Painful how? It sounds like the author was genuinely moved by the game. It has to be a good thing that a AAA console title can have that effect, even if it only took 30-odd years for us to get there.
Such console games "get" this effect just because they look more and more like movies, not because they are better intrinsic games than what we had before. And the examples shown by the author show her clear ignorance of PC games in the 80-90s, so it's not surprising he didn't feel "much" in front of consoles games. We basically had to wait for late SNES games and PS1 games to see more and more games on consoles with deeper storylines and character development. But this occured on PC way before it happened on consoles, and you had actual strong female characters way before on PC too (hey, come on, the Roberta Williams games had almost always female protagonists, and were hugely popular!).
The idea that "we had to wait until 2014 to feel something when playing games" is what I considered the most painful. Because it's preposterous.
