Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave has Mr. Gribbz by the shortest and curliest hairs he's got. You know it's fucked up when he feels compelled to make a whole post about something, as he abhors the written word. But when a game gets him to stop skipping cutscenes, a phenomenon whose rarity would allow me to count it on one hand, that's when you know you're dealing with some all-time shit. I don't think he's a casual-t, but he's way too invested in the story to miss something because of a bad roll.

All my crap about "lineage" in games tends to find its most reasonable expression in Japanese output, I think because it seems like game development functions almost like a guild system there. There is a high level of transmission - and a high level of retention - that allows something like the maximum bitrate. We've had a few opportunities to look through it recently, but Nintendo in particular has this constellation of Elder Houses around them that have been in the mix with proven concepts since the primordial origins of the medium - Intelligent Systems was birthed from Nintendo's own head, like Athena. Take a look at that roster. It runs deep.

The only reason I haven't grabbed it yet is because I keep wishing I could play it with a mouse. You know me - I'm forever dreaming of the impossible. But when I was fruitlessly complaining about this state of affairs, Gabe was like no, actually, this game uses the Joy-Con mouse. I have an HDMI dock setup for my monitor from back when we were doing all those Golf Streams during Quarantine, so the Switch 2 is gonna pretend to be a computer for a little while.

(CW)TB out.