in normal gameplay.
  • Several emails you receive at the end of each day exist that you would only see by continually going to sunset. What makes it even more egregious is the emails you get are dependent on how much of the debt has been paid off, so if you pass a certain milestone in pokos prior to receiving them, you'll never get that email on that particular save file. There is also a unique set of emails after rescuing Louie before having collected every treasure. Since most players do Dream Den last due to the Titan Dweevil being considered the game's final boss, you have to actively go out of your way to do this.
  • Defeating a boss (excluding the Titan Dweevil) with a large number of Pikmin casualties will change the weight of the treasure it drops to match the player's army if they otherwise wouldn't have enough Pikmin to carry it (leading to humorous situations such as 3 reds carrying the normally 35-weight Prototype Detector). This is done to ensure the player is still able to collect the treasure after defeating a particularly tough boss, or entering the final sublevel of a cave with a small amount of Pikmin.
  • The original GameCube version has a glitch that allows you to unlock Blue Pikmin as early as White Flower Garden, allowing you to bypass unlocking Yellow Pikmin. This glitch is still possible to perform in the Switch version, but now the Blue Pikmin will not respond to your captain's whistle no matter what, meaning you must unlock Yellow Pikmin first as intended.
  • It's possible to pay off the debt by repeatedly entering Emergence Cave and farming the Snow Bulborb corpses. If this is done, Wistful Wild will not be unlocked until the Geographic Projection is collected, and it will unlock at the same time as Perplexing Pool.
  • If cheats are used to give Blue Pikmin the abilities of Purples, the Waterwraith can be fought on the first four sublevels of the Submerged Castle, and it will correctly drop the Professional Noisemaker upon its defeat. The beast will also not appear on any subsequent floor if it is defeated this way, including the final floor.
  • If Pikmin are buried on the surface and the player grows enough from Queen Candypop Buds underground, the game will forcibly move some Pikmin from their group to the Onions/Ship upon exiting the cave to prevent them from bypassing the 100 Pikmin limit.
• Diabolus ex Machina: After collecting enough treasure to repay the debt of Hocotate Freight, Olimar immediately takes off to return home, only to realize he forgot to make sure sure his coworker, Louie, got on the ship with him. This results in him needing to return to the planet again, this time to retrieve Louie, who has somehow taken control of a massive Titan Dweevil, who serves as the game's Final Boss.
• Disc-One Nuke: Purple Pikmin. Early on, their sheer power and ability to stun enemies will completely steamroll a lot of early-game enemies. However, by the time you get to Bulblax Kingdom ^note generally considered to be around when a normal player would get to the 'mid-game' dungeons they begin to fall behind for several reasons. Their lack of speed becomes more and more apparent against enemies that are far quicker and easier to aggro, and many enemies are far larger than early-game enemies or flying up in the air (or both), which makes pulling off the Purple's stun attacks far harder than it is on early-game enemies ^note since they need to land on them at the peak of their throw to initiate it instead of just latching on. In addition, the game starts to get more spam-happy with instant-kill hazards such as explosions and crushing, so being able to swiftly get away with your Pikmin is key. While they're still a good late-game attack force, they're nowhere near as abusive as they are early on.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The President tells Olimar that, if his debt can't be paid off in time, the debt collectors will bury him in Hocotate Swamp.
• Don't Ask, Just Run: In the Submerged Castle, if you spend too long on any floor in this cave, the Waterwraith comes down and attempts to steamroll you. It isn't fun.
• Down the Drain:
  • A few dungeon sublevels (including an entire dungeon, appropriately named "Shower Room") look like partially flooded bathrooms; the two-player level Tile Lands and the Giant's Bath in Challenge Mode are of the same design. The Shower Room also features a rest floor set within a compact pipeline network. These are are primarily home to aquatic and amphibious enemies, such as frog-like wollywogs, their wogpole young, water-spraying watery blowhogs, and water dumples.
  • One of the underground levels, the Submerged Castle, is more similar to a true sewer level due to consisting of partly flooded tunnels and pipes, and can only be entered with blue Pikmin. It's also a bit more difficult than other underground areas thanks to the invincible Waterwraith that chases you down if you dawdle around on one level for too long.
• Dungeon Crawling: One of the major gameplay devices is exploring underground caves that are based on different everyday places (such as a shower, a toy room, or the natural habitat of a particular group of creatures). These caves can be either short, long or gargantuan, depending on the case. The caves' different sublevels are also semi-randomized; they'll always have the same stuff (Treasures to collect, enemies to defeat, eggs to break, obstacles to destroy or avoid...), but where all that stuff is and where you start off is picked at random every time you reach said sublevel, even by reloading a save.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: While this game shed away most of the Weirdness from the first title and marked the point where the series got a more firm grip on its identity, there are still a few odd details that set it apart from either of its sequels:
  • The Ultra Spicy Spray is introduced here, but it also comes with an Ultra Bitter Spray that has yet to return as of Pikmin 4. The Bitter Spray has the effect of temporarily turning enemies to stone, which is out of place even by the soft science fiction standards of the series. 4 replaced it with the ability to freeze enemies, but it still did not introduce any other sort of spray berries to farm. The sprays were also "activated" by the commanders burping (for Bitter) or farting (for Spicy) on their targets; 3 and 4 would remove the Toilet Humor by just having the Ultra Spicy Spray be sprayed out from a bottle instead.
  • The original and Wii release are the only installments in the series to have Product Placement in its treasures. All future titles either use generic fictional brands or keep the treasures limited to Nintendo-related content. This also applies to the Switch port of 2, due to the existing deals made with the brands having expired.
  • The multiplayer introduced here is handled differently from its successors. Player 1 only uses Red Pikmin, Player 2 only uses Blue, and to balance this the Reds lack their usual damage bonus and elements are not involved outside of the final map and some Cherry effects. Bingo Battle in Pikmin 3 and Dandori Battles in 4 would have players using multiple types of Pikmin, differentiated by the colors of their leaves/buds/flowers (cyan for Player 1, magenta for Player 2), where the players need to make use of the types' abilities.
• Easter Egg:
  • If you get twenty of each Pikmin type into a group, they'll hum Ai no Uta instead of their basic marching song (which in turn sounds like the title screen music). This Easter Egg was removed from the Switch version, likely due to licensing issues.
  • Wait three minutes and fifty seconds on the treasure collected screen after getting treasure from a cave and Totaka's song will play. It also plays by waiting on the screen that shows when entering a cave/sublevel without a memory card.
  • Pressing the Z button while viewing the Piklopedia will petrify whatever enemy you're looking at.
  • There are a number of secret effects that can be activated on the title screen through button inputs, namely making the Pikmin that form the title disperse and reassemble, make them spell out "Nintendo", or spawning an Iridescent Flint Beetle or a Bulborb that the player can control.
• Endless Game: While there is a definite ending for collecting every single treasure in the game, you are simply brought back to the level select screen after the ending cutscene and are free to continue playing for as long as you want.
