The first full-on sequel to Pokémon Peace Squad, Pokémon Peace Squad 2 takes all the things that the first one gave us and takes them up to eleven. Another episodic saga, this time, the arrival of seven unusual crystalline meteors from space with some connection to the Chaos Emeralds prompts not just the Pokémon Peace Squad to start searching for them, but also all the villainous teams, Dr. Eggman, and the Turks, who have formed an organization of their own called the Meta Alliance, led by the mysterious Meta Leader. On top of that, there's also the threat of a downright MASSIVE robot built to destroy the Pokémon Peace Squad to tangle with. With this new combined threat, the Squad already has their work cut out for them. The sequel adds in several new features, such as the option to now choose two Pokémon out of a pool of three (although some characters only get to choose one out of two), Pokémon now coming with helpful abilities, and two new stats in Health and Jump that help to further individualize each playable character, as well as doubling the number of playable characters from before and adding in faves such as Ash Ketchum and various movie characters, hidden boss fights, and much more.
In addition to all this, there's also the game's Quest Mode, where you choose from one of several customizable Pokémon Trainer bases who joins a troupe of mercenaries that is the precursor to the Pokémon Peace Squad. Here, typical Pokémon RPG elements blend with PPS gameplay as you level yourself up, catch Pokémon you can use to not just get through stages but also have battle in traditional Pokémon matches, and fight the various villains causing trouble. You can even transfer Pokémon to and from various handheld games or use your Quest Mode character in Story Mode! In addition, you get to travel through not just all the well-known Pokémon regions (Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh), but also the Orange Islands, Orre, Fiore, Almia, various Sonic the Hedgehog locations, Star City, and even Final Fantasy VII landmarks! It's like playing a whole other game.
A lot of the other additional flair that the first game had also returns for this, such as several extra stages you can play, an expanded multiplayer mode, tons of minigames you and your friends can partake in, being able to take part in simulated gambling, a race mode with a ton of different styles of racing, a small-but cool fighting game, a massive collectible card system with so many things Pokémon, Sonic, and Final Fantasy, and a number of other hidden features you can access. Due to the immense size of this game, it marks the return of the three-disc format that games such as Final Fantasy VII were known for, and there is more than enough content packed in this game to last a lifetime and there may always be something new for you to discover.
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Main Tropes
Tropes that apply to Pokémon Peace Squad 2:
- All the Worlds Are a Stage: Dimension Maze is a massive stage composed of parts from every levels outside of the Final Episode and extra levels, linked by portals of various colors. Robotic foes of various teams can appear in any part of the stage here.
- Amusement Park of Doom/Casino Park: Electric Park is a gigantic amusement park with a high-tech casino theme built by Team Plasma. There are tall buildings styled after slot machines, huge pinball tables you go through in giant transparent balls, giant craps tables with dice bigger than a person, long roads where you roll down in a giant game of Bingo, trains making their way on monorails, and Lanturn-shaped dirigibles serving as flying casinos. The last part of the level involves making your way along casino-themed trains.
- Anyone Can Die: This quickly ends up being the case in the game's Quest Mode, where your mercenary friends die one by one (or even multiple at a time). By the revisit to Chemical Plant in Chapter 9, with Serena's death, who makes a Heroic Sacrifice, your character is the only one left.
- Assist Character: Characters from the Sonic series, Final Fantasy VII, along with Pulseman, Mario, Solid Snake, and Ness, among others, appear in various stages and are controllable using a second controller.
- Badass in Distress: Knuckles ends up being this when Hunter J attacks Prof. Oak's lab and takes the Chaos Meteors to give to the Meta Alliance. Prof. Oak and Tracey are also nabbed.
- Bag of Spilling: In the first game, the chosen character had all skills available to them at the start, but in this game, the various skills have been relegated to tiers referred to as basic, intermediate, and advanced, and higher tier ones can only be done after obtaining Intermediate or Advanced Orbs, Diamond, or Pearl. Such a glaring example is swimming, and if you don't have at least an Intermediate Orb or Diamond, you'll lose instantly upon going into water. This applies more to the Orbs, which only last the duration of the stage, which can make things awkward if you for example collect an Intermediate Orb in one stage and are able to swim only to lose the ability to do so in the stage afterward.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: Optional Mission 2 for Astrom Platform in Quest Mode involves a girl named Mikiko who's dying from AIDS and has only ten minutes to live. However, there are crooks about that want to kill her to collect a bounty before she can die naturally. You're supposed to stop them from being able to kill her beforehand and have her die a natural death.
- Big Applesauce: Stardust City has aspects of this, being a large coastal city with tall buildings and various landmarks reminiscent of those in New York City, such as the Statue of Gallade (Statue of Liberty) and Tribune Square (Times Square). Pokémon Peace Squad Trinity adds in Star Central Station (Grand Central Station) as another landmark.
- Bittersweet Ending: Sephiroth has been defeated by the combined efforts of your character, Sonic, and Shadow, who manage to use the Chaos Emeralds to restore the universe, and Ryan and Nancy get married. However, your character ended up lost to the dimensions, although Prof. Oak decides to start working on creating a device in order to find and bring your character back. Note that if you're playing as certain characters (such as Ash); they'll be revealed to have made it back after all.
