Pikmin 2 Waterwraith
Image: Nintendo Life

Soapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they've been chewing over. Today, Jim is reliving a childhood trauma to mark Pikmin 2's 20th anniversary...

To the casual observer, Pikmin must seem like a pretty relaxed experience. Everything is colourful. The characters are cute. There's even a little dog guy in the latest one. All told, it must just be delightful.

It's no secret that I love Pikmin and, with bloodshot eyes and unbrushed hair, I am here to grab you by the shoulders and tell you that you are wrong.

Pikmin is not a relaxing experience. Sure, your little buddies are cute, but good luck getting to sleep at night after you've heard their cute little screams. PNF-404 (which is the planet that you're prone to crash landing on, for those wondering) is a never-ending wheel of traumas. You will see Pikmin drowned, eaten, and squished all before making a mad dash back to your ship before things get dark and the real predators come out to play. Think that sounds relaxing? Think again, buddy.

But as the hardened Pikmin fans know, watching your troops get burned alive is child's play. The series has plenty more stomach-churning horrors up its sleeve and all pale in comparison when put up against Pikmin 2's Waterwraith — a being so devilishly horrifying that I would still put its reveal among Nintendo's scariest moments.

Pikmin 2 Ship
Ready for blast-off? Next stop: Trauma Town — Image: Nintendo

Today, the game turns 20 (in Japan, at least) and so I am putting on my big boy pants and diving back into the moment that left my GameCube on pause for 45 minutes while my confused mother attempted to decipher what her sobbing son meant by "blob man," "rolling pins," and "so many little ghosts."

It all takes place in the 'Submerged Castle,' one of the four caves found in Pikmin 2's 'Perplexing Pool' area and the site of so many horrors you have to wonder just how dazzled by the cute overworld the age rating board was when it slapped a PEGI 3 on there.

Before you even dive into this cave, things look hairy. You can only enter with Blue Pikmin and your ship is reluctant to join you down there, telling you in a definitely-not-sinister way, "You two must go alone". But nonetheless, you load up on viable team members and jump right in because how upsetting can it really be?

Very upsetting, matey. Very upsetting.

This is five sublevels of every conceivable hazard (fire, water, electricity, and poison) and, as we mentioned, you only have Blue Pikmin to deal with it. The enemies on each floor hardly help to calm your nerves either, with a Fiery Bulblax rearing its flaming, half-melted face as soon as you turn the first corner — again, PEGI 3?!

Looking back on it now, this is spooky enough. But 20 years ago I was blissfully unaware of the hidden five-minute timer that counts down on each and every floor. A ticking time bomb which, on hitting zero, releases the Waterwraith and makes every horror you had seen up to that point feel like a walk in the park.

For those who have been lucky enough to avoid this abomination over the past two decades, the Waterwraith is a gelatinous blob that straddles two giant rollers and is capable of crushing all of your party Pikmin in one fell swoop. Armed with limited troop types, its translucent body is immune to all attacks (until you hit sublevel five) so all that you can do is run and hide.

And run and hide I did. My first meeting with the Waterwraith resulted in a rare 'Game Over,' with all of my Pikmin flattened. The fact that it had dropped in out of nowhere meant that every subsequent run was full of paranoia. When will it arrive next? How long do I have left? Why are my palms so sweaty?

On the final sublevel, you can load up on Purple Pikmin and finally take that sucker down, but we Pikmin fans didn't know that at the time (a sense of panic that you don't get from the cool experience demonstrated in the above playthrough). As far as I was aware, this was an unbeatable demon who wouldn't rest until Olimar, Louie, and every Pikmin in sight was flatter than a day-old Coke.

It had been the best part of two decades before this blob beast plopped into the franchise again in last year's Pikmin 4, but it still gave me the heebie-jeebies — and I knew how to beat the damned thing this time. Who would have thought that a giant, faceless entity capable of ending your game in an instant would be so terrifying?

In Nintendo's defence, it has pumped out a good amount of nightmare fuel over the years capable of scarring more than its fair share of innocent little minds — Dead Hand in Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask's tumbling moon, Big Boo in Super Mario 64, the spooky strings of Lavender Town. We could go on (if we were brave enough).

But for me, the Waterwraith is the granddaddy of them all. It's the ultimate combination of suspense, character design, and peril which culminates in an experience that I would rather never revisit again. I want a Pikmin 5 just as much as anyone, but I don't know whether my fragile little heart can handle another cameo from this monstrosity.

Do you remember your first run-in with the Waterwraith? Are you equally scarred by the whole experience Let us know in the comments.