The fact that he monetized his trauma. Now THAT'S the rise and grind mindset.

In all seriousness, I really like that he's an inversion of OJ--Jupe is an entertainer who pretends to be a cowboy, while OJ is a wrangler who doesn't seem to really be at home in the world of entertainment. I really like characters who have a weird relationship to spectacle and the entertainment industry, and that's extremely true with Jupe, who was traumatized horribly by the industry but is still shackled to it because that's how he makes his money.

Also--and maybe this is shallow of me--but as an Asian-American, I like that he's specifically Asian-American too. It's nice to see some rep in a film that isn't specifically about the experience of being Asian-American. (Some people might argue with me about this, that Jupe's Asianness is an indelible part of his circumstances and character arc, and like, I can see that. But I think the role could also have been played by a white guy and the plot would have been roughly the same.) It feels more like a "there's no reason why this guy COULDN'T be Asian" sort of casting and I want to see more of that.

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of something newbie-friendly for your first playthrough, but I'm having a hard time coming up with any that are particularly approachable to someone who doesn't already know what a dungeon crawler is...I think the answer might be a hybrid-genre series like Persona. The Persona Q games are explicitly first-person dungeon crawlers, so if you've played some of the main Persona games and you want to give a dungeon crawler a try, maybe try PQ or PQ2?

But that doesn't really answer your question about the ABSOLUTE BEST dungeon crawlers though. To me, the gold standard is Etrian Odyssey, which might also be a good starting point: it has a relatively modern ruleset and plays pretty much how you'd expect a standard JRPG to play. It's very easy to pick up and play and is challenging without requiring that you learn a whole new (old) system like THAC0, which Etrian Odyssey's sibling Dark Spire uses, or many of the dungeon crawler games that hew closer to Wizardry.

All that said, the games I think are the tops of the tops are: 7th Dragon (DS), 7th Dragon 2020 (PSP), Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (DS/3DS), Etrian Odyssey series (DS/3DS), Dark Spire (DS), Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi (PS4, Switch, PC). Runner-ups for hybrid visual novel/dungeon crawlers are Ray Gigant (PS Vita) and Zanki Zero: Last Beginning (PS4, PS Vita, PC).

Also, honorable mention to Dungeon Encounters, which doesn't really resemble any of the other games I mentioned but is a 100-floor dungeon crawler at its core. It's very minimalist in both presentation and rules, so I think it'd be hard to use it as a stepping stone to the other games mentioned, but it's definitely worth checking out in any case.

I do still write fanfic, although mostly just when the mood strikes me (also all the fanfic I write nowadays is NSFW, so I rarely post it publicly). Part of it is also because my "day job," such as it is, involves writing for Electricopolis, so if I work on fanfic I start to feel like "why am I not doing something for my main stuff instead?"

Primarily, writing is something I do because I'm good at it and I thrive off of attention from it. This isn't me trying to be self-deprecating; the same thing motivated me when I was at school. I get more juice from external motivators rather than internal ones (e.g. the feeling of a job well done); it's just the way I am. I think that's because I never feel like I've reached a point with my work where I'm satisfied with it, but who can say?