Big McLargehuge
Fragile Traveler
Hell, I missed 3 & 4 until the Vita came out. The originals of both of those were released on the PS2 after my PS2 had been mothballed, so most of the western audience came well after the fact...and that's probably for the better. The upside to this is that the handheld versions of P3 & P4 that came after the fact are significantly better than their PS2 counterparts, just for quality of life improvements alone (not being able to control your party members is a sin in JRPGs). Plus there's a ton added to the games, even characters. P4G is the proper way to play that game and the PC version is just a prettier version of the Vita version.
I think Persona 3 will either get properly remade or at least a heavily tweaked modern port before we're too deep into this modern generation. Now that there's an audience for Atlus games on PC, I think you'll either see a lot of these games straight-up ported there (such as P4G being the Vita game with graphics settings) or at least receive ports moving forward after the fact. I hope P5R gets a PC port...I wouldn't be surprised if one pops up in the next year. I have to imagine there is some sort of exclusivity deal with Sony because there isn't any other good reasons for 0 of these games to be on Switch otherwise...hopefully it's just timed exclusivity for the mainline games. I think P5R showing up or not on Steam later this year would answer that question.
I'm always baffled at how little anime tends to interest me given my adoration of JRPGs, but that just goes to show how different things can be. FFVII & FFIX are 2 of my all-time favorites and I'd say appreciating FFIX without being a huge FF fanboy bodes well for you here. That game was filled to the brim with references to older games that you don't need to know to necessarily appreciate and wore its weirdness proudly, which certainly applies to the Persona series as well. Just replace the Shakespearean theatre angle with Jungian psychology.