• Eternal Engine: The Subterranean Complex is one of the explorable caves in the game, located in the Valley of Repose. All floors except the first (which is a snowy tunnel due to its proximity with the wintery surface) take place within walkable rusty setpieces that used to be part of larger machinery a long time ago. The treasures found within them are pieces of the ancient machinery, such as gears, nuts and bolts, vacuum tubes, a spring, and a lightbulb. They're now overrun by all sorts of wild creatures, including a very dangerous mechanical spider that serves as the boss (Man-at-Legs). Other caves include mechanical floors as well, but they're not as prominent in them as they are here.
• Evil Debt Collector: The plot involves the president of Olimar's company running from debt collectors after taking a loan from the wrong bank — the All-Devouring Black Hole Loan Sharks. He sends emails about it.
  I just took a call from my loan agent! He has the scariest voice I've ever heard. While you two are dawdling about, my life hangs by a thread! Get to work, slackers!
  Olimar! You're my hero! You've erased half of our debt. Still, things have become a bit dangerous, so I'm going into hiding. Focus on work... and don't slack off!
  I found some tasty grass today. It was the first time in a while that I could eat until I was full.
  I have a regrettable message. I have been caught. If I don't pay off the company debt right away, I'm to be buried in Hocotate Swamp. It's bleak here... Hurry!
• Extended Gameplay: The game ends when you get 10,000 Pokos to pay off the debt, but you can return to the planet after the credits roll to find Louie and the rest of the treasure, which includes exploring a new level and eventually getting a 100% Completion ending.
• Extreme Omnivore: A childhood where his grandmother had him eating bugs leads to Louie treating the hostile creatures of PNF-404 like an all you can eat buffet.
• Family-Unfriendly Death:
  • The series is fairly violent already, but the electrocution deaths of some of the Pikmin stand out, being vaporized with visible skeletons. There's also the death of the Burrowing Snagret. It simply explodes the first time you defeat it, and then allows you to carry its decapitated head back, eyes open and frozen (in the third game, you can carry its whole body). The game, like its predecessor, is rated E for Everyone.
  • The Segmented Crawbster's death in particular has to be elaborated on. The creature's stomach (which is its weak point), violently explodes and visible steaming erupts from it, while the thing screeches in agony, before dropping over dead, with the same frozen stare of the Burrowing Snagret on its face. Again, this game is rated E for Everyone.
• Festering Fungus: Patches of mold-like fungus can be found in several areas, where they must be destroyed to access the beneficial plants they grow over and smother. After a few days, the mold will begin to grow back and smother the plants all over again.
• Fictional Currency: The game introduces the Poko as the currency of the planet Hocotate. The game's objective is to gather treasure objects worth a combined total of at least 10000 Pokos to pay a huge debt to Olimar's company. According to the opening cutscene, 100 Pokos is more than the yearly salary of the President of Hocotate Freight.
• Final-Exam Boss: The Titan Dweevil attacks using poison, water, electricity, and fire. Four of the five types of Pikmin are invulnerable to each element used, while the Purple Pikmin's strength helps kill it in its defenseless form faster.
• Fire-Breathing Diner: According to Louie's cooking notes, crimson candypop buds will burst into flames on contact with the tongue.
  Keep fire-retardant condiments within arm's reach!
• Flawless Victory: Challenge Mode denotes the levels you've completed without losing any Pikmin. Getting this on all 30 Challenge levels unlocks a hidden cutscene.
• Flunky Boss: The Recurring Boss Empress Bulbax is a Flunky Boss in her second and third appearances. She continuously spawns Bulbax Larvae. While incredibly fragile (a single punch from one of your captains will turn them into slime), they are capable of instantly killing your Pikmin, and they're a nuisance to deal with.
• Food Porn: Louie's detailed descriptions of how to cook the various enemies and plants in the Piklopedia can get extremely in-depth and detailed.
• Foreshadowing:
  • There are hints in the story regarding the fact that Louie may not have been completely truthful about what happened to the Golden Pikpik Carrots:
    • In an e-mail from Louie's grandmother, she reveals he loves Pikpik carrots and had a childhood hobby of eating bugs. The latter foreshadows his cooking notes in the Piklopedia and the former hints at how his love of those carrots got Hocotate Freight into debt in the first place.
    • Yet another e-mail from the President, obtainable after ten days of being under 3000 Pokos...
      President: You know, Olimar, I've been in this business for over 50 years, and I've never heard of space bunnies in that shipping lane. I have some doubts about Louie's accident...
  • An e-mail from the President mentions that if "dolts" like Olimar and Louie could find treasure with ease, he could find boatloads more. He makes good on that claim by becoming playable after the debt is paid.
  • One for an actual level: the introduction for Shower Room has the ship chime in and tell you the importance of splitting up and switching leaders. Sure enough, the cave's boss, the Ranging Bloyster, requires this exact strategy to defeat.
• Forest of Perpetual Autumn: The Wistful Wild is an eerie forest region with decaying flora that merges the mainlands of the Impact Site and the Final Trial from the first game. Four of the five treasures found aboveground (a pinecone, a chestnut, a mushroom and an acorn) are all the kind of flora you'd expect to find littering the forest floor in autumn.
• Free-Sample Plot Coupon: The initial debt Olimar's company must pay to avoid bankruptcy is 10100 Pokos, but when a bottle cap falls from Olimar's head and is appraised in 100 Pokos, the company's President is so joyful that he instructs Olimar to return to the planet he was in, now accompained by a coworker (Louie), to find more objects to pay the remaining 10000 Pokos.
• Fungi Are Plants: The large patches of white fungus that can be found growing over and covering berry-producing plants in certain areas of the game are referred to by the ship as a "moldlike botanical entity", and it also reports that it can detect "other plant life" suffocating beneath it.
• Fun with Acronyms: One of the treasures is the head of an R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy), an accessory for the NES system. Olimar calls it the Remembered Old Buddy instead.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • At some point prior to paying off the debt, the President will begin sending panicked emails describing how he was captured by the debt collectors and how they plan to drown him in the swamp. However, nothing will actually happen no matter how long you take, and continually going to sunset will just have the President's final email being sent repeatedly until the debt is fully repaid.
  • Some of Olimar's notes in the Treasure Hoard indicate he named the caves after the enemies or environment encountered there. Despite this, the caves are already named upon approaching them, even before you've ventured into them.
  • Olimar's notes for the Bumbling Snitchbug note that only an idiot would allow themselves to be captured by it. He still notes this even if the player was never caught by one, or if Olimar himself was caught by it repeatedly.
  • Olimar's journal entry for the Key describes the Beady Long Legs as a "Pikmin devouring spider". But the Beady Long Legs doesn't actually eat Pikmin nor does it ever attempt to.
