faramir77 posted...
I had that same issue with it. By about day 5 in game it became clear that the pressure wasn't really there.
I think that was pretty much exactly my experience. Those first few days, it was a matter of "I need to make sure I find enough fruit to stay ahead of what I need." By about day 5, though, I had enough that I could never collect another piece of fruit and still be able to last for 20-30 days, and that drive disappeared.
faramir77 posted...
Pikmin 1 has a more appropriate difficulty but still isn't really that big of a challenge.
I think is was a good balance. Getting everything in less than 30 days is trivial now that I know what I'm doing, but on a first playthrough when I was 12 years old, I felt appropriately challenged by needing to find at least one part per day.
faramir77 posted...
Pikmin 2 seems to be the most divisive. Lots of people say that it's the best, I personally think it's undoubtedly the worst, with the cave system being incredibly boring.
I need to revisit it. I remember enjoying that the caves meant there could be longer, more complex puzzles and fights because there was no longer a need to fit them within the limit of a day, plus the quasi-roguelike experience of having to complete the cave in one shot instead of being able to leave and restock my army made for an interesting challenge because it provided a different sort of resource pressure.
On the flip side, though, they also meant that any given session spent quite a bit of time in a single cave that tended to be a fairly uniform environment and therefore not as engaging as exploring overworld locations. It wasn't quite as a egregious as, say, time stopping while inside the greenhouse in Harvest Moon 64 and dramatically increasing the length of any given day while you watered everything in there (no idea how well that reference will land here, but it's the first thing I thought of), but I expect I would still agree that it slows the pace down by enough to be a bit of a problem.