- In addition, if you managed to find the Arena Pass in Dimension Maze, you'll be treated to a bonus fight with the King of Pokélantis, where win or lose, your character will end up reappearing in Pokélantis and thus have returned home.
- Bubblegloop Swamp: One area of Flora Biome is a swamp with large plants and purple poison water that causes instant death if you fall in unless you have a Pokémon with the Immunity ability.
- Continuing is Painful: In addition to having to start the stage all over again like in Story Mode, Quest Mode also sends you back to the last Pokémon Center visited with half of you money gone (just like in the core series Pokémon games).
- Continuity Snarl: While the first game has aspects of this, PPS2 was especially bad about contradicting several elements from other things Pokémon. What makes this worse was that these were deliberate as they were the result of Executive Meddling. Basically, such retcons were shoehorned into the game, in ways that they let you know they were being contradicted, tended to be brought up repeatedly, and there were even special missions whose underlying purpose was to further such things, with by far the biggest offender being Mission 2 for Death Yard, which explicitly refers to three actual events from the anime as being rumors perpetrated by a tabloid magazine note .
- Crystal Landscape: Go-Rock Crystal is a large crystalline base located in a mountain containing a number of crystal-based gimmicks such as crystal boxes that have different effects depending on their color. A battle with Regicolossus occurs in a colossal crystal cavern outside the base proper.
- Doomed by Canon: During the first nine Chapters of Quest Mode, you're introduced to several members of the mercenary troupe that was the precursor to the Pokémon Peace Squad. None of these characters appear anywhere else, and over time it becomes quite apparent why.
- Down in the Dumps: Death Yard is a huge junkyard in a rocky area that contains hazards such as pools of toxic waste and fans that blow you away.
- Down the Drain: Aqua Submarine is a huge submarine belonging to Team Aqua that's filled with pools of chemicals that either prevent you from swimming or prevent you from being able to swim downward.
- Elaborate Underground Base: Depth Cavern is a series of huge caverns where Team Rocket has built floating chemical plants that Pokémon Hunter J has seized. The first part of the level involves sinking the factories while flying on a glider.
- Enemy Mine: Taken to the extreme before the final stage of the game, where after Meta Leader reveals himself to Sephiroth and that he only used the villainous teams for his own goals and tries to destroy both them and the Pokémon Peace Squad, he shatters the universe! All the villains decide to team up with the good guys and stop Sephiroth before it's too late.
- Epic Fail: The sad fate of Piplup being able to be in commercials. In this game's Quest Mode, you learn about a pharmaceutical company that had used Piplup in extensive marketing of their product, a medicine called Pip-Pup. Only 40 people ever bought the product, none of which even saw the commercials, and later all 40 customers died from the drug, which was then taken off the market. This forever made Piplup infamous in the commercial industry, with it being labeled as unmarketable. Ironically, Prinplup and Empoleon are actually the most marketable Pokémon for commercials.
- This has been brought up in later games, such as Chaos Adventure with Dawn having said that commercials are the one thing her Piplup hasn't been able to star in, due to the infamy of Pip-Pup.
- Escort Mission: Every Stage 2 for Episodes 3 – 14 has a character that you rescue that you have to reach the end with the first time you play the stage, basically making the stage a little harder. Upon clearing the stage, however, that character becomes playable.
- Even Evil Has Standards: In Chapter 7 of Quest Mode, it's revealed that Dr. Eggman had the Egg Spiker scrapped because it had so many flaws (no less than 22), it was a deathtrap for anyone that piloted it and he made it clear that no one should've piloted it in the first place.
- Evil, Inc.: Altru Inc. from Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia is explicitly stated starting from Blake Hall taking over to be a front for Team Dim Sun.
- External Retcon:
- As noted in the Continuity Snarl example above, the events of the anime episodes where Dawn caught Swinub, the Hearthome Collection, and Ash meeting Sinnoh Elite Four member Aaron are told in this game to be lies perpetrated by the tabloid K-Zone.
- Another such example is that Ethan and Lyra are instead haters of Jimmy and Marina that are trying to ruin their image and that it is actually Jimmy and Marina wearing their HG/SS outfits that are supposed to be the HG/SS protagonists.
- Face–Heel Turn: Upon your first visit to Cipher Key Lair in Quest Mode, you'll come across either Lex or Siara, who reveals him/herself to be upset over the other's death in the first stage of the mode and decided to leave the mercenary troupe and assist various villains in the hopes of coming across you and exacting revenge. Using a mech Dr. Eggman scrapped for unknown reasons, he/she decides to fight you.
- Fantastic Drug: Mudkip Scale, which is ingested by licking. It's known to have narcotic properties and prolonged use can even cause hallucinations. Further prolonged use can also lead to death.