  • The ship describes the Dream Den as the "deepest, darkest, most sinister horribly vile pit". However, the Dream Den itself is actually the second-longest cave in the game, with the Hole of Heroes beating it by one sublevel. The latter also has the return of several boss enemies from earlier in the game, making it slightly more difficult than the former.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: The second half of the Waterwraith battle has it trying to run away from you... and running out of breath after a while. This results in a very satisfying retribution for everything it put you through.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The Segmented Crawbster, a boss enemy, is a colossal elongated crustacean with a massive, club-like right arm. It trie to crush your leader by curling into a ball and rolling over him, but doing so can cause it to hit a wall and flip over on its back. When this happens, its only weak point — its soft belly — is exposed to your Pikmin's attacks.
• Gotta Catch Them All: There are 201 treasures; to beat the game, you only need however many are necessary to raise 10,000 Pokos, but you can return to get the rest and a second ending.
• Guest-Star Party Member: The Bulbmin, who are immune to all environmental hazards but can only be used in the dungeon they are found in.
• Guide Dang It!: The Ujadani, tiny mite-like creatures that release gigantic amounts of nectar and sprays when attacked, aren't even mentioned in the official strategy guide, and the game doesn't acknowledge them in its encyclopedia. In fact, the name is only known from a Japan-only E-Reader card. They only appear every 30 days starting from Day 31 in the final area around the entrance of The Hole of Heroes, the Boss Rush dungeon. The only way to ever see them is to happen to be at that specific place by chance.
• Hailfire Peaks: Submerged Castle combines Down the Drain with Big Boo's Haunt. It is a partially flooded sewer that has a mysterious ghost-like being haunting it that will chase after the party if they spend too much time there, serving as the game's horror-themed cave.
• Happy Ending Override: The first game ended with Olimar surviving his visit to the Pikmin planet and rebuilding the Dolphin so he could return to Hocotate. When he arrives, he finds out that Hocotate Freight is in debt and inches away from bankruptcy, and the Dolphin had to be sold to pay off part of the debt. When Olimar discovers that his bottle cap is worth 100 Pokos, the President assigns him to return to the Pikmin planet and gather the rest of its treasures.
• Heroic Mime: Captain Olimar and Louie never speak in cutscenes, as the Ship's AI takes over the exposition duties. However, you can at least view Olimar's (and, eventually, Louie's) commentary on recovered treasures and lifeforms encountered.
• He Was Right There All Along: The Creeping Chrysanthemum looks like a lot of the normal flowers that are all over the game except it has narrow blinking eyes staring at you which are hard to notice. If you approach it, it pops out of the ground and reveals the giant fat root that is its torso. It uses its stem arms to scoot around on its "butt" & tries to eat your Pikmin with its red flower mouth. If you or your Pikmin are too close to it when it initially pops out of the ground, you'll get knocked over making it extra hard to avoid losing Pikmin.
• Homing Boulders: The Decorated Cannon Beetle fires boulders which actively home in on your character. It is justified in the Piklopedia where it notes that the boulders are magnetic and attracted to the high metal content in Olimar's space suit. That said, it doesn't explain how the homing still works when the entire level is constructed of metal.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The Waterwraith. The game's Exposition Fairy even tells you "Run Away! Run Away very Fast!" Any attacks against it result on the Pikmin being killed until the last sublevel of the dungeon when you recruit the purple Pikmin and can make him tangible.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: Although humans don't show up, one of the treasures is a set of dentures Olimar names "Behemoth Jaw". Olimar says in his notes he can't even begin to conceive the existence of a creature with teeth that massive, and hopes he never has to face something of that size.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • One of the treasures is a rubber duck's head called the "Paradoxical Enigma", and Olimar writes about it as if it were a mind-opening work of art. Later in the game, you find a full version of the same rubber duck: it's called the "Rubber Ugly", and Olimar can't believe how ugly it is.
  • Olimar notes that only an idiot of a captain will allow a Bumbling Snitchbug to catch them. Despite this, Olimar can be caught by them as many times as you like (or don't like).
  • One of Olimar's notes has him express outrage at the ship for accusing him of sampling all the food treasures they've gathered. Yet, a majority of the notes for said treasures heavily imply that Olimar (as well as Louie) very much are tasting and sneaking bites of them, apparently without the ship's permission as the first one indicates.
• Immediate Sequel: The game begins right as Olimar returns home to Hocatate after the events of the first game.
• Indestructible Edible: Many of the treasures are food and, while it's heavily implied that the planet where you find them is the far future of the Earth, none of it is the least bit rotten.
• Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: Some of the treasures are various foodstuffs that are surprisingly edible, to the point that Olimar and Louie keep sneaking bites of many of them. With Louie it's plausible, but you'd think Olimar would show more caution about eating something he found in a cave, and on another planet to boot.
• Infinity +1 Element: Bulbmin, only found in a few dungeons, are "extra Pikmin" with middle-of-the-road attack and speed... but resistance to every element. You can only use them in the dungeon they appear in, though. (You can convert them to other Pikmin with Candypop Buds to take them with you, but you get perfectly ordinary Pikmin of those specimens.)
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: The "garden"-type cave settings have borders of only very short rocks keeping the squad in bounds, as the leaders cannot jump over them. Pikmin can be thrown over them, but they're sloped facing inwards, so they are able to walk back in when whistled.
• Interface Spoiler: Downplayed. The total number of treasures available in the game (201) is not revealed in any way until after you pay the debt of 10000 Pokos, by then you may have collected about half of them already.
• Justified Tutorial: The first day is spent controlling Louie, who needs to learn the ropes from someone who's been to the Pikmin planet before.
• Karma Houdini: Neither Olimar nor the President learn that it was actually Louie who ate all of the Golden Pik Pik carrots and subsequently put Hocotate Freight in massive debt.
• King Mook:
  • The Empress Bulblax is a Queen Mook of bulborbs, serving as the partner of the Emperor Bulblax (though their biologican features are very different).
  • Dweevils, a common family of enemies who fight using elemental attacks, have the Titan Dweevil, an immense specimen fought as a boss who uses objects it has hoarded to attack with four different elements.
  • The Pileated Snagret are this to the Burrowing Snagrets, which are Mini Bosses to begin with.
  • The Ranging Bloyster^note No, that's not a typo, it is the ranging bloyster to the smaller Toady Bloyster.
  • The Giant Breadbug fought as a boss is this to the normal Breadbugs fought as nuisances.
  • An inter-game inversion: the first game has the Armored Cannon Beetle, fought as a single boss. The second has Armored Cannon Beetle Larvae, as well as Decorated Cannon Beetles, weaker and more common enemies.
• Laser Sight: A half-robot, half-spider monstrosity known as the Man-At-Legs has a giant laser sight emerge from its underbelly and throw a bright red laser beam to target any threats, whch it then proceeds to pulp down with what can only be described as a rapid-fire autocannon.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • One of the treasures is a console controller d-pad. The treasure log says that the Pikmin carrying it looked a little dazzled.
