The Pickups are a Put-On

As I mentioned a bit ago, when you defeat enemies in Hyrule Warriors dropped rupees get automatically collected but dropped materials and weapons become pickups that just sit there unless you go collect them.

These items are crucial to long-term character advancement, so I’ve been carefully getting all the drops as I play, which has had a significant detrimental effect on my experience. Musou games are about moving quickly; you really should move on from an enemy the moment it’s defeated. It’s detrimental (and unfun) to wait around for it to have its death animation and drop its pickup and go collect it - especially if your last attack happened to have significant knockback. Worse, you can continue to juggle them unintentionally after they’re already dead, which just delays the animation further. And the worst are enemies who have scripted things they say when they die, because they’ll just sit there defeated on the field until the message queue clears and they can say their line, and then drop their pickup. And the cherry on top is when these delays cause you to miss an optional objective or an A-rank by mere seconds.

Well, it turns out the pickups are a lie. You can ignore them completely. You still get the dropped items automatically when you clear the mission.

I have no idea why they still have enemies drop these items and leave them on the field and play an item pick-up sound and display a “Material received!” message when you pick them up. It really makes it seem like you have to collect them manually, which misleads the player into a much less fun way to play the game.

Really glad they fixed this for Fire Emblem Warriors and had the dropped items immediately vanish and display their collection message.