The Crushing Weight of Pikmin 2

Comments · 185

• SK

  @Skyehoppers · 11 days ago · pinned

  Hello! Sincerely, thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, please consider supporting me on Patreon for $1/month or sending a small tip on <a href="http://ko-fi.com/">ko-fi.com</a> (links in the description). Now, what did you think of my analysis? Any differing interpretations? Anything you think I missed? Art interpretation should be treated as a conversation, so I&apos;ve listed some discussion questions below to kick-start analysis beyond what I did in the video! <br> <br>1. How are the ideas I discuss in this video represented or not represented in the more recent Pikmin games? I haven&apos;t played them myself besides P3 for a few hours, so I&apos;m curious to what extent things have changed over time. <br> <br>2. There is quite a lot of text in the Mail mechanic, most of which I never dug into. Are there any other interesting and meaningful details in those messages?<br> <br>3. Waterwraith! There&apos;s a lot of very earnestly strange details in the description of the creature. Is there anything further symbolic about it?

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• BR

  @brownpantsman7868 · 11 days ago

  Seeing the Olimar entries in Pikmin 2 it really feels like someone at Nintendo was venting about their situation

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• SH

  @ShiraCheshire · 10 days ago

  When I was a kid, I also hated the idea of a pikmin dying. That&apos;s why I only ever lost a few during my entire first playthrough as a kid.<br>Instead of risking my pikmin to the hazards of caves, I&apos;d send Olimar out and have him punch every. Single. Punchable enemy. To death. This took hours. I&apos;d reset if anything caught me by surprise and killed a pikmin. I went down to the deepest level of the final cave over and over only to not fight the boss, because I wasn&apos;t good enough to avoid losing pikmin when I did it. It was all worth it though, because it meant all my little guys got home safe and sound.<br><br>After I beat the game, I went around just growing my pikmin numbers and collecting tasty sprays. I only stopped because I felt bad about that repeating message from Olimar&apos;s wife, and wanted him to be able to go home to be with his family.<br><br>Maybe the message is that I was a silly, ridiculous child. Or maybe there&apos;s something in there about how none of this is inevitable, maybe. I don&apos;t know.

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• KI

  @kittimitti6 · 11 days ago

  As someone who&apos;s been playing all the pikmin games many times over the last 3 years, I&apos;ve had to come to terms with the loss of pikmin life a while ago in order to get through them and I haven&apos;t really spent much time to think about it since then. &nbsp;When I heard you say &quot;they sing&quot; though, that broke me into tears immediately and filled me with such an overwhelming sense of sadness. All the misery you&apos;d described felt like it all came crashing down on me at once. Great video man.

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• PR

  @pressaTD · 11 days ago

  Exploiting Pikmin to make money…. Who would do such a thing?