  • In the description of the Aquatic Mine, Olimar mentions in his notes that he feels the presence of a guiding hand.
• Leitmotif: The game handles this in a unique way. Olimar and Louie don't have signature themes; instead any music playing is rendered in a straight 4/4 beat whenever Olimar is in control, and in an off-kilter swing beat whenever Louie is in control.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Louie is sort of an idiot who tries to eat everything. However, after he gets left behind on the planet, he survives on his own without any Pikmin, gets all the way to the bottom of the Dream Den, and even manages to not be harmed by a beast with four dangerous weapons. The ship even remarks that the desire of man is something to be feared.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: The two captains are encouraged to split up to beat certain obstacles and perform multiple tasks.
• Letting the Air out of the Band: There's one in the scene that plays after the credits and leading up to the postgame- Olimar has returned to Planet Hocotate after collecting treasure to save his company from debt, and the President is thanking him for doing so. Upon learning that there's more treasure on the Pikmin planet, he becomes excited and starts to yell Louie to tell him to go back with Olimar to get the remaining treasure... only to find that Louie is missing, after being left on the Pikmin planet. Cue the music coming to a stop.
  President: "...Where's Louie?"
• Level Ate: The Glutton's Kitchen, a cave in the Perplexing Pool, is a donwplayed example. While its physical decor is themed around a child's playroom full of toys and blocks, it also has a strong food theme; the treasures found there are primarily edible items — a cookie, chocolate, fried egg, a slice of meat and sausage — plus some beverage caps, and its signature enemies are Breadbugs, enemies resembling walking breadrolls, and their King Mook the Giant Breadbug, which looks like a giant squared loaf of bread. The sweet smell can be perceived from even outside the cave's entrance.
• Level of Tedious Enemies:
  • Sublevel Eight of the Cavern of Chaos is filled with a tremendous number of dwarf red bulborbs, the game's most common weak enemy, which crowd its various rooms and passageways and must all be manually cleared in order to let your Pikmin safely carry treasures through the level and in order to deal with its other inhabitants, two very powerful and dangerous gatling groinks.
  • Sublevel One of the Dream Den is similarly filled with swarms of dwarf orange bulborbs, only marginally stronger than the red kind, which fill its passageways.
• Lighter and Softer: The first game had a significantly darker tone, with Olimar being stranded on a strange planet fighting for his life, and reminiscing in his journal about his life back on Hocotate. This game in comparison has a much more energetic and upbeat tone, with the survival aspect replaced with Olimar just trying to save his company to keep his job. Helping matters is there's no day limit, the constant contact with the characters' families, and the addition of a second captain erases the lonely atmosphere of the first game. Even the soundtrack is much more goofy and upbeat compared to the atmospheric and mysterious tones of the first game.
• Loan Shark: The President of Hocotate Freight has to go on the run from debt collectors after discovering that the company's loan came not from Happy Hocotate Savings & Loan, but from the building next door, the All-Devouring Black Hole Loan Sharks.
• Logging onto the Fourth Wall: The game has the player receive emails from the characters' families, which are sometimes replaced with spam mail. The spam refers to a website, either nintendo.com or pikmin.com.
• The Lost Woods: The game brings back the Forest of Hope, renamed the Awakening Wood. The layout of the forest remains nearly unchanged, with only some adjustments in the paths. Notably, the more dangerous creatures first seen in the original game (Armored Cannon Beetle and Burrowing Snagret) are absent, though the latter creature can still be found in larger quantities within one of the forest's playable caves (Snagret Hole), where a stronger version called Pileated Snagret can be found as well.
• Luck-Based Mission: Challenge Mode has a luck-based level called Concrete Maze. It has 3 floors. You have a strict time limit on each floor. The first floor is a maze with randomly placed destructible walls blocking most of the dead ends, a key behind one of the randomly placed walls, and a buried exit behind another one of the randomly placed walls. The buried exit will only emerge after you get your Pikmin to take the key to the ship (which takes a really long time if the key is really far from the ship). The second floor is like the first floor but it's bigger, it has way more paths, and Volatile Dweevils randomly fall from above to suicide attack you & your Pikmin. All you have to do on the third floor is throw your Pikmin into Candypop Buds to get more Pikmin and have your Pikmin get some treasure for you that's laid out for you. That floor is really easy if you don't assume you need to be careful about which colors of pikmin you get from the three Candypop Buds (which change colors every few seconds so going for specific colors takes a while).
• Marathon Boss: If you're playing cautious with your Pikmin, the Titan Dweevil can go on for somewhere around 45 minutes. The reason is because all of its attached objects have to be disabled one by one, and each a high amount of hit points has to be inflicted. Even after you disable all the objects, you still have to kill the surprisingly bulky Clipped-Wing Angel form. This trope can also happen with some of the more powerful bosses, such as the Pileated Snagret and Man-at-Legs.
• Marathon Level: The three final underground caves (Cavern of Chaos, Hole of Heroes and Dream Den), all located in Wistful Wild. All previous caves have at most nine levels (basement floors), and frequently only five or seven. The ones in Wistful Wild are ten to fifteen floors long, and several of them take long to tackle due to the heavier concentration of enemies and hazards. Hole of Heroes adds multiple bosses, too.
• Mind Screw: Most of the creatures encountered in the series are based on anthropods or other small animals, and generally act like one would expect non-magic fictional animals to act. Then there's the Waterwraith, a humanoid being made out of a transparent liquid of sorts that goes around in stone rollers. The Waterwraith is also normally invincible, and for some reason being hit with Purple Pikmin turns it purple, freezes it, and makes it vulnerable. The Hocotate ship reports having difficulty detecting it (being able to "see" the Waterwraith but otherwise not sense it) and Olimar's notes implies that the thing is a hallucination, yet it's somehow "real" enough to wipe out an entire Pikmin army. It lacks the "ghost" that usually appears when an enemy is killed, suggesting that it was not killed or was technically never alive to begin with. Overall, it's easily the most supernatural being in a game that otherwise avoids concepts like other dimensions and hostile spirits, and it's never made completely clear if the thing even exists or not. In Pikmin 3, the final boss is a similar-looking being that also has "Wraith" in its name, but with a slightly different body-type made of gold and a fixation on Olimar. What connection the two have, if there's any, is anyone's guess.
• Mini-Boss: The Burrowing Snagrets are degraded to this in the Snagret Hole, since the main boss there is the more powerful and dangerous Pileated Snagret. This also occurs to Emperor Bulblax in The Cavern of Chaos (in fact, you now fight three smaller specimens in the same floor), whose main boss is Segmented Crawbster.
• Mini-Dungeon: Challenge Mode is about exploring thirty miniature caves, most of which are only one to three floors deep. Collector's Room has the most floors at seven, but those floors are bite-sized even by Challenge Mode standards. The Emergence Cave in the story proper is only two floors deep as well and the only cave without a boss.
