•Time blindness in Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is a deadly affliction, causing the author more pain in what has already been “a less than amazing experience.” Like most people with busy lives and social obligations, if something isn’t on the calendar, it doesn’t exist—and even then, without several notifications ticking down to the appointed time, stuff still gets missed or forgotten.
The consequences for missing time-sensitive events in Fire Emblem are morale killing. Throughout the game there are events known as paralogues—side quests specific to certain characters. They are optional but, unlike other basic side quests, offer a nice bit of extra story and worldbuilding—the very thing I’m enjoying about Fortune’s Weave at the moment, so the author doesn’t want to miss them.
The problem is that they’re incredibly easy to miss. Paralogues are only available during a narrow window of time, so if you’re out completing quests and exploring dungeons on the world map without taking the time the significant amount of time! it takes to pop into the hub world, you can miss them. And even when you do enter the hub world, you can still f@%&@! miss them.
The author’s first run-in with a paralogue was Leda’s. Excited to take it because it offered a hefty payday for completion and generally enjoying Leda as a character, accepting her paralogue informed them that she’d be ready to go five in-game days later and that the event had been added to their calendar.
But while out “putzing about the world map fishing and feasting,” keeping close to the city so they could get back when it was time to ride out with Leda, a notification arrived that the time for the paralogue had passed. The author lost it.
In Fortune’s Weave, like in other Fire Emblem games, there’s a calendar marking companion birthdays, shop sale days, and other important events. But there’s a separate system that allows you to mark a particular day with a notification so that when you’re out in the field, you’ll get a pop-up letting you know the marked day has arrived.
“So what the game meant by ‘added to my calendar’ and what I thought it meant were two wildly different things,” the author writes. “From years of managing my personal and professional life with a Google Calendar I was expecting a notification; meanwhile the game did the equivalent of writing that shit down on a sticky note and burying it under a pile of papers.”
The only way to complete a paralogue after missing the deadline is to restart the chapter, obliterating all work put in up to that point. The author restarted the chapter, then powered down their Switch, “so thoroughly dispirited that I don’t even wanna look at the game right now.”
The article sits alongside other coverage of the author’s Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave experience, including pieces on dwindling patience, the game being “So Full Of Stuff That Isn’t Major Battles,” and a single protagonist with main character energy.
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