If a video game is a main course and standard DLCs are side dishes, this is the equivalent of a restaurant goer saying "my meal is too salty" and the waiter responding "for only $2.99 you can buy a tool with which to scrape some of the salt off!"

It worked so well at this one restaurant that, naturally, all the other ones followed suit. Restaurants that already offer easy modes- uh I mean less salty meals stocking salt scrapers to get a quick buck off of the people who lacked the endurance to eat the saltier meal but lacked the humility to just order the low salt alternative. Restaurants making their meals deliberately saltier (see Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology) to sell their salt scrapers. Restaurants dodging the microtransfation (idk man you come up with any better) allegations for years by making you work just a little bit for your low-salt meal.

And it's all the fault of Fryer Emblem's Awakening Burger. They were far from the first to ever do pay-to-win DLC, but they sure found one of the most clever methods to do it. And the industry was never the same since.

I think I enjoyed this game a lot more than most people in part because I wasn't that into Breath of the Wild and its lore so this game's more divisive writing decisions didn't bother me as much and in part because I'm just generally a huge Musou sucker and this game, mechanically speaking, is a very, very solid Musou game. Not as good as the original Hyrule Warriors but then few Musou games are. The movesets are largely great, there's a huge amount of content, and the system mechanics include a lot of super nice touches, like every character getting their own variations on the Sheikah Slate runes, and shield-wielding characters like Link and Urbosa getting to use the parry/reflection straight from BotW. There's just a lot to chew on and experiment with for fans of the genre.

That said, while I didn't consider it a deal breaker like some people, the performance definitely isn't ideal. I don't think it's a controversial statement to say this is like, the #1 game that would benefit from the existence of a Switch Pro. But it's also pretty old at this point so knowing Nintendo and Koei Tecmo they probably wouldn't even update this game to make use of the hardware lol