- Floating Continent: Pokélantis is a massive technologically-advanced ancient city that's floating near the edge of space, having been raised by the Meta Alliance using the Chaos Meteors. The level Pokélantic Road involves going down the city streets while dealing with a large myriad of obstacles such as force fields, towers that fire large lasers, Hard Light roads, floating anti-gravity crystals, gravity-altering walls and ceilings, and more.
- Forced Tutorial: One that drags on is given to you before you go to the first stage. Here, you're taught everything, even simple things such as forward and backward movement (taught separately). You can't even perform an action until you're told to do it the first time.
- Green Hill Zone: Leaf Storm is a level in the vein of a first level (and is in fact one in its game of origin) taking place in a natural area of green. A time limit of 10 minutes, Flora Wheels that one-shot you if they run you over, and the Pathcrusher, a giant bladed wheel-shaped vehicle out to mow you down, make things a bit more difficult.
- Hailfire Peaks: Pokémon Peace Squad 2 has several examples of this kind of level design:
- Magma Reactor is a combination of Eternal Engine and Volcano Lair.
- Aqua Submarine is a combination of Down the Drain and Under the Sea inside a submarine.
- Flora Biome is a combination of Bubblegloop Swamp, Jungle Japes, Palmtree Panic, and Towering Flower, and has Container Maze added to the mix.
- Ice Metropolis is a combination of The City and Slippy-Slidey Ice World.
- Antarctic Lake is a combination of Slippy-Slidey Ice World and Under the Sea.
- Freeze Plant is a combination of Eternal Engine and Slippy-Slidey Ice World.
- Cipher Hotel is a combination of Eternal Engine and Hell Hotel.
- Depth Cavern is a combination of Eternal Engine and Underground Level.
- Go-Rock Crystal is a combination of Crystal Landscape and Eternal Engine.
- Regicolossus is a combination of Eternal Engine, Gravity Screw, Space Zone, and Womb Level, with shades of Slippy-Slidey Ice World in the last third.
- Meteor Base is a combination of Lethal Lava Land and Space Zone with Gravity Screw and Mirror World added in.
- Technologic Palace is a combination of Eternal Engine and Temple of Doom, along with Death Mountain, Lethal Lava Land, Down the Drain, Slippy-Slidey Ice World, Jungle Japes, The Lost Woods, Crystal Landscape, and Underground Level, with Gravity Screw thrown in.
- Hell Hotel: Cipher Hotel is a grand hotel that unbeknownst to the public was built by Team Cipher. Attractions include exquisite rooms, an arcade, a swimming pool, a casino, a shopping mall, and a Shadow Pokémon factory.
- Hellish Copter: When you enter the second half of Oil Labyrinth, you'll end up being chased by the Blade Copter, a helicopter with a vertical array of sawblades swinging underneath it. The blades will also cut through pipes containing oil while flares are thrown from the Blade Copter at you. Once you're cornered by it, you'll discover than Garret of the Go-Rock Quads is the one piloting the Blade Copter and take it head on, downing it. The Blade Copter makes a return at one point in Night Fleet, this time unmanned.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: When fighting Lex/Siara in Cipher Key Lair, due to the mech they're using being really faulty (there's a reason Eggman abandoned it), Lex/Siara fails to escape the craft before it explodes, killing them in the process.
- Humongous Mecha: Taken to the extreme with Regicolossus, a truly colossal robot based off of Regigigas that's stated to be one mile (1.6 kilometers) tall. It's brimming with dozens of different kinds of weapons, such as chainguns, missile launchers, solar pulsars, giant fire, ice, and electric lasers, darkmatter cannons, and its Colossus Buster Chest Blaster.
- Idol Singer: Quest Mode gives us Rica, a sixteen-year old (at the convergence point) pop and gravure idol that's famous throughout the Kanto region. She first appears having been captured by Team Flora and has to be rescued from the Leaf Storm stage. Afterwards, you get to watch the idol perform at a concert at Indigo Stadium. In addition, there's also Rica's fellow idol, Megumi (who is one year Rica's junior).
- Jungle Japes: Episode 3, Flora Overgrowth, as a whole happens to consist of jungle-themed levels. For individual examples:
- Angel Island takes place in a familiar-looking island jungle consisting of vines you can swing across, pools of water to swim through, and waterfalls to climb. Unlike its original iteration, the jungle doesn't catch fire later on (outside of Expert Mode, a Special Mission, and a Quest Mode mission).
- Leaf Storm is a stage consisting of huge vines and leaves making up most of the landscape. You have a time limit of 10 minutes to make it to the end of stage, with a giant wheel-shaped vehicle called the Pathcrusher to outrun afterwards.
- Tropical Trees takes place within trees that are hundreds of meters tall, with pathways, bridges, and huts making up a village. You'll go around and inside trees, utilize mechanisms in the village, run up the side of a REALLY tall tree, and ride a series of giant flowers going through the canopy.
- Flora Biome's central area consists of vibrant jungle connecting all the other areas, with thick green-color water located at the bottom.
