When Skyrim came out, I played the hell out of it and finished it with about 215 hours recorded. Last year, I bought all the DLC and started from scratch. I've done all of vanilla Skyrim and Dawnguard (and as much of Hearthfire as I felt like, by which I bought all the properties, set up framework for the houses and adopted a kid to live alone with my wife in Solitude's expensive house while my character exists as the world's worst husband/parent by basically never going home, since I use my Whiterun house as my storage place. SUCKS TO BE YOU, FAMILY!

And now, I approach the end of Dragonborn at the 235 hour mark. Essentially, after I finish the current quest by going back to Skaal Village, I'll only have the final quest for the plot. Other than that, I have 8 dungeons and 3 optional Black Books. And I guess I could fight Karstaag, which is a fight actually capable of killing me. My apologies to the Ebony Warrior. L80? I'm a step or two away from L62 and there's no way I'm taking the time to pump out that much work.

During this run-through, I wanted to put this game to rest, so I made sure to do every single clearable dungeon. Some aren't marked as cleared because you have to do them for a specific quest (or when not doing a specific one) to get that designation, but whatever, I did them and that's that.

It says a lot that the game was memorable enough to me for me to want to spend this much time playing it. Whether it says a lot about the game or me might be up for debate, but I have no regrets. Twas a fun and memorable ride both times. If anything, it's kind of bittersweet knowing that I'm entering the final laps of the ride, as after all of this, it's hard to imagine a situation where I'd want to do it all again.

Only real complaint is that I've, for the most part, coasted for the last 100+ hours, with all the fun coming from exploring dungeons and not from anything resembling challenge. Well that and all the damn crashes. It takes too damn long for the game to load up for me to want to need to get up from my couch and restart the system.

Still, just minor issues. It's been a great time from beginning to end both times through this game. In a way, the only real silver lining from getting to the end and not playing it anymore is that I might start making faster progress in a lot of my other games. Especially since I have a number (DQ IX, Stella Deus, Spyro 2, Super Mario Galaxy) that could potentially fall like dominoes after I get Skyrim out of the way.