Like, this is a personal problem, but I cannot stress enough how much I want games to be a straight line. I'm the "all open world games are bad" guy. I have very, very little tolerance for exploration, and want everything given very clear instruction, with as little down time as possible to get from point A to point B. "You can go anywhere" to me means "Guess I'm going nowhere". It's really no surprise that a majority of my top 10 games of all time have needed up being VNs or VN adjacent, now that I think about it.
No matter what they have to say, talking to completely unimportant NPCs who aren't connected in any way to game progression or hitting ticks on a checklist....was simply never in the cards for me.