- Kaizo Trap: Upon clearing Quest Mode Optional Mission 1 for Flight 999, you seemingly clear the mission (with it even being labeled Success), only to then appear on the Cargo Ship with Mr. Kincaid, who you protected in the mission, revealing himself to be The Dragon to Team Dim Sun's leader, and saying this is the end for you, forcing you into a fight with him. If you lose, you have to the whole mission over (with Success even changing to Failure).
- Karma Houdini: Every villain in Quest Mode ends up getting away without punishment for their crimes, which include (prior to Chapter 10) the deaths of every mercenary but yourself. Then again, if any of them got justice, they wouldn't appear in the game's main story.
- Killed Mid-Sentence: Early on in Quest Mode, you come across a Tingle Expy that offers to make a map of the entire known Pokémon world, who chants "Tingle. Tingle. Kooloo-lim-" only to get shot by a sniper. He does manage to say "pah" before falling dead, though.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: Regarding Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia, this game, mainly its Quest Mode, makes no attempt to hide that Blake Hall is Team Dim Sun's leader, even when the Quest Mode character themselves doesn't know.
- Legion of Doom: The Meta Alliance, which consists of every villainous team that has been known at the time of this game, plus Dr. Eggman and the Turks. It's also led by Sephiroth.
- Lethal Lava Land:
- Volcano Valley happens to be the enormous crater of an active volcano, with lava as far as the eye can see. Buildings resembling a Hawaiian village, mining rails you'll grind along, lava falls you can shut off, and lava geysers that cool to form spires you can go across make up the stage's features.
- Regicolossus's first third has pools of molten steel you'll have to cross, including one that rises inside a large shaft.
- Meteor Base has lava pools strewn about the level that make things more hazardous in addition to its various other features and obstacles.
- Luck-Based Mission: Two Special Missions happen to be this.
- Mission 2 for Tropical Trees requires you to execute one of seven special moves within 10:00 using Metronome. Since these moves are drawn out of a pool of about 474, you just have to keep using Metronome and hope you pull off one such move before time runs out.
- Mission 2 for Draco Starbase Area 5 is a textbook example of being luck-based. Sonrisa can only throw up to 100 bottles of steroids in order to get one that explodes (which is reduced to ½% for this mission). All you can really do here is throw steroids until one explodes, restarting the mission every time you throw 100 without success.
- The Maze: Dimension Maze is a vast maze going through time and space, composed of parts of stages from throughout the game, the exceptions being those in the Final Episode and those buyable from the Story Mode shop. Due to the size of the stage, you have access to all characters, being able to switch to another upon falling, and can even save your progress in the maze.
- Mile-Long Ship: The Rocket Armada 2 Flagship/Kyogre Flagship happens to be a supermassive ship. It's so huge that it's able to support Regicolossus, who stands a mile tall.
- Mirror World: There's one introduced in this game. In it, the Meta Alliance is a heroic police force while the Pokémon Peace Squad are bad guys, effectively making it an evil parallel universe, not to mention the layout is mirrored. It's reached by vehicles called Ghostdashers found in Episode 12 and Episode 14's Meteor Base and you must also be weary of your evil doppelganger having gone to the normal world. The Mirror World also returns in Endless Boundaries as a mechanic in a stage there. On another topic, an episode of the anime also coincidentally involved the Mirror World.
- Moveset Clone: Pokémon Peace Squad 2 has several of these, usually with mission-exclusive human enemies being reskins of other human enemies, but the most noticeable example happens to be Jupiter and Pokémon Hunter J, which have the same stats, use the same tactics, and even use similar boss mechs. In fact, the game considers them to be the same enemy. This is all in accordance to it being all but explicitly confirmed that the two are the same person. Team Galactic Grunts and Hunter Henchmen are also clones of one another and the game considering them to be the same enemy.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Actually said by your character after the death of Lex/Siara. Taking responsibility for what happened, your character turns him or herself into the police. Not long after, it's revealed that the mech was scrapped because Eggman deemed it a deathtrap and that it wasn't your character's fault for what happened, allowing him or her to be freed.
- Near-Villain Victory: During the end of the game, Sephiroth, revealed to be the true identity of Meta Leader, manages to shatter the entire universe, turning it into a broken mess of torn locations, and the good guys manage to defeat him just moments before he finishes the job.
- Nerf: Pokémon Peace Squad 2 has two of these over the first game:
- Vehicles in the first game could be driven indefinitely, but in this game, most vehicles require fuel to use, which costs money to do. Especially noticeable as there's many more than in the first game, with a number of them required to progress through levels.
- Star City Raceway from one of the first game's expansions gives one to the Mach 101 in the form of the Mach 101 clone, which is the same vehicle but without weapons, which means no autojacks, no oil slick, and no homing rocket, making it a purely racing vehicle.
- Nested Story Reveal: After clearing Chapter 9 of Quest Mode, it turns out that the first nine Chapters were a story that your character was telling, including him or her handwaving any errors in the story (such as one involving Cinnabar Island). However, this still doesn't explain the retcon involving Pokémon Ranger's events occurring in accordance on what PPS1 stated (since that game stated such events started late alongside that game's story, which begins after this story was told).