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• BI

  @bigmooms7729 · 10 days ago

  great video! this game has always seemed very anti-capitalist to me, and it is cool to see people discussing it. a couple of points id like to make:<br><br>1. the idea of the pikmin benefiting from Olimar&apos;s involvement in a colonialist sort of way seems to be contradicted by how few pikmin there are at the start of the game. assuming these are the same three onions from the first game (which i think we can assume given that we are in the same areas and there are no other onions to be found), their populations are dramatically decreased from where they would have been at the end of pikmin 1, and they are struggling to fight a single dwarf bulborb. to me this implies that nature restores itself and the food chain balances out the pikmin population after not too long. the same will presumably happen after the ending of pikmin 2 as well, the meaning being that any progress achieved through Olimar (and by extension capitalism) is not as impressive as it first seems, and quickly reclaimed by nature. <br><br>2. I have never understood Louie to be intended as a stand in for humanity&apos;s greediest impulses, nor a defence of how capitalism can potentially curtail them. to me, he has always come across as an allegory for the type of people who cannot function well in a capitalist system (and potentially even neurodivergent, given how he is consistently portrayed as quiet and &apos;odd&apos;) . Olimar, for all the wonderful and poignant thoughts he writes, does function successfully under capitalism. he pushes his dreams aside, toils for the company, and achieves modest success. Louie on the other hand could not handle the responsibility of his job, caving in and making a foolish choice which nearly ruined the company. It is also worth noting that unlike Olimar&apos;s nuclear family, Louie comes from a much less idealised background, being raised by his grandmother due to what we can only assume was the death or estrangement of his parents (his grandma also not seeming to be a very fit guardian, given that she forced him to eat the bugs). Louie is the kind of person that doesnt fit in well in a capitalist environment, but seems to flourish as soon as he is put on the distant planet, able to achieve things once in a naturalistic setting and away from his boss. after collecting the treausres, I definitely interpret it as him wanting to be left behind, his old life on Hocotate being much less desirable than the life he had made for himself here. its interesting that he also abandons the pikmin, ending his exploitation of them as soon as the opportunity arises. And rather than him directly controlling the titan dweevil, i think there is a stronger argument for him unconsciously influencing it. he is described as not moving, and we already know dweevils mimic the behaviour of the object they are carrying. given that the titan dweevil was carrying a bunch of weapons and someone who had a strong desire to be left alone, the creature became very hostile to the people trying to bring Louie back to Hocotate. him being forcibly put in the ship and taken back is a pretty sad ending for the character to be honest.

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• CL

  @clefairyfan333 · 10 days ago

  Of course Nintendo would never align with Marx, that guy tried to kill Kirby!

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• BR

  @brownpantsman7868 · 11 days ago

  I just noticed how Pikmin has nature run in parallel with the corporate world: the constant fight for survival or else you lose your position in the food chain, how you have to use other beings as tools to crawl your way up, or even the initial start from trying to survive in Pikmin 1 to simple profit incentive in Pikmin 2. I&apos;m sure you could even draw a parallel to colonialism here.

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• CH

  @church7089 · 11 days ago

  Actually guffawed when the screen transitioned to the Saturn valley waterfall for &quot;lunch.&quot;

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• WH

  @what12388 · 11 days ago

  Well, what I find interesting about the caves as an aspect of Pikmin 2 is their contrast to the surface.<br><br>The surface is this lively naturalistic Eco system, but the caves are these rigidly structures man made structure with creatures that...don&apos;t seem to have to spawned naturally. A creatures doesn&apos;t just spawn a machine gun randomly and I think the only reason all the enemies are so much more dangerous down in the caves is simply because they had to adapt to an environment that is filled with dangerous things that just seem to want to kill you for no reason at all.<br><br>A cave floor is where you can see the hand of the designer, where the videogame becomes clear to see, the same way you can see the hand of humans in our structures.

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• BR

  @brownpantsman7868 · 11 days ago (edited)

  I think the song &quot;Ai no Uta&quot; for Pikmin 1 is the perfect representation of both this theme and Pikmin as a whole, no wonder it outsold the first Pikmin game

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• JA

  @jackprobert8733 · 10 days ago

  Pikmin 3 is interesting as a follow-up to everything you’re talking about because its protagonists are motivated by survival again. They’re looking for fruit that can grow on their post-apocalyptic home planet, which is destroyed by their own pollution.<br><br>It’s a much more direct parallel with what might have happened to the humans on PNF-404. Plus, it changes the atmosphere of the game’s story to something more optimistic and hopeful again. It’s also interesting that 3’s protagonists include an actual botany researcher this time!<br><br>Also, that there’s a lot more emphasis on the three protagonists working together - puzzles often need you to throw other Captains to complete them - is interesting in comparison to Pikmin 2’s much more individual gameplay. Pikmin 3 doesn’t just ask you to work with your Pikmin, it asks you to work with your fellow Captains, too.<br><br>Thank you for a great video! Pikmin 2 is probably my least favourite of the series, but it’s still very interesting.

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