• Mob Debt: The first half of the game is paying off the company's debt, which turns out to be a debt to a mafia known as the All-Devouring Black Hole Loan Sharks. As you spend days collecting treasures on PNF-404, you may get letters from the President detailing his misadventures as he goes into hiding until either you finally pay off the debts or the mob finally gets him.
• Money for Nothing: The objective of the game is to amass 10,000 Pokos to pay off your company's debt. Once you reach this goal, however, you can return to the Pikmin planet to gather up the treasure you didn't find. The treasure still has monetary value, though, and boosts your Pokos count, but there's literally nothing to spend it on (and your post-game progress is tracked by individual treasures found, not their worth). What's gratuitous is that many of the treasures found only in the postgame are incredibly expensive (one treasure is worth 3,000 by itself, and the final boss drops over 4,000 in separate treasures), meaning their high values are completely pointless. Retrieving enemy bodies also becomes pointless after paying off the debt, since that serves no purpose but to provide a few extra Pokos.
• Monster Compendium: The game introduces the Piklopedia, which allows players to observe any creatures that have previously been defeated (alongside decorative plants that have been run into) and throw Pikpik Carrots at them to see how they will interact. Additionally, it lists how many Pokos the creature is worth when carried back to the Ship (when applicable), how many Pikmin have been lost to the creature in question (when applicable), and how many of said creature have been defeated (when applicable). Finally, each creature has a description in the form of "Olimar's Notes", which describes the creature from a scientific point of view, presented as notes from the titular captain. Defeating the final boss unlocks a second set of these notes, focusing on Louie and how to properly cook and eat them (when applicable), to varying results.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The beginning of the game has Olimar finally managing to return home, having successfully repaired his ship and returned to his planet in one piece. And almost immediately, his ship is repossessed by the company. Ouch.
  • Going from the relaxing summer area that is the Perplexing Pool to the Submerged Castle. Unlike the other caves, Submerged Castle has unique music — an eerie tone that hints that you're not alone. And you're not.
  • The cutscene after paying off the debt has Olimar looking back at the planet wistfully as he flies back to Hocotate, remembering the Pikmin and seeing their faces on the planet's surface. He then cuts a shocked Wild Take as he realizes Louie's cockpit is empty and he accidentally left him behind.
• Mook-Themed Level:
  • Some caves are themed around the native creatures that inhabit them, and base their names (either directly or indirectly) on them: Bulblax Kingdom (the Bulborbs and the King Mook Emperor Bulblax), Snagret Hole (the Burrowing Snagrets and the King Mook Pileated Snagret), and Glutton's Kitchen (the Breadbugs, insect-like creatures resembling an actual piece of bread, and their King Mook Giant Breadbug).
  • The Hole of Heroes, while not an example as a whole, has three sublevels that fit — level 3, home to one of each kind of Blowhog; level 9, home to one of every kind of non-boss Bulborb in the game and several specimens of each dwarf variety; and level 14, home to several specimens of each Dweevil variety outside of the explosive Volatile Weevils and to the also spider-like Beady Long Legs as a boss. Similarly, in the Dream Den, level 8 is crawling of dweevils of each elemental type, while level 13 is home to two of each kind of basic Bulborb.
• Multiplayer-Only Item: The multiplayer modes include several items that can be earned randomly, and each of them provides a different effect either in favor of the player who got it, or against the rival player.
• Mundane Object Amazement: Olimar, Louie, and the President make their money collecting mundane Earth objects which are highly valuable on their home planet.
• Noob Cave: The Emergence Cave, which only has the weakest enemies, as well as no bosses or hazards. It is also where you first get Purple Pikmin and has only two floors.
• Noodle Incident: When you find the Broken Food Master (American English)/Divine Cooking Tool (British English) in the European/Australian version, part of Olimar's description is "I did try and be creative at cooking once before... but there are some things that are better left forgotten."
• Nostalgia Level: Three of the four mainlands explored are mildly modified versions of mainlands seen in the first game. Namely, Awakening Wood is Forest of Hope, Perplexing Pool is Distant Spring, and Wistful Wild is a combined form of Impact Site and The Final Trial. Olimar gets to notice this, even having nostalgic feelings towards them.
• Not the Intended Use: If you find a drop of spray (red or purple), it is possible to get two doses out of one drop by getting both your captains close to the droplet, and pushing the inactive captain with the active captain. The inactive captain will start to collect it, and if you get the active captain to start collecting it as well, you will get two doses of spray instead of one.^note This is similar to how Pikmin drinking nectar will be flowered regardless of how late they started.
• Number of the Beast: There's a creepy doll's head that's worth 670 pokos; in the Japanese game, it's worth 666.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • Like in the first game, bombs can kill Pikmin instantly if they're hit by the explosion. And due to their increased size, Yellow Pikmin cannot use them anymore.
  • Electricity can kill the eponymous Pikmin instantly, so any enemy attack based on this element is lethal. Good thing Yellow Pikmin can resist electricity, allowing them to defeat electric enemies more easily and destroy electric barriers. Also, in the third game, electricity is nerfed so that it can only stun non-yellow Pikmin.
  • During the later fights with the Empress Bulblax, there's her offsprings, the Bulbord Larvae. They die in one hit, but also kill Pikmin in one hit (as well as deal a good chunk of damage to the captains), and they do it fast. Given how the Empress Bulblax also constantly gives birth to the little buggers, they can become deadly if left unchecked. A captain can distract them to leave the other free to attack the Empress, but that can be easier said than done.
• Only Mostly Dead: The Gatling Groink and Spotty Bulbear slowly regain health after being "killed". If you let their health get back to full before you convert them into Pikmin food or money, they'll get back up and attack your team again. The Bulbear doesn't do this in Pikmin 3, notably.
• Opening the Sandbox: Similarly to the first game, the first few days are very linear and need to be completed in the same order due to the player only having access to a few Pikmin types at that point. Once Blue Pikmin are unlocked, the player is free to explore any area in any order they wish, since the goal of collecting 10,000 Pokos can be fulfilled from any amount of Treasures they've collected from any area.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: In the original Pikmin game, one of the red Pikmins' main traits is their powerful attack. In this sequel, however, they are overshadowed by purple Pikmin, who have a much stronger attack stat and make reds useless for everything except taking out fire hazards.
• Palette Swap: Most members of the Dweevil family only seen in the game are identical aside from color, which corresponds to their element. The Fiery variety is red, the Munge variety is magenta, the Anode variety is yellow, and the Caustic variety is blue. The Volatile (orange and black) and Titan (black when armored, tan when not) varieties downplay this, as they also have bombs carried on them and a much larger size, respectively.
• Palmtree Panic: The Distant Spring from the first game returns, now named Perplexing Pool. Due to the passage of time, some parts of it have changed, most notably in the coast which now reveals a man-made pool that used to be buried and provides the entrance to the Shower Room, one of the playable caves. When the pool is emptied (by opening the hole to the aforementioned cave), so is the whole body of water in that side of the zone, thus leaving the background sea and the body of water located in the other end as the only wet features in the zone.