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: As the player character obtains each of the Chaos Meteors, he or she has them sent to Prof. Oak's lab. Once all seven have been found, what do you think happens when the Meta Alliance is able to find out where they are?
- No Fair Cheating: In Quest Mode, if you try to use a cheating device to reach an area that isn't accessible until a later chapter, the game will crash. This is because of how Adventure Map data is managed in the game, which means such data isn't added until the proper chapter.
- No-Gear Level: The events leading to Kingdom Valley have Pokémon Hunter J take all your Pokémon, stripping you of all Pokémon attacks and requiring you to get them back as you progress through the stage.
- No One Gets Left Behind: Much like in the first game, if there are any friendly characters tagging along with you, you lose if so much as one of them gets their HP reduced to 0. This is especially noticeable in Quest Mode where you can have as many as seven people with you at one point and not even one of them is allowed to fall. You also can't let an Assist Character under human control get reduced to 0 HP either (having them fall under CPU control is fine, however).
- A lot of these cases are justified, however, as a number of the characters you have to protect are ones that appear in both the first game and this game's main story, meaning that they are meant to survive the events of Quest Mode. Others such as the Matfields and the Acoys show up multiple times in Quest Mode, meaning of they were to fall at one point in the game, it would mess up their later appearances.
- Ominous Floating Spaceship: The Rocket Armada 2's flagship is a mammoth flying vessel in the shape of Kyogre that serves as the core of the Rocket Armada 2 that is shown floating in the sky in its center. The superfortress has tons of massive cannons, laser turrets, neutralizer weapons, and a giant superlaser.
- Optional Boss: Aqua Submarine, Egg Hovercraft, Plasma Tower, Ice Gate, Hunter Carrier, Galactic Elevator, and Dimension Maze have something called an Arena Pass. Clearing the stage with one in tow gives you one-time access to a boss stage where you fight Gigantic Mantine, another playable character, a brawl of enemies, Emerald Weapon, or the King of Pokélantis. To fight that boss again requires you to clear the stage with the Arena Pass again.
- Railroading: This game's Quest Mode has several of these, with a noticeable one involving a minigame called Pokéringer, which can be done in Fortree City. A bit down the Route going east of Fortree City is a horde of invisible Kecleon, which you can't get past unless you have the Devon Scope. It turns out that the Devon Scope is the prize for placing first in the short tournament of Pokéringer, thus forcing you to partake in it at least once.
- Retcon: In PPS1, when playing in The Forgotten City, it was brought up that the events of the first Pokémon Ranger had just begun. In Chapter 8 of this game's Quest Mode, the events of Pokémon Ranger have been retconned to having already transpired before the events of PPS1.
- Another one occurs involving events from this game. While the events of said location still happened, by Pokémon Peace Squad: Endless Boundaries, the location of the Hartache Ultra Building was retconned from being in Mandarin Island's main city to Stardust City.
- Saved by Canon: None of the villains encountered in Quest Mode can die or be brought to justice because of their roles in this game as well as the first, which precede this game's Quest Mode, wouldn't happen otherwise.
- Shifting Sand Land: Dusty Desert is a sprawling desert filled with large ruins and quicksand that you'll make your way through. The second half of the level takes you into a temple going under the sands.
- Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Episode 5, Rocket Glacier, as a whole happens to consist of ice levels. For individual examples:
- Ice Metropolis takes place in a city encased in an icy dome, with the level consisting of snowboarding down streets high in the air, climbing up tall buildings, navigating a maze of raised ice sheets, and exploring an ice factory.
- Antarctic Lake is a freezing lake located in an icy cavern under Ice Metropolis, where due to the temperature of the water you can only be under for half as long. Other features include thin ice sheets, puzzles where you push huge ice blocks or snowball enemies, and thawing Red Ice with Blue Fire.
- Freeze Plant takes place in a massive frozen factory where the main hazard is a substance called liquid ice, which is instant death if you fall in. Other hazards include floating ice packs in the air, areas of mist that restricts your jumping, and hovering turrets that shoot ice lasers.
- Ice Gate (or Great Glacier if you prefer) is a massive stage consisting of dozens of different paths and areas. The start of the stage puts you in Icicle Lodge (or Icicle Inn) before having you snowboard into the level proper. One of the hazards here is quicksnow, which functions the same as quicksand.
- The last third of Regicolossus is frozen over, containing pools of liquid ice. A long Snowball Turret puzzle is especially noticeable here.
- Sole Survivor: This is the fate of the Quest Mode character, as they end up becoming the only member of the mercenary troupe still alive towards the end of Chapter 9.
- Stealth-Based Mission: There are a couple instances of this in the game:
- In the first part of Cipher Hotel, you need to sneak past Cipher Peons in order to enter the hotel proper. Making this more justified is the fact that they carry flashlight-shaped weapons called Glare Guns, which stun you if you're caught in one, but if a Cipher Peon spots you, it's still possible to dodge and even fight them as long as you don't get caught by the Glare Gun. If you're caught, you'll be thrown in a cell-like area.
