Emulator

Game Name?

Pikmin 2

Game ID?

GPVE01

MD5 Hash?

66f8d886afa0742cd9901d1bfe3b114f (confirmed with redump.org)

What's the problem? Describe what went wrong.

Pikmin 2 has a nasty bug which causes Dolphin to crash to desktop ("Dolphin.exe has stopped working") without Enable MMU checked. Sometimes this occurs at startup although rarely, but the steps below for me are 100% reproducible in creating the problem. Note that this bug is also sneaky and I had to take a very clinical approach to reproducing it, or it would not appear consistently. Please excuse the rather long description of the steps to reproduce it for this reason.

What steps will reproduce the problem?

To start with, you want to reach Awakening Wood on day 3, with 60 red pikmin (the maximum possible assuming you turned 10 into purple pikmin on day 2). With a save at this point, you can now reproduce the crash.

1. From the start, take out your 60 red pikmin from the onion.
2. We'll take a counterclockwise circular path around the landing zone. Move towards the ramp leading up to two plants and a black breakable wall, but don't go up the ramp. Kill the burrowing slugs at the bottom, and send them back to the onion.
3. Continue forward, and collect the pellets from the plants nearby, then kill the three bulborbs. Send them all back. (There's a strawberry treasure here on a ledge but it doesn't affect the bug, ignore it.)
4. Keep going in your circle, and you'll reach three more pellet plants. There's also some more burrowing slugs here. Kill everything and return them all to the onion as well.
5. As you complete your counterclockwise circle, send some pikmin to the grass in the corner and have them begin picking the grass.
6. You should now be back at your ship. Go to the onion and pluck the pikmin sprouts. Around this time you should get a cutscene that you've reached the maximum allowed pikmin.
7. Go collect your five pikmin at the grass and use the nectar to make flower pikmin. Another cutscene will trigger.
8. You should have 95 mostly flower pikmin at this point. Take them up the ramp from earlier, and collect the berries from the nearby plants to make ultra spicy spray. This will trigger two more cutscenes.
9. Bring all 95 pikmin to the black breakable wall, and use the spray (another cutscene) to take down the wall.
10. Continue through the broken wall and kill the shelled creature.
11. Ahead and on the left is a disguised flower monster. Kill this, and approach the cave entrance that's behind him and to the right. You should NOT be able to make it this far. If you can reach the flower monster and then the cave behind it, the bug has not occurred.

This was my full route from the beginning of day 3 to the cave entrance. The bug almost always occurs at 8-9, but it can occur way earlier around 5, or just a bit earlier around 7. But it will ALWAYS occur before reaching the cave entrance at the end of 11 following this path. While it seems to have something to do with the area with two plants and the breakable wall, just loading the save and walking up there did not work in reproducing the glitch. I had to do all of the above steps every time to confirm if a build was actually broken or not.

Which versions of Dolphin did you test on? Does using an older version of Dolphin solve your issue? If yes, which versions of Dolphin used to work?

5.0-1331 broken
4.0-9507 ok
5.0-666 ok
5.0-999 broken
5.0-834 ok
5.0-917 broken
5.0-881 broken
5.0-860 broken
5.0-848 broken
5.0-845 broken

What are your PC specifications?

Intel Core i3-3220 @ 3.3GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650, Windows 10

Is there any other relevant information? (e.g. logs, screenshots,
configuration files)

All core/graphics settings are at default, using OpenGL backend. Only game property is manually unchecked MMU.
I attached my .gci save to make it easier to check. You want to use slot 2, which is on day 3.