I definitely feel this in a way, even as somebody who obviously makes a lot of his money through them. I grew up mainly on the Mega Drive, N64, and GameCube, which is not exactly a trajectory to instill a lifelong passion in those sorts of games, ahaha. They've grown on me since, but the lack of exposure pretty much means it's too late for the truly big franchises to ever get their hooks and instead it's mostly the weirdo older and, indeed, relatively smaller stuff that grabs my attention.
I wish the fan translation scene these days put much effort into translating the more offbeat Japanese RPGs from the PS1 and 2 eras instead of patting themselves on the back for getting the big ones sorted out and going home, because there are some fantastic smaller games that made a real impression on those bigger developers that people are missing out on, especially the work of Shouji Masuda, whose defining work tends to come in the form of RPGs played episodically that are a lot more digestible to get through. If fan translations of his stuff ever come out (I think one one might eventually, but not holding out the rest), I'll try to remember to do a PSA because I think people like you who are understandably burnt out on more conventionally structured ones would get a lot out of his work and especially his punchy, to the point dialogue and storytelling (provided it's handled well, a mammoth challenge in its own right).
But yeah, I super feel you. I'm slowly trying to go back and explore more of the really big stuff in the canon, partly out of professional due diligence, but almost invariably no matter how well it might still hold up, almost always I end up dropping it. It's just hard to shake growing up how I did and my mind is too poisoned by the more off kilter stuff I do get into to really mesh with the more mainstream fare, ahaha.