- In Chapter 3 of Quest Mode, in order to get to Kanto, since your passport initially isn't approved for entry into Kanto, you need to sneak past international border guards on Route 26 and Route 27, where if spotted, you'll be sent back to New Bark Town.
- There are two optional Quest Mode Missions arranged by the border guards to test your wits that you can try to clear, the Expert Level for Angel Island, and the Master Level for Cipher Key Lair.
- The Stinger: After the credits (unless you ended up fighting the King of Pokélantis or are playing as a specific character), you're treated to a scene in which your character comes to and turns out to have ended up in Blaze the Cat's home dimension.
- Super Drowning Skills: Unlike in the first game, for some reason you can't swim unless you have an Intermediate Orb or Intermediate Diamond with you. Fortunately, this was removed in later games.
- Temple of Doom: Technologic Palace takes place inside four enormous temples located within Pokélantis. Due to story reasons, you'll select four different characters, one for each temple. The main gimmick of this level involves huge chambers containing holographic technology that gives each chamber a look based of different level environments, with switches that make the setting disappear, revealing its metallic grid structure, and revealing paths and platforms you couldn't use before.
- Towering Flower: One of the domes in Flora Biome contains a giant flower garden with flowers the size of tall trees. Navigation here involves going along walkways over foliage, going up the interior of flower stems, and across platforms that appear whenever the dome becomes bathed in sunlight.
- Tree Top Town: Tropical Trees consists of a village located high in the jungle treetops, with switches that activate various things throughout the village.
- Unperson: Pokémon Peace Squad 2 has a meta example involving Barry, Ethan, Lyra, and the Hearthome Collection, as all four of them basically don't exist as far as this game is concerned. Barry is replaced with a blatant Suspiciously Similar Substitute called Pearl, Ethan and Lyra are replaced with Jimmy and Marina in their HG/SS outfits, with the former two used as the names of imposters of the latter two, and the one time the Hearthome Collection is mentioned it's referred to as a non-existent competition brought up in a tabloid magazine, all three of these basically being a Take That! to all four characters/events.
- Volcano Lair: Magma Reactor is a giant base sitting in the middle of the lava of a giant volcano on a tropical island. Inside are obstacles reminiscent of Wacky Workbench such as springy floors, fire coils, and rising cylinder tubes. Other hazards include lava pools and falls, large pistons, corridors so hot that you'll take damage while inside, large tunnels that magma rushes through, requiring you to take shelter inside special capsules, and a giant X-Ray machine you'll go through.
- Where It All Began: The final optional mission in Quest Mode than can be unlocked is located in Angel Island, the first stage in the game, and consists of every non-boss enemy in the game!
- Wide-Open Sandbox: Quest Mode happens to be a hugely expansive adventure that could qualify for a whole game in of itself, with 8 regions and a multitude of other locations to explore, Pokémon to catch and have battles using, action stages to play through, minigames to play, and more.
- Womb Level: Regicolossus involves you going through the titular titanic robot, with there being various mechanical hazards such as various weapons, laser grids, huge boxes that churn out robots, and switches that change the gravity.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!:
- Pokémon Peace Squad 2 pulls this off no less than four times. First, after finally collecting all the Chaos Meteors and sending them to Prof. Oak's lab, it looks as though they're all safe and out of the Meta Alliance's hands, except that Pokémon Hunter J is sent to take them all back again and on top of that takes Oak, Tracey, and Knuckles as additional prizes, prompting the Squad to mount a massive assault on Team Rocket's colossal air fleet and go inside Regicolossus to shut it down once and for all. But wait a minute, all the villains manage to evacuate to a gigantic Star City shuttle and head for space, so now you must climb said shuttle as it heads upward and eventually go through Team Draco's starbase, fight Dralene, and get the Chaos Meteors back. Okay, everything's all good again, except after unlocking the Final Episode, the villainous team leaders return, take the Chaos Meteors again and raise Pokélantis from the ground to the edge of space, and you must now get through said city, fight a possessed member of the Squad, and activate four temples. That's all accomplished, except that you've played right into Meta Leader's hands and he decides to reveal his true identity, turn on the other villains, and use the Chaos Meteors to bring about the universe's end, requiring you now to go through a tangled dimensional mess, fight Sephiroth (Meta Leader's identity) and Metal Sonic fused together, then fight them fused with Regicolossus deep in the void. If you also grabbed the Arena Pass, this trope is done a fifth time, as you now find yourself having to fight the King of Pokélantis (although you don't have to necessarily win this one).
- Also, when playing in Expert Mode, Draco Starbase Area 5 alone pulls this off three times. After defeating Dralene and re-collecting all the Chaos Meteors, you then have to fight Meta Leader himself, then after defeating him, you fight Dralene again in an even stronger craft and have to use the Chaos Meteors to fight her. After that's said and done, you need to safely make it back to Earth and make a splashdown in the Lake of Rage.
