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

Weird amalgamation of DW2's style of Musou Mode and DW4's character roster, only with weirdly segmented battlefields and a UI that takes up a third of the screen. I mean, it's not unplayable, and if this were the only PSP Musou game I'd have applauded them for getting 1 vs. 1000 action to work on the system at all, but seeing how polished and faithful of a PSP port Warriors Orochi 2 would later get does not do this game any favors. I like the reworked bodyguard system though, it's probably one of the only things that actually stands out in a good way about this release. Feels like a prototype for what DW8XL's bodyguards would later entail.

Best storytelling of any Musou game and that's including Persona 5 Strikers. No other game in the series even gets close to making you feel this much for the series' versions of the Three Kingdoms characters, as much as 8 and 9 make genuinely solid attempts at it. There's more moments that make me cry in this game's plot than there are in the rest of the series combined (aside from DW3 but those are tears of laughter). Powerful, powerful stuff.

Oh, yeah, and there's a game attached to it. I mean Legend Mode is pretty fun and has a lot of replayability but if you're not here for the writing the Story Mode falls kind of flat compared to its contemporaries and I do think this game suffers from the modern Musou moveset clone issues a whole lot, especially so since Story Mode doesn't let you choose your character on first playthrough. Yeah, you can weapon switch, and you bet your ass I'm gonna be weapon switching because nobody's been assigned the Bombs as an EX weapon yet, but if you're the kind of guy who likes to exclusively use each character's EX weapon, well, I hope you like the generic Sword, because you'll be using it a lot.

Also this version comes with all the DLC and for the most part that's great but if you're just trying to play through the story mode you're going to constantly get overpowered joke weapons auto-assigned to your second weapon slot and I hate it.

One of the first Shrek movie's primary messages is to not judge people by superficial qualities like their appearance. In this sense, Swamp Kart Speedway fails tremendously as an adaptation, because for looking past the ugly exterior of its graphics and sound design, you are rewarded with far, far worse gameplay.

Playing this game feels like spending your retirement funds on a slot machine. Sometimes you'll pick up an item and have it disable your controls and send you careening down a pit. Sometimes you'll hit a wall you weren't actually all that close to and end up stuck in it for a good like 7 seconds until either the game decides to let you out or you decide you've lost enough time to reset the race. And sometimes; nay, ALL the goddamn time; you'll end up colliding with other racers and getting sent back a few feet while their momentum remains undeterred regardless of your velocity or positioning, as if you are nothing but a fly on their windshield.

And maybe there's some truth to that. Maybe we are all flies drawn to a dumpster fire. We see the familiar, inviting faces of Shrek, Donkey, Fiona, the three pigs I definitely didn't forget were in the movie, and we think, hey, maybe this game won't be that bad. Maybe this'll actually be an alright Super Circuit clone with a bit of Shrek flair. Only for we, the metaphorical flies closing in on the fire, to subsequently burn to death.

Shrek is love, Shrek is life; but in Swamp Kart Speedway, I see naught but hatred and death. Begone, false prophet.