• Patchwork Map: The four areas appear to be close to each other on the world map, but each one is themed after a different season. This means that the snow-covered Valley of Repose is near by the warm and sunny Perplexing Pool and the Forest of Perpetual Autumn Wistful Wild.
• Playable Epilogue: The game ends once 10,000 Pokos are collected from any number of treasures that are recovered. However, you are free to continue playing afterwards to collect the remaining treasures you didn't find the first time around. In fact, the fourth and final area is only unlocked in the postgame, and said area has a large chunk of treasures in it.
• Poison Mushroom: Doodlebugs are an unusual living example. They look very similar to their Metal Slime relatives, but leave small clouds of poison lying around as you follow them.
• Poisonous Person: White Pikmin are able to absorb poison and can poison animals who eat them. Unfortunately for them, this poison is not transferable by touch, so the toxin can't poison those that squish these little guys.
• Pre-Ending Credits: The first part is about Olimar and Louie trying to collect treasure in order to pay off a debt of 10,000 Pokos. Once the debt is paid, they return back home, and the credits roll. However, said credits show that Louie was left behind during the takeoff, so now it's up to Olimar and the President to try to find Louie for the second part, as well as collect the rest of the treasure while they're at it.
• Proactive Boss: The main gimmick of the cave Submerged Castle is that, in every floor, the Waterwraith will continue harassing the Captains and the Pikmin, and during the first four floors it's invincible because the only type of Pikmin that can weaken it (Purple) doesn't appear until the fifth floor, where the monster can finally be challenged in a boss battle.
• Product Displacement: The original release of the game was full of real-world products in the form of the game's treasures. In the Nintendo Switch port, all of them are edited to replace the branding with generic counterparts both for ease of localization and due to Nintendo not renewing the appropriate licenses.
• Product Placement: The original release of the game is full of it, with many of the "treasures" being things like Duracell batteries and Vlasic pickle jar lids. Although more than for advertisement, the products are there to drive the point home that the Pikmin's home planet is Earth. This even leads to some of the treasures being different depending on the version, so as to be more relatable. The Drone Supplies, for example, is a container of Underwood deviled ham in the American version, but a pack of French Haribo Tagada sweets in the European/Australian version. In the Nintendo Switch port, all the brands are replaced with generic counterparts.
• Prolonged Video Game Sequel: The original Pikmin has players collect thirty ship parts on a thirty-day timer. Even inexperienced players can get multiple parts in one day, and the days are short enough that you can generally beat the whole game in one day if you put some effort into it. However, Pikmin 2 is significantly longer than the first game as there are 201 collectible treasures, new underground cavern levels, new game modes, new Pikmin types, and a new captain, Louie.
• "Psycho" Strings: The theme for the battle against Titan Dweevil relies heavily on this. In fact, the more parts you take off of him, the more intense the strings get! Every single song (about to attack, [insert element here] attack, and so on) during this battle has these at some point.
• Purple Is Powerful: Purple Pikmin are the strongest types. They're not only 10 times heavier then a Pikmin of any other color; they are also 10 times as strong and, when thrown, have a chance of stunning the enemy. They’re also the only Pikmin who can hurt the otherwise invincible Waterwraith.
• Ragnarök Proofing: The various treasures. Some (but not all) electrical devices are still functional, metal objects may be rusted but are all still in pretty good shape, and all the food items still look perfectly fresh (and are still totally edible and tasty, according to Olimar's notes), despite having sat in a cave or out in the open for who knows how long.
• Randomly Generated Levels: The caves are put together using predesigned rooms arranged randomly, with enough corridors to connect them all, and the placement of enemies, treasures, the exit, and other features are all randomized as well. There are a few floors that have static layouts, however, such as most boss floors.
• Recurring Boss: The Empress Bulblax is generally the first boss you'll fight at the start of the game; she reappears much later in two other holes. In your second and third encounters with her, she becomes a Flunky Boss capable of summoning the fragile-but-deadly (to your Pikmin, that is) Bulborb Larvae. While her "main" attack (rolling) remains the same, the addition of Mooks makes you change your strategy.
• Replay Mode: The game has an Extras mode where the cutscenes unlocked in the main game, including the credits, can be seen again at any time. There is a special slot reserved for an exclusive cutscene that will only be available after full completion of Challenge Mode.
• Resource-Gathering Mission: The company Olimar works for is facing a serious debt, and to pay it the company has to amass 10100 Pokos. Luckily, a mundane object Olimar inadvertedly brought from the Pikmin planet is worth 100 Pokos, so he and Louie return to the aforementioned planet and gather as many objects (many of which are man-made, albeit fallen into disuse) as possible to pay the debt with their worth. After the objective is complete, the President asks Louie to look for more objects to secure more money, and accompanies Olimar to do so and to rescue Louie.
• Reviving Enemy: Spotty Bulbears and Gatling Groinks slowly recover health and get back up after being defeated if they aren't taken back to the ship first.
• Rule of Cool: The ship being plated in gold in the post game, for obvious reasons, is a highly impractical decision but who can say no to having a gold plated spaceship?
• Run or Die: The game features the Waterwraith in one dungeon, which cannot be killed except with a Pikmin variety that cannot be brought in and can only be created at the last floor. Once it drops down, you haul ass to the exit.
• Shout-Out: Several items are shout-outs to other games, like a tube of paint with Mario Paint on it, R.O.B.'s head, the key from Super Mario World, Bowser's likeness on a box of matches, Princess Peach's crown, and even a Nintendo brand ace of spades card.^note Playing cards are just one of the many businesses other than video games that Nintendo still has a hand in. The Justice Alloy treasure bears a resemblance to the main mechs from the Mazinger Z series. Its name, and that of the Metal Suit Z, may be in reference to the material that is used to construct these robots, Super-Alloy Z.
• Seasonal Baggage: Each of the four seasons is present within one particular area, rather than all seasons appearing in a cyclic fashion through all areas. Namely, Valley of Repose is set in winter, Awakening Wood is set in spring, Perplexing Pool is set in summer, and Wistful Wild is set in autumn.
• Sequel Escalation: There are five types of Pikmin that need to be managed, a far larger array of enemies, much longer gameplay in the form of caves, new powerups in the form of sprays, and the day limit is removed. The number of collectable items shoots up from 30 to 201. All of this makes Pikmin 2 a more extended experience, and with higher stakes story-wise, than its predecessor.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • It's possible to recruit Blue Pikmin before Yellow Pikmin through use of an out-of-bounds glitch. By Pikmin 3, the developers became aware of this and put an Invisible Wall around its Blue Pikmin area to prevent the same thing from happening. The Switch port simply makes it impossible to actually get them to follow you until you've already unlocked Yellow Pikmin; if you glitch into the area, they simply won't join you no matter what.
