one of the final bosses of the story mode (not the final final one) had me so bad i abandoned the game for 4 months and then very quickly realized that fuck this and cheated so i could max out every skill and make all the party members level 70, not much else cause i still wanted to engage with the game lmao (it still wasn't a complete walk in the park, but not "i'm killing everything in two hits" type of cheating) but outside of that it was overall very good and entertaining and the characters were good 👍

what do you mean the sidequests were mandatory, i somehow avoided that reminder both times its supposed to appear with how i did them as soon as i could lmaooo
awesome game btw, i didn't play 2 and instead watched its cutscenes because i saw All That (its apparently longer than 3) and just felt pain but instead kept Torna to play myself because it sounded sad & tragic (aweseome) and the physical version came out in my bday, so, with my experience, i think playing it like how i did may actually be the ideal way because its shorter, to the point, and all the emotions hit at the end while not trying to extend itself to a ridiculous degree (xenoblade 2's ending is great, but i could tell the way there is all over the place just from cutscenes alone)
seeing what happens at the end really still managed to shake me because you'd been there for the past like 30 hours and goddd it hits, yeah
also, we need more 27 year old girl protagonists in jrpgs because Lora is really cool