>>3851991
You can "get" anything at any age if you can learn to properly adjust your mindset and expectations. As we age, we tend to only appreciate things that give us very specific kinds of enjoyment, because we simply don't have the time and energy to appreciate everything. But I can tell you from personal experience that is behavior that absolutely can be un-learned.

A wonderful thing comes with being able to appreciate "kiddie" media like JRPGs with the cognition of an adult—you start to notice lots of little details that make everything so much more charming. My favorite in SoA is how strongly Aika latches onto Drachma because, despite being adopted by Vyse's parents after hers died, she still felt like an outsider without a family of her own. In fact most of Aika's character building is only revealed by interacting with the environment in her house and on Pirate Isle, from how she tosses and turns every night in her parents' old bed, to how she throws gunpowder in the fireplace for fun.

>>3852005
>I played FF9 at the exact right age at least.
I played FF9 for the first time just a couple of years ago and fell in love. Somehow I managed to have nothing at all spoiled for me after 23 years, so it pretty much felt like finding a wormhole back to being 13 years old—before I started playing, I even re-read some of the old EGM reviews from back in the day that had made me interested in the first place, as well as the entire instruction manual. Took me 10 hours just to get to Lindblum because I wanted to try and find everything on my own, and see every piece of dialogue. I was surpsised how often some of it updated. Sometimes I'd waste time backtracking to find nothing, but since so many people already declare video games a "waste of time" I decided I was going to stop feeling guilty for wasting my time while wasting my time.