Time blindness in Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is a deadly affliction, causing me more pain in what’s already been a less than amazing experience. Like most folks with busy lives and social obligations, if it ain’t on the calendar, it does not exist to me. And even then, without several notifications ticking down to the appointed time, warning me “Hey, you better clear a block of time for this important thing,” stuff still gets missed or forgotten about. And 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 the other, basic side quests, paralogues offer up a nice bit of extra story and worldbuilding—pretty much the thing I’m enjoying about Fortune’s Weave at the moment, so I don’t want to miss them. Problem is, they are incredibly easy to miss. Paralogues are only available during a narrow window of time, so if you’re out and about completing quests and exploring dungeons on the world map and don’t take the time (the significant amount of time!) it takes to pop into the hub world, you can miss them. And even when you do pop into the hub world, you can still f@%&*@! miss them.
My first run-in with a paralogue was Leda’s. I was excited to take it because it offered a hefty payday for completion and I generally enjoy Leda as a character. Accepting her paralogue informed me that she’d be ready to go five in-game days later and that the event had been added to my calendar. Awesome. But while I was out putzing about the world map fishing and feasting, keeping close to the city so I could get back to it when it was time to ride out with bad bitch Leda, I got a notification that the time for the paralogue had passed. And I lost it.
In Fortune’s Weave, like in other Fire Emblem games, there’s a calendar that marks out 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 day you marked has arrived. So what the game meant by “added to my calendar” and what I thought it meant were two wildly different things. 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 you’ve missed the deadline is to restart the chapter, obliterating all the work you’ve put in up to that point. I restarted the chapter, then powered down my Switch, so thoroughly dispirited that I don’t even wanna look at the game right now.