ANNOUNCEMENT: Tales of Symphonia Playthrough Stream

I’ve always wanted to pay a truly massive tribute to my favorite game of all time: Tales of Symphonia. As a teenager, I made little videos of the characters talking with each other (embarrassingly bad), drew a fair amount of fan art (also pretty bad), and even had dreams of shooting the entire plot in live-action videos in cosplay (which probably would have been the worst of all, if I’d had the budget and attention span to pull it off).

So, instead of showing you all the ways my love for this game can go wrong, let’s talk about one thing I know I can do right. Namely, just plain playing through the game. Starting on its ninth anniversary here in the United States–July 13–my friends and I will be streaming gameplay of Tales of Symphonia every two weeks, Saturdays at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time, on Operation Rainfall’s Twitch channel. The stream will also include a webcam of the players so you can get the full commentary experience.

We’ll take you through the game from beginning to end, so you can see the good and the bad, the epic and the hilarious. There will be everything from massive climactic boss fights (on Hard mode) to our pointing out some of the weirder mishaps in the game. We aim to make this as entertaining as possible, so expect a few extra surprises–I’m personally planning to bring some real gels to the party. We’ll have crazy times–on a T-rated level, since that matches the game itself.

Each session is most likely going to be around two or three hours, although our first might stretch a bit longer since it’s the big kickoff. Since we’re planning to go into any side quests that offer new areas or extra boss battles, and, given the length of the game, this project will most likely take at least 20 sessions or so in total–in other words, we’ll probably be finishing it around this time next year.

Look out for my review of Tales of Symphonia this weekend, and follow our Twitch to get a reminder when the stream starts on July 13.