  • It's possible to skip the entirety of the first day (normally a Forced Tutorial without the time limit normal days have) by initiating a Pikmin extinction. While normally the tutorial is designed to not have anything that can actually kill your Pikmin (The Bulborb enemy you attack during it cannot actually eat any of them or hurt you), you can clip your starting Pikmin out of bounds in a way that makes them fall off of the level, which leads to the game killing them. Doing so allows you to ignore getting the first couple of treasures, and unlocks Louie automatically.
• Skippable Boss:
  • There are several Burrowing Snagrets through the Snagret Hole that can be skipped even for 100% Completion as long as they're not internally guarding anything important; the one in Valley of Repose and the one found alongside the (mandatory) Pileated Snagret in Hole of Heroes can be skipped as well.
  • The Titan Dweevil is the only boss that needs to be killed to get the "rescue Louie" ending in the game; the player can repay the debt by getting the treasures in the regular floors of the caves and skip to the geyser of the boss floor to leave, and then go straight to Dream Den while avoiding the other caves in its area. Neither of the two treasures that unlock new areas are guarded by a boss: one is the game's first and only boss-less cave, and the other is in the overworld. Skipping all bosses is not possible for the best ending, since every one of them drops a treasure and all 201 treasures are needed to obtain it.
• Sky Face: During the cutscene that plays when the player clears the company's debt, the camera pans towards a star gleaming in the bright sky that transforms into the President's face.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The Valley of Repose is a snow-covered street crossing, with snowdrifts forming the terrain and snowmen, leafless trees and dying grasses as decoration, although besides the snow the only other wintery elements are a few Christmas-themed treasures in the Frontier Cavern (the traction physics usually associated with this trope are absent).
• Smelly Feet Gag: The Repugnant Appendage is a right baby shoe. Despite it being an artifact of the long-lost civilization that inhabited the planet, the stench apparently withstood the test of time. The ship is repulsed by the odor, and even the more stoic Olimar is forced to second its opinion.
• Snowy Sleigh Bells: The shivery Valley Of Repose theme is rhythmed by sleigh bells.
• Something We Forgot: Olimar collects enough money, starts his ship, heads for Hocotate... and then realizes that he left behind Louie on the Pikmin Planet. Cue second part of the game having the secondary goal to find and rescue him.
• Stalked by the Bell: On each of the first four floors of the Submerged Castle, you have an invisible five-minute timer that, when it runs out, the Waterwraith drops down and pursues you. You cannot even slow it down, let alone defeat it, so you have to either make a break for the next floor or try to keep it distracted while you gather the remaining treasures.
• Stop Motion: Most of the game's concept art, including the box art, uses a claymation style.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: When your main Sidekick Louie goes missing after you complete the game's main mission, he gets replaced with the President of the Hocotate Shipping Company, who remains with you even after you rescue Louie.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity:
  • There are often traps in the caves, of which include explosives and falling rocks, but these nasty things are more often than not triggered in dead ends with treasure or nectar in them. God forbid you leave your Pikmin unattended. In fact, it will happen so often in the late game that most players will expect it to happen every time and take extreme precautions.
  • Generally, if you see an escape geyser in a cave, and you're not on the final floor, the next floor is gonna be a treat; oftentimes, it'll be the cave's end boss. Special note goes to the Submerged Castle, which is the only cave in the entire game to have an escape geyser on the first sublevel, as if the game itself is warning you that this is your last chance to turn back before things get crazy. And they will if you happen to spend too long on a floor...
• Taken for Granite: Ultra-Bitter Spray petrifies enemies it's used on. Killing them while they are like this leaves no corpse to retrieve, but may drop nectars or sprays (including more Bitter Spray). In addition, Ultra-Bitter Spray can even halt the rampaging Waterwraith temporarily, giving you precious extra time to reach the next floor.
• Take Your Time: The messages after each day will detail the President getting caught up with the All-Devouring Black Hole Loan Sharks. The start hunting him and he goes in to hiding. No matter how many days the player takes, there is no gameplay consequence from this, and eventually the mail will just start repeating his last message until the debt is repayed.
• Teamwork Puzzle Game: The game has you control both Olimar and Louie who is replaced later by the President to control two sets of Pikmin.
• Technicolor Toxin: Poisonous gas is purple, as are the spores from the Puffstool. The color coding is also used for (the more pinkish) Munge Dweevils, which are part of a family of enemies with Elemental Powers as well as the Titan Dweevil, when he's about to use his poison weapon. Oddly, White Pikmin are the type immune to the latter, while Purple Pikmin don't have a hazardous element they're immune to, though they can't be blown by wind, making Whites the only Pikmin whose color does not match that of their element.
• Thematic Sequel Logo Change: The flowers making up the "2" are magenta to represent the Purple and White Pikmin introduced in the game.
• Toggling Setpiece Puzzle:
  • The battle against the Ranging Bloyster in Shower Room is a unique Puzzle Boss version of this trope, because the toggleable setpiece is the boss itself. The Bloyster is a slime-like creature whose eyes and backside bud, which are all connected to the main body via antennae, are colored yellow when the boss is in a docile state. When one of the playable Captains approaches the boss, the latter's eyes and bud detect his presence and glow into the color matching the Captain's helmet bulb, enticing the boss to chase him for an attack. If the Captain is Olimar, the parts in question will glow red; if it's Louie or the President, they'll glow blue. When the player switches control between Captains, the Bloyster will stop chasing the one who is no longer active, and after a couple seconds its eyes and bud will accordingly swap colors to match that of the now-moving Captain so it begins chasing him instead. The strategy to win the fight is to use one of the Captains as a distraction to lure the boss and, upon proximity, switch to the other Captain and make him attack the bud with Pikmin; the two Captains have to swap roles (bait and attacker) periodically to efficiently defeat the boss. This video showcases the battle with this tactic in mind. An extra detail is that, as the Bloyster moves onto the active Captain, the sound it makes is also dependent on its current target.
  • One of the above ground treasures in Perplexing Pool involves a series of scale puzzles in order to reach it. You must place one captain on a scale with some Pikmin, then have the other one throw Pikmin on a different scale to raise the one the first captain is standing on, allowing them to move to the next one. The player must also balance how many Pikmin they use, as if it is too little, the scale will not be weighed down, and if it is too much, the first captain will not have enough Pikmin to lift the treasure at the end.
• Toilet Humor: The Ultra-Spicy Spray is activated by farting on your Pikmin (pressing Down,) and the Ultra-Bitter Spray is activated by burping on your enemies (pressing Up.) The Doodlebug also farts poisonous gas periodically.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Purple Pikmin to some, due to most bosses in the game requiring quick movement or a Pikmin immunity to beat. Doesn't help they can only be found underground and can't be made with an Onion, and the fact that you need 100 of these guys to get a treasure late game often means most people won't want to risk losing them so they won't have to do as much grinding for them late game.
