20 Years On, Pikmin 2’s Waterwraith Remains Nintendo’s Scariest Moment

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.