Completely off on my own here but this game right here made middle-school me hate and fear RPGs and I still haven't shaken it off, honestly. I hit some kind of point where I believed I needed to grind to progress and it hit me like a punch in the stomach. Then I realized that I dreaded the prospect so much because I fundamentally and deeply hated the whole tedious menu-battling character-optimizing system that every battle was — that is, what I was dreading was having to suffer ANY MORE of the actual gameplay part of the game. Up to that point, I hadn't even thought if I was enjoying myself or not, just killing time. It's not like I was particularly invested in the story. It occurred to me that a quicker way to not have to do any more battles was just to stop playing, so I did, and wrote off the entire RPG genre.