- In Optional Mission 1 for Flight 999 in Quest Mode, after making it so that Mr. Kincaid and his students don't come to harm for 10 minutes, you clear the mission, except that you then find yourself on board the Cargo Ship where Mr. Kincaid reveals to you that he's Team Dim Sun's second in command and that you must now fight him (and you must fight him every time you seem to clear the mission) in order to truly clear the mission. Losing to him means that you must do the whole mission over. Note that this is the only time in the game that an Optional Mission throws you such a curveball.
- You Wanna Get Sued?: Red Mountain Optional Mission 1 in Quest Mode involves an entity that Buck refers to as the Red Ring of Doom. He explains that while he would call it something else, he'd get sued by the company behind a competing game system if he did. What Buck is referring to is the "Red Ring of Death" that plagued many an Xbox 360.
CHARACTER FOLDERS
Other Villains
Regicolossus
Created by Team Rocket as their greatest weapon, Regicolossus is a truly immense robot with virtually every weapon there is built into it, incredible strength, and more! Modeled after the legendary Pokémon Regigigas, it's credited as the largest robot in existence! (Seriously, not even Eggman's ever built a robot this big!) It has enough power to obliterate mountains, entire cities, large islands, everything in its path. As a result, it's one of the most dangerous weapons Team Rocket has ever possessed! In Pokémon Peace Squad: Ultra Revival, Team Rocket has built dozens of them!
Tropes that apply to Regicolossus:
- The Assimilator: Regicolossus has the power to take control of anything electrical or mechanical that it comes in contact with, which it does to a mako furnace, the Highwind, and Pokélantis' laser towers.
- The Bus Came Back: In Pokémon Peace Squad: Ultra Revival, Regicolossus makes a surprising return in the form of a whole army of them!
- Colossus Climb: Each battle with Regicolossus except the final two involve making your way up its body in order to reach the top of it and damage it.
- Extra-ore-dinary: Regicolossus can launch giant metal blades from its hands that are able to cut through almost anything, but can also be used as stepping-stones by the chosen character.
- Eye Beams: Regicolossus's six eyes each fire powerful lasers; two fire-based, two ice-based, and two-electric based.
- Fantastic Nuke: Regicolossus's main weapon is the Colossus Buster, which fires a blast that can destroy an entire city.
- Fire, Ice, Lightning: Regicolossus's six eye-based mega lasers come in fire, ice, and electric varieties, each with their own effects.
- Fusion Dance: During the finale of Pokémon Peace Squad 2, Sephiroth, already fused with Metal Sonic, merges with Regicolossus and the Chaos Meteors, becoming Absolute Sephiroth, the Final Boss of the game.
- Human Popsicle: When Regicolossus is first encountered within Freeze Plant, it's encased within an enormous glacier, which it then effortlessly bursts out of upon awakening.
- Humongous Mecha: Taken to the extreme as Regicolossus stands at an immense 1.6 kilometers! It manages to contain an entire level inside it.
- Think Regicolossus is already massive as it is? Optional Mission 3 for Cipher Key Lair in Quest Mode ends with a titansized one stepping onto the factory! Turns out to only be a projection created by Ardos as a test of courage for you.
- Macross Missile Massacre: Regicolossus has hundreds of missile launchers located on its body that it uses to rain down destruction from the sky.
- Mook Maker: The inside of Regicolossus contains multiple gigantic boxes that produce various Team Rocket robots that are meant to protect its interior and can also be launched en masse from it.
- More Dakka: Regicolossus has what could be thousands of gun turrets located all over its body that it can fire in all directions at once.
- Our Darkmatter Is Mysterious: Regicolossus has giant darkmatter cannons located within its hands that it fires huge blasts of dark energy with.
- Power of the Sun: The center of Regicolossus hands contain powerful solar pulsars that are capable of destroying buildings with one shot.
- Reactor Boss: The fourth battle with Regicolossus happens to be against its atomic core. Its core is completely immune to normal attacks, instead requiring you to take down walking robotic tanks that enter the chamber, then throw their turrets at the core while dodging laser fields and robots that it deploys from capsules.
- Recurring Boss: Regicolossus is fought four times throughout the events of Pokémon Peace Squad 2, the fourth of which is done from the inside of it. You end up fighting it a fifth time during the Final Episode.
- Uniqueness Decay: In Pokémon Peace Squad: Ultra Revival, Regicolossus is now being massed produced by Team Rocket's regime, with many of them deployed during the second and third parts of the game.
- Wave-Motion Gun: Regicolossus has a superlaser embedded into the area on its back that it uses during the final fight with it in Pokélantis.
- Womb Level: The third stage of Episode 13 in Pokémon Peace Squad 2 takes place within Regicolossus's cavernous, sometimes maze-like body, with obstacles such as molten steel, electrical, and liquid ice pools, machinery that churns out robots, laser fields, hidden weaponry, and more throughout.
OTHER FOLDERS
Trivia
- Executive Meddling: Pokémon Peace Squad 2 unfortunately happens to be rife with this kind of thing:
- Sunflorazumarill's original pitch for the game didn't involve so much vehicle usage. Most of the vehicles in the game were shoehorned in by Carrington, almost making vehicle driving one of the gimmicks of the game. In most cases, driving these vehicles is required to clear various stages. In addition, while the first game had no such mechanic, most vehicles now require fuel (which you have to pay for) in order to use.
