After a torrid affair with the NCAA during my college years, I only really started following the NFL a few years ago when I was conscripted into my family’s fantasy football league. Upon claiming back-to-back championships in 2022 and 2023, I felt like it was safe to say I was “pretty into football.” I willingly, sometimes even eagerly, watch entire games without having to be at a bar. If that’s not fandom, I don’t know what is.
As a professional video game enjoyer, perhaps I’ve coasted too long on the assumption that sports games were not for “people like me.” So with the launch of Madden NFL 27 just around the corner, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is there a place for a weeby Final Fantasy enthusiast among the stats-savoring armchair quarterbacks? Could I be a sports-game person?
After a couple hours, my answer to this question would have been “oh heavens no.” The experience of playing Madden 27 often feels like information overload. At any given moment, you are utterly snowed in with too many options, too many statistics, too much data. In many ways, this is an unruly and hostile experience. Yet I keep coming back. That’s mostly because Madden is effectively the only NFL game, and I am simultaneously resigned and determined to make it work — even if that means playing it in a way that largely runs counter to the developers’ intentions.
The experience immediately opens on a bum note. Booting up Madden 27 as a newbie feels like getting onboarded to Salesforce during your first week at a new job. You will be asked to agree to impossibly long terms of service in four-point font. You will be prompted, in an unnecessarily hostile way, to enter EA account login credentials that are not strictly necessary to proceed, but you are automatically assumed to have.
That deeply corporate onboarding experience gives way to a sin that no Final Fantasy game would ever dare attempt: assuming the majority of its audience has played most — if not all — previous installments of the series and therefore does not need even the barest refresher on the various modes or gameplay basics. The logical part of your brain knows that all of this will become familiar and routine in a short time. The emotional part of your brain tells you it’s time to jump out the nearest window and run shrieking for the hills, Simpsons style.
I venture a peek into the settings menu, my first port of call when starting any new game. The UI is a never-ending Russian nesting doll of small white text. There are 12 submenus within the settings menu, so many that a single screen cannot contain them all. Within the penalties submenu alone are seven sliders for items like offensive holding and false start, on a scale of 0-99. This is followed by an additional seven on-off toggles for stuff like “kick catch interference” and “running into the kicker.” And this isn’t even the most granular of the 12 submenus: the Coach Adjustments menu alone features submenus within submenus, with dozens upon dozens of inscrutable options like “Cover 4: Quarters Check: 1 Rec Tight,” which itself has four possible selections.
All of this leaves me feeling as though I unintentionally stumbled upon evidence of a new boyfriend’s toggle and slider fetish. Oh brother, I don’t wanna see this! I realize all of these options are the product of painstaking developer work and a sincere love for the sport, but it’s all so cluttered and imposing, just begging for more approachable curation to help new and casual players find their footing.
Madden 27’s Ultimate Team Mode requires an online connection and hence would require me to make an EA account, to which I say a hearty “no thank you, I’m good” in light of recent events. So I set up a Franchise Mode save file, customizing my coach down to his Air Max 90s.
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