Alright, bear with me for a minute.
I've played games for most of my life, starting with Pokémon Yellow on the Gameboy Color. JRPGs used to be my favorite genre up until a few years ago, when I bought a PlayStation Portable and played Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. At the time, I used to play JRPGs at my own pace, talking to whoever I wanted, whenever I wanted, doing quests whenever I felt like it, not feeling like I've been missing anything important, but Trails in the Sky changed that forever.
If you're not aware, Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is a JRPG with a heavy focus on story and building the world and setting of the game. Because of that, the game has severan cities and NPCs, like you'll see in pretty much most games of its genre, except that in this particular game, NPCs have new dialogue everytime you move on with the story. At one point, a particular NPC will talk about its child taking a trip and a few hours later into the story, their child will have returned and they'll talk about how the trip was.
That was a great feature that I did fall in love at first, but after ten hours or so, I noticed that, instead of enjoying the story and the world, I was just hunting any NPC I might've missed along the way and prompting the dialogue to see what they had to say. After I scoured through the entire city, I'd move on with the story and after a "cutscene" or two, there I was, going through the same city, the second, third or fourth time, just to see if any NPC had anything new to say.
At that point, I wasn't enjoying the game anymore, I had just developed some sort of OCD where I absolutely had to soak in everything the game had to offer, going from talking to every single NPC I could find, multiple times, to reading every single description of items, weapons and equipments as I acquired or purchased them. After finishing Trails in the Sky, I never got back to Trails in the Sky Second Chapter, despite the huge cliffhanger where the first game ends, because I could not bear to go through all that a second time.
I thought it was restricted to that particular franchise, but oh boy, was I wrong. Right after that game, I played Fate/Extra and the same thing happened, I'd prompt dialogue with every single NPC, read every item description, although that was a much more straight-forward affair in some way. Still, it annoyed me to no end, and now years later, I can't play most games I want, specially JRPGs, without dropping at some point due to frustration of having to do that every single time.
If you have timed quests where you'll lose access to them by advancing the story, bye bye. If there'll be NPCs in a room, somehow I leave the room and I can't go back to that same room to talk to whoever I might've missed, so long. Even Aksys has massively featured that "every NPC has new stuff to say" when they released Tokyo Xanadu last year, and I had to endure that through the end, as I had to review that game for a publication.
In the end, my taste in gaming has drastically changed, where now I'd rather be playing games like Overwatch, Mario Kart, Splatoon 2 and specially visual novels, where I do end up reading everything the game has to offer, and if I do miss something, I can just open the backlog and read what I missed, in the place of games where there might be too much going on and I'll feel, sooner or later, that I'm missing stuff and just drop it after a few hours. Because of a single game and the OCD I developed, I lost most of the drive I had to play what had been my absolute favorite genre for almost 20 years of my life.