- The fact that various actions in the game (such as swimming) now require things such as Intermediate and Advanced Orbs, Diamonds, and Pearls, even though all actions were available from the start in the first game, was also added in by Carrington. One such case is the start of the Aqua Submarine stage, which was originally intended to have the character start swimming from the get-go regardless, but was changed to piloting a small submarine inside it (and it being blown up if you're able to swim from the beginning).
- Due to his role as a villain in this game, Giovanni was replaced by Silver (the GSC rival) as a playable character. However, even after this, Giovanni was made a playable character anyway (albeit one unlocked at one point in Quest Mode) and on top of that, Jessie & James were also made playable characters (also unlocked in Quest Mode). Due to the story, however, they can't be used in Episode 5, Highwind Crisis, or Episode 13, and playing as them is outright stated to be non-canon to the game's story.
- At the end of the Flora Biome stage, there was originally supposed to be a line from the villagers about turning the complex into an ecology base, but was removed. Instead, it's stated that the Team Flora helicopter at the end is big enough to seat everyone, implying that the villagers leave with the chosen character.
- In Episode 5, Jessie & James were originally supposed to be battled only in Antarctic Lake. Instead, they were made to be battled once in Ice Metropolis (despite a boss battle already occurring shortly beforehand), once in Antarctic Lake, and twice in Freeze Plant. In addition, several additional bosses were shoehorned into Freeze Plant in both Jenny and Expert Modes.
- Originally, Pokémon Hunter J was supposed to only be hired by the Meta Alliance to do two tasks for them, but this was changed to be that she was a part of the organization. In addition, J was supposed to suffer a Disney Death regardless of the character you played as after defeating her, but was changed to that some characters get a different cutscene where the Disney Death doesn't happen. To top things off, in Episode 13, J was originally going to leave after delivering Prof. Oak and Knuckles to the Meta Alliance, but she and her henchmen were added to the bestiary for Episode 13's stages.
- Despite having no relevance to the story of the game whatsoever, Timerunners and Spaceriders were shoehorned into the game (with Timerunners only appearing in Episode 12). In addition, a new vehicle called a Ghostdasher was also added to the game, despite it having no relevance either and only appearing in Episode 12 and Meteor Base.
- Gold Beetles (from Sonic Adventure 2) were slated to appear once in every stage of the game, but in the end, they were relegated into only being in any stage taken from a Sonic game (although in some cases more than one appears in a stage).
- Drill Dozers were supposed to make a return in PPS2's multiplayer mode, but were taken out. Even more egregious, every multiplayer mode except "Destroy the Dozer" made a return and several new modes were added in as well.
- One of the most egregious examples of things changed from Sunflorazumarill's original vision was with the collectible card system, in which he stated all the methods for collecting them (all of which involve clearing a stage with certain conditions met). In addition to bumping the number of cards from 1200 to 2400, none of the original intended ways of collecting cards were used in the final version. In fact, none of the actual implemented ways even involve clearing the stage.
- Word of God: Over the years, Sunflorazumarill decided to confirm specific details regarding some things in the game:
- The story behind the Rocket Scorpion and Rocket Hydroplane in Pokémon Peace Squad 2 is that they were built using the remains of the Hunter Scorpion and Hunter Hydroplane after the destruction of the latter two.
YMMV
- No-Damage Run: There are four Special Missions that involve this, all of them Mission 4's. For Volcano Valley's, you must make is through the stage without Caitlin taking damage (Darach taking damage is fine). Mission 4C for Corel Mountain takes it a step further by making it so that neither character is allowed to take damage. Draco Starbase Area 4 has one for Argenta where she can't take damage and has to reach the end within a time limit. Finally, Empire City has one that does the same thing, only with Agatha.
- Take That, Scrappy!: Episode 10 features the widely despised Princess Elise from Sonic '06 showing up, to be kidnapped by Pokémon Hunter J. She also gets kidnapped by Team Rocket during an Optional Quest Mode Mission for Kingdom Valley. The game pulls no punches with Elise's infamy as around 50% of the playable characters have idle quotes if you stand around in Kingdom Valley, further bashing her:Brock: I know I should be head over heels for Elise, but there's something about her that makes me sick to my stomach…Misty: Getting kidnapped, Elise? I think you’re used to it by now. Learn to defend yourself, bitch!Erika: [Elise] reminds me of a princess in a pink dress, one who gets kidnapped all the time. Even then, she's far better than this one.Sabrina: *throws up in mouth* I have felt that Princess Elise kissed a person once. A dead person.Shingo: I'm wondering if we should let Princess Elise into the Squad after rescuing her. Never. It would be an insult to do so.Harley: I hate this Elise princess! I hate her! I hate her! I HATE HER! I HATE HER! I! HATE! HER!Marley: I can't shake this feeling that Elise may have kissed something not far from a dead Shaymin. *shudders*
