Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

Argh. This game is killing me.
Needed to rant.

One of these days I really need to get to that series. I'm embarrassed to say that I've never played a single one of them

im with you on that one, i'm NOT really a 1st PV dungeon crawler type of person BUT I will eventually get around
to playing them, eventually.

Well, Persona 3 and 4 were not 1st person pov, so you can at least check out those. Well worth checking out. Both are great games and Persona 4 would definitely be in my top 10 list. And you don't have to play the others before you play those (although playing Persona 3 before 4 while not required definitely is a plus because there are scenes involving Persona 3 in persona 4)

The difficulty of this game is sadistically grueling.
Honestly, having just beaten the game, I'd say the storyline is the only thing going for it.
The game mechanics though, leave a lot to be desired. My peeves:
- Bad UI/mapping design (most rooms are not marked on the automap, equipment stores do not show inc/dec in stats, mapper spell is always facing north, instead of turning with the user).
- Inordinate amount of grinding and backtracking.
- Grueling difficulty as mentioned - random encounters even in towns, super tough bosses, lack of save points, traps/teleporters everywhere.

Beaten all 3 alignments of this hellish game.

I loved crawlers back in the PC (IBM 286) and 8-bit days. I charted all floors on graph paper but would probably find that approach tedious now.

I played Dungeons & Dragons: Pool of Radiance on the NES not so long ago, and I was fascinated by it. It's true that this type of games are very slow for today standards (Hello, making camp to restore your characters every single time), but I found it to be pretty damn good rpg for the system, quite expansive and detailed for a NES port and a great experience if you're patient enough.


You can finish missions in different ways, AND mock goblins and orcs to make them run away intimidated like failed bullies! That's gold.


About the Shin Megami Tensei Series, it has some pretty good games, but I consider the series quite...overrated myself, mostly because I heard too many times people "fanboying" about them like they're perfect in every single way for years.