"Yet it already feels tainted, like we’ll look back on Stellar Blade as a pawn in this fruitless battle for conventionally attractive women in video games and a lack of censorship that proves, once and for all, that the gamers have won."
If you're wondering why the author of this article is so angry about "conventional beauty standards for women" that's because he's a man: https://i.imgur.com/IZxpq5q.jpeg
Blatant pretending. He says 'Japan is known for scaling down difficulty' while linking to some obscure shit about the original FF7, acting like he doesn't know the much more recent and bigger story about Squenix's Ethics Department getting involved with Tifa's tits. He just has no idea what any of it's about...! gawsh.
Older Japanese games also didn't change things entirely for difficulty. A lot of what they did was because you couldn't fucking patch games back then, so if you had a bunch of broken shit or stuff that didn't turn out well you could fix it on the international release and then backport that instead of doing a full recall re-release at home. It just happened that a lot of the time Japanese devs were retarded and overtuned their RPGs (which is why encounter rates is a go to nerf on International releases).
Also, two very big IPs famously increased the difficulty once they left the country. Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn renamed "Normal and Hard" mode in Japan to "Easy and Normal" to completely fuck people over on an already hard game. Digimon Next Order did similar, with the "Normal" mode not even existing originally.
Japan, the country responsible for the concept of "Nintendo hard", scales difficulty down now?