Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition - The Badge Market Problem

Warning, this video is probably not going to be very interesting to watch. It's literally just badge crafting, and you probably will get the point after about 5 mins so be warned if you want to save some time. Anyway, this is the a progression mechanic in the game for the various playable characters. You craft badges using materials that you collect from defeated enemies, and the character gains abilities like more attacks, extended buff duration, faster SP charge, deal chip damage to blocking enemies, etc. You craft one badge, then you can branch out to other categories on the tree.

The problem with this is that if you need to craft a lot of badges at once... then you will be incredibly annoyed as each an every single badge on the trees need to be confirmed by the player. One. Step. At-a-time! The fact that I only got through a few characters in just about 20 minutes is pretty alarming, and I was holding off on finishing a lot of trees for this reason. You actually spend a ton of time in the Badge Market, but for some of the wrong reasons.

The main problem is that this process is unnecessarily long. You select a badge to craft, confirm you want to do it, watch the badge appear, then a message saying it's crafted appears. This process takes approximately 3-5 seconds per badge (for the following math, let's assume 5). Average character will have 17 attack badges, 21 Defense Badges and 13 Assist Badges, or 41 Badges total. Now take this amount and multiply it by 5 seconds. Then take that amount and multiply it by the number of characters in the game (29 Warriors).

5945 Seconds, or about 99 minutes of crafting badges. That is quite overkill. Even optimized at like 3 seconds per badge, you are guaranteed to spend an hour here making badges. What really sucks about this problem is that it could have easily been fixed. We know this because in a game similar to this called Fire Emblem Warriors, there is an option where you can skip confirmations in the Crest Market and craft badges in less than a second! Better yet, if you could just highlight all the badges you want to craft first, then confirm it, you could have just had the whole tree light up in a flash.

This is more of a nitpick since most people aren't going to complete every single character's badge tree, or grind the materials needed to do it, but you will have to spend a lot of time here eventually. It's probably better to just do it one character at a time or a little bit each time you go into the Bazaar so it doesn't become a grating experience like in this video. And even though I had tons of materials, I didn't have nearly enough when I got to other characters. So I'll have to hunt those materials some more. Not a big deal since I'm just picking up materials from whatever comes in my way to completion.

I also spend about another 8 million rupees leveling up the characters I recently unlocked. You really can't get enough rupees in this game it seems...