I initially thought that without the time limit from Pikmin 1 this game would be a lot easier to beat but boy was I wrong. Sure, the overworld in this game is easy enough to deal with and traverse but the real difficulty comes from the caves. Purple Pikmin are able to destroy a majority of the enemies but in the late game caves especially it's harder and harder to navigate the environments with the sheer amount of enemies and hazards you have to be wary of. It's very difficult to multi-task in this game as well so if a bomb rock drops on you or a bulbear starts chomping away at your pikmin while you're trying to do something else you're gonna have a real tough time getting out of that situation, especially with how finicky the Pikmin can be about when they wanna stop doing something. I reloaded my game several times just trying to get through one sublevel without losing all or most of my pikmin. While I like the dungeon crawling element and think it added something fresh to the game, I do think some of the caves went way overboard for sure, especially with the procedural generation it felt like sometimes you were genuinely shit outta luck.