I'm a lifelong JRPG fan who's played just about every 16 and 32 bit RPG there is. Massive fan of anything Square, can tell you just about anything about the first 12 Final Fantasy games, etc. I've even beaten some really obscure shit like Paladin's Quest. But one series I never played was SMT.
First off, the only way to play almost all of the games in English is fan translations, and I tend to shy away from that sort of thing because they're often crappy. So if there are any really good translations out there, that'd help.
Second, they had a reputation for being grindy. I can handle a certain amount of grinding. Dragon Quest games are about where my limit is. I like DQ for the most part, but I don't like walking back and forth just outside of town, mindlessly mashing "A" for hours, and most of them devolve into just that around the halfway mark. I haven't played anything newer than 5 though, so that may have changed over time. Basically, if SMT is any less grindy than the early DQ games, I'm good to go.
Third, I don't really know where to start. I've got forty years of content to sift through. Do I play the DDS games? Do they hold up? I'd be playing the SNES remakes, almost certainly. How about the side games like Nine and If?
Oh, and for what it's worth, I didn't like Persona 4 at all. The level design was insanely bland (nothing but identical hallways) and the battles were too easy. But I've heard P4 is the least SMT-like of the Persona games, so that might not be a problem.
I've played a decent amount of SMT 3. Haven't beat it but I've not put in the effort either. It's a bit weird in a hard to describe way but at times pulls me in anyway. The dungeons can be a lot of hallway though. Everyone says it's hard but I'd say it's more tedious. Don't expect to spam A. I enjoy the combat more because you don't just hit attack until the enemy "pulls their sword back for a big attack" then you defend. Barely poked into SMT V. It's more of the same really in the first hour or two.
You might try Persona 5. It's SMT lite and the dungeons are some of my favorite. I haven't gotten past the intro of 4 yet it wasn't accessible easily to me until the PC release.
Otherwise I get the idea your experience with l these games is far further fetched than mine. I had to get a bit older before I gave turn based a real chance.
Yeah, I've been playing turn based games for thirty years, and some of my favorite games of all time are crappy, ancient RPGs that are barely more complex than Cookie Clicker. But I also know what you mean about needing to be in a specific "RPG mood". I'll sometimes go four years without touching one, then all of a sudden I'll play ten of them in a year. But when I was a kid, I couldn't get enough of them.
I think I might as a kid, but I had PC and the epic JRPGs of old just weren't on there that much. Ended up in early 3D.games and a lot of the point and click adventure games instead.
RPGs on PC were trash garbage until Might and Magic 3. JRPGs specifically basically didn't exist. Back then, only the very most successful games bridged the console/PC gap, and usually they suffered horribly for it.
But on the upside you got some killer FPS games well before they were even remotely playable on consoles.