I Have Never Played A Shin Megami Tensei Game Before
When I was but a babychild, having learned how to walk and work a knock-off tamagotchi with Littlest Pet-Shop branding, I was first allowed to play on the holy grail of the handheld console market at the time: the brick-esque Nintendo Dual-Screen. I don't remember SHIT about how that thing played but I DO remember playing Final Fantasy II/IV. Me n my sister would never make it past the first opening segments, going only so far as to have Cecil blow up Rydia's home town before resetting, so I could then rename him something like Cat100 and watch him do his stoic monologues with a name that sounds kinda like a shitty forum handle, made, appropriately, by a 4 year old.
This endless torture loop of letting Rydia have one more day with her mother before her entire town is destroyed, because "What if he had One More 0 In His Name wouldn't That be Funny," was kind of indicative of my ongoing problem with JRPGs: I have zero patience for them. Now, I'm not some fuckin pleb. I've basically beat a whole Dark Souls, I've played my fair share of Slow-Paced Art Games, put in plenty of hours trying to stick to RPGs (I'm practically done SLARPG, which was dope as hell, I've played Undertale and Deltarune as far as it's been released as of time of writing, and I've dumped over 50 hours into Persona 5, to name a few), but without some kind of out-there primary battle gimmick, I've never managed to make my way through a full RPG before.
