@ystael
@beehaw.orgStephen's Sausage Roll.
I play a lot of puzzle games. Some of them are pretty hard (the later levels of Tametsi take quite a while to crack).
But this one is on a completely different level. If there is a more brutally punishing sokoban-family game on existence, I have no idea what it might be.
Stephen, if he exists, is most likely condemned to roll sausages eternally in hell, for the sin of making this game.
Another vote for Cherryh - pretty much anything by Cherryh. And in the "journey" department, perhaps also look at John Varley's Gaia trilogy (Titan, Wizard, Demon)? (Probably falls into your "excessive violence and some smut" category)
You might also try the "far future/dying Earth" genre as a way of getting the exploration without necessarily being tied to the space/hard sf milieu. I think the most awarded member of this subgenre (and I liked it quite a bit) is Gene Wolfe's three Sun series (Book of the New Sun, Book of the Long Sun, Book of the Short Sun).
Swans - Song for Dead Time
So bury your trust beneath the ground with me, dear
And lay your loneliness down for the sun to burn
To sand...
Various groups are running fan servers for Monster Hunter Frontier since it shut down in 2019. There is a translated client that mostly works. Search for "rain frontier server" for more info.
Disclaimer: I haven't tried any of this myself and I don't know whether the client they distribute will give your computer encephalitis.
OK, that's what I had kind of feared. Thank you!
Not like it will be such a hardship to finally finish it - just have to resist the temptation to play Monster Hunter instead :)
I enjoyed the first game very much but never finished it because I was distracted by some other shiny object. How much does 2 spoil the first game's plot?
A few I've enjoyed that aren't mentioned elsewhere so far:
Robin McKinley, The hero and the crown. If you've never read this, please, just go and do so, if you read nothing else on this entire response. The Newbery Medal it got was well deserved. (And it has princesses and dragons and wizards.)
Louise Cooper, Indigo (8 short books). Sealed ancient evil, cursed protagonist on heroic journey, talking animal companion. Just lots of fun all around.
Lois McMaster Bujold, The curse of Chalion series. Maybe a little more politics than you are looking for, but the divinity/magic system works well and I appreciate that the viewpoint characters are generally kind of old and busted. She is of course better known for the (excellent) Miles Vorkosigan military space opera series.
Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, A companion to wolves et seq. Exactly what it says on the tin; the catch is that the viewpoint character of the first book becomes bonded to a female wolf, which radically changes how his culture sees him.
Elizabeth Moon, The deed of Paksenarrion. Basically what you'd get if you wrote down a really good D&D campaign (but mostly for only one viewpoint character). Formulaic in spots but enjoyable and well executed.
Other replies have mentioned Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books, which I enjoyed a lot; and David (and Leigh) Eddings, which were my first big-kid fantasy novels (as for many other other American children of the 70s and 80s). Another long series in something of the same vein as Eddings is Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar saga; I haven't read the entries after 2000, but before that it was a lot of fun.
This is all going to be "great gameplay" rather than "great story".
If you have a way to play 3DS games and a tolerance for punishment in your JRPG dungeon crawlers, the Etrian Odyssey series has some of Yuzo Koshiro's best work.
When you hit something more serious for the first time, you get this instead.
And, uh, there's this memorable remix of the wandering-boss theme from the first game.
You already have Persona games in your list, but let's add some more Shin Megami Tensei:
Finally ... Monster Hunter is an incredibly fun and addictive game series, and though it doesn't center the music quite as much as a typical JRPG does, it's got some great stuff. I particularly like the soundtrack of MH: World -- although the newer game MH: Rise tried something new with its mostly choral arrangements, I think they are not quite as memorable overall.
Arena battle from Monster Hunter: World (it's particularly impressive the way this theme, the small-monsters arena battle theme, and several of the town themes reuse the same melodies in different arrangements)
Monster Hunter World is five years old and holds up great.
bask in the sun halfway up the Ancient Forest with a Tobi-Kadachi (giant white electric flying squirrelsnake; chill until you hit it)
climb up to the top of the Coral Highlands cat colony and watch the sky jellyfish float by in the sunset
share a hot spring with snow monkeys in the Hoarfrost Reach
They did a great job of making the maps feel like a living system that goes on while you're not there. (Sadly, this is much less true of the newest MH game, Rise, where the maps are full of traversal puzzles but the wildlife pretty much all exists only to attack you.)