dot game life

  well after 60 hours, i finally completed tales of graces f. what a weird tales game. i really wanted to like it but in the end it turned out to be just a meh sort of game that ends up in the bottom tier of my personal tales of ranking. just a bunch of incoherent ramblings below as usual since this game is so confusing and thus so are my thoughts about it. ----- the thing about graces is that the premise is SOOOOO good and so interesting, and honestly like something no other tales game had done? you start the game with everyone as kids and, although i thought it was going to be a less-than-one-hour portion of the game, it can actually take like 3-4 hours to get past the childhood section. but it's kinda cool cus you see how the characters bond with each other and have adventures in their childhood! but like i mentioned, the end of this arc is sooooo weird and abrupt, the 11-year-old protag decides to leave his family and childhood friend and sails to another city on his own to joi...

 full totk onion below for my own sanity. super long-ass rant ahead (11k words lmaoooo wow) and also contains spoilers. so i beat the final boss of tears of the kingdom a while back. took me (according to my switch) “over 100 hours” to beat the game. i did about 110ish shrines, and got like 50 or so korok seeds. did quite a lot of sidequests as well. i was actually surprised how long i played it for considering how much fun i was not having playing it. but of course i wanted to uncover the whole overworld map (excluding the depths) and unlock as many shrines as possible to be able to say that hey, i explored quite a lot and gave this game a fair chance to impress me. which, unfortunately, it did not. if i had to rank all of the zelda games i’ve beaten (which i’ve done all except triforce heroes), i’d put botw in absolute last place, with totk slightly right above it. before writing this, i re-read through this fantastic botw critical piece on destructoid by Cory Arnold (...

well, after 36 hours, i've finished tales of symphonia once again :) and despite the many flaws in the switch remastered edition, i honestly had a blast playing through it for the umpteenth time. no matter how many times i play through this game, it just brings me joy like no other. i've already rambled about why i love this game when i beat it for the first time in the ps3 collection, so super long junk thoughts below this time about the remastered edition, playing through the hard path for the first time ever, and wow still finding new sub-events after all these years: -------- i cannot BELIEVE that this game, from the gamecube era!!!, runs so poorly on the switch. there was only one update downloaded when i first started playing it late february, but that didn't really do anything to improve the experience or performance of the game as far as i could tell. it becomes super noticeable when you first go to the triet desert (2 hours into the game!) and the game starts lagg...