The world is a complicated place, but, regardless of political leanings, I think we can all agree that in 2016 I was much younger than I am in 2026. The younger me was a much more patient person, especially when it came to playing video games. I relished the opportunity to go on whatever ride designers and developers had spent years meticulously crafting. These days, however, I find myself frantically looking for the shortest and quickest path to satisfaction. Time is a commodity and I am not rich in it.
Maybe it’s my patience wearing thin, or maybe it’s the children who are wrong, but I find that games these days are working overtime to put as much distance between the player and the thing that makes playing it satisfying and worthwhile. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is undoubtedly the best recent example of this happening. I love tactics games. I’m not great at them, but nevertheless, I relish the opportunity to slowly move units around squares, compare stats, and then watch them bonk each other. To me, they are the video game equivalent of waking up on a Saturday morning and sitting down to do a sudoku puzzle or fill out a crossword. Like I said, OLD.
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, however, has been the equivalent of being old and waking up on a Saturday morning to find I’ve got bills to pay, family members to call, meals to prep, mandatory exercise sessions to do, six different gods to appease, and a neighbor that accosts me in the hallway to tell me about their mundanity-riddled week.
Each time I turn on Fortune’s Weave, I find that the thing I want to do most is buried underneath a laundry list of chores that, while beneficial to my ongoing existence, are also incredibly tedious to the extent that by the time I get to the bit where I can make my little people bonk each with different damage values, I don’t even have the mental energy to enjoy making my little people bonk each other.