  • White Pikmin, when eaten by enemies, release a poison that knock off a large chunk of their health. However, most players prefer not to lose too many whites — although technically, to beat the game, only one is needed to dig up buried treasure and disarm toxic vents, if you're ultra-patient.
  • Ultra-Bitter Spray. Although it can immobilize enemies and even make some of the toughest bosses a complete joke, it is much rarer to come by in comparison to Ultra Spicy Spray, and the berry plants needed to farm them are often in inconvenient locations. As such, most players will only ever use them if there's absolutely no other way out.
• Took a Level in Badass: Despite being depicted as incompetent regarding every day work at Hocotate Freight, and even somewhat implied by Olimar regarding daily Pikmin work in the third game, Louie is one of the most capable survivors seen in the entire series. Being left behind on a ultra hostile alien world doesn't phase him, and his voracious appetite leads to him having no qualms whatsoever eating any and all fallen enemies to survive.
• Toy Time: Glutton's Kitchen, one of the caves located in Perplexing Pool, takes place inside the remnants of a child's room. Several toy blocks, a toy car's wooden racetrack, and kitchen mantles make up for the dungeon's layout. It is inhabited by several electric enemies, so it's recommended to only come here with Yellow Pikmin. Interestingly, many of the treasure items found here aren't toys, but food.
• Tree Trunk Tour: The first level of the Snagret Hole consists of a tunnel winding through the roots of a tree before sloping up through its trunk and ending inside a birdhouse, where the player can find a giant feather to gather as a treasure. Afterwards, the player drops through the floor of the birdhouse to travel along the ground before heading fully underground.
• Turns Red: The Waterwraith, a humanoid blob of water attached to steamroller-like wheels, does this when you finally get a fair battle against it. When its health hits zero the wheels explode into dust and the "Boss Defeated" music begins to play, but then cuts itself off and flows into an eerie-yet-comical version of the boss theme while the Waterwraith, alive but disarmed, begins panicking and running around the arena, trying to get away from you. It can't even hurt you at this point, and chasing it down and killing it is highly satisfying.
• Uncommon Time: The Piklopedia theme is in 5/4.
• Underground Level: The Caves, which serve as underground dungeons (though many of them mix the setting with others, for the sake of variety; the most traditional examples would be those found in Awakening Wood).
• Underground Monkey: The cave-dwelling Dweevils are red (fiery), blue (caustic), yellow (anode), purple (munge), and black with a bomb on its back (volatile). The color lets you know which Pikmin to use (except for Munge Dweevils, which require white Pikmin, and Volatile Dweevils, which can kill any of them).
• Unintentionally Unwinnable:
  • Due to the way sublevel generation works, it's possible for a treasure to fail to spawn, preventing the player from obtaining it unless they either reset the game, or go all the way through the cave again since the treasure gauge won't detect it in such a layout. It's even possible (albeit extremely rarely) to get a layout where a boss fails to spawn, meaning the player will miss out on an Explorer's Kit treasure and its subsequent upgrade.
  • Hole of Heroes sublevel 6 can potentially spawn a layout where the treasure is placed on top of a tall stump that only Yellow Pikmin can reach. Problem is, most of the sublevel is flooded, meaning only Blue Pikmin can reach the area with the treasure. Thus, the player will have no way of collecting the treasure since Yellow Pikmin can't swim, and Blue Pikmin can't be thrown high enough to reach it.
• Unique Enemy:
  • There's a single Toady Bloyster in the Perplexing Pool that holds a treasure. It's the only one you fight in the main game. You fight its bigger boss relative more times than this creature.
  • Starting from Day 31, every 30 days two swarms of tiny bugs will spawn near the entrances to the Hole of Heroes and the Dream Den, the last and hardest caves in the game. Killing them releases a ton of nectar and sprays.
  • While not technically an enemy, there is only one Golden Candypop Bud in the entire game, located on a single floor in the Glutton's Kitchen.
• Universal Poison: White Pikmin are not only immune to poison, but they can also release toxins and damage enemies when consumed.
• Updated Re-release: New Play Control! Pikmin 2, released for the Wii, irons out bugs, tweaks controls, and improves graphics, audio and other technical details.
• Variable Mix:
  • The game has a very deep set of this. Themes can vary greatly. The captain's health affects the tempo and the amount of Pikmin lost within a cave will cause the song to lose instruments. In addition, there are variants on the themes when carrying treasures and when fighting enemies. Multiply the level themes by two since there's a variation of every song for when you play as Louie/President, and for above-ground themes multiply by two again to account for the sunset variations of every song.
  • The boss music seamlessly changes depending on what's going on during the fight — the boss moving around, the boss attacking, the boss being beat on by Pikmin, and a finale to the song that always seems to fit the music regardless of when it changes. The Titan Dweevil actually has different segments of music when it uses each of its weapons, and different music depending on how many weapons it has left.
• Vehicular Assault: There's the Titan Dweevil, a giant spider bristling with weapons (who has kidnapped Louie) as the final boss. However, the game offers the alternate explanation that Louie was in fact the one controlling the Titan Dweevil all along...
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Dream Den. The Hocotate Ship will warn that it's exceptionally dangerous, and it's right. The cave has fourteen sublevels with only one rest area and several difficult enemies combined on single floors. It is also found in an area modelled off of the first location of the first game.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Purple and White Pikmin are kept in the ship's hold because they have no Onion. It isn't explained what happens to them when the Captains leave the planet. Are they taken back to Hocotate? If they are taken to Hocotate, which doesn't have an oxygen atmosphere, can they even survive outside of the hold? Are they left behind?
• Who Would Be Stupid Enough?: Olimar's Piklopedia entry for the Bumbling Snitchbug (which, rather than snatching up Pikmin like its cousin the Swooping Snitchbug, moves instead to abduct and drop the captains) asserts with confidence that only a reckless moron would ever be snatched up by one, even if it ever happened to the player.
  Olimar: This is a variety of snitchbug. Its most interesting characteristic is that it likes to snitch leaders. Yet barring wanton carelessness or incompetence, leaders are not easily captured. Any leader caught by this creature is clearly an idiot, which is why this creature is also known as the exposing snitchbug.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Pikmin will flee in terror from otherwise harmless Mitites.
• Work Off the Debt: This is the main issue driving the plot. Louie's ship was attacked by a space bunny while delivering a load of golden pikpik carrots, putting Hocotate Freight in debt. Olimar returns with treasure and the company's President sends Olimar and Louie back to the pikmin planet to get more treasure to pay off the debt.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Olimar is sent right back to the Pikmin’s planet after just arriving back home to find his company in massive dept.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: No matter how much time you spend underground, no time will pass at all in the daylight, due to the magnetic field below the surface of the earth.
• Zero-Effort Boss: The Waterwraith is a hard fight at first, but then halfway through the fight, he becomes incapable of harming you at all. You still have to chase him around and attack him, and he can run away, but you can't lose after that point. It is meant to be cathartic after completing an entire dungeon where it chases you around, completely invulnerable.

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