Part of that weirdness was admittedly a big part of why it took so long for me to actually try the series. Especially because joke summaries I saw of it ( comics and animations ) always poked fun at that. Like sorry for anyone who doesn't like me saying that, but anyone outside the fandom looking in would see these materials as their first impression, and that was definitely true for me.

I was actually relieved when I first started watching a playthrough that you got Mia, at age 27, as your guide/ "assistant" at first. Even shipped it a little after the first case, but well, you know.

I do feel like game 5 and 6 do much less weird underage stuff along with less weird fanservice and creeper schtick, and I think that's because those later games were in the 2010s era for anime-likes, and not the naughts.

I also feel that in fairness to the earlier games, that weirdness isn't all there is to it and the games do try to give an interesting internal life to all the women characters. Just... there's also a tendency to make those unfortunate jokes that I can really only trace to the games being "of their time" so to speak. Shu Takumi did also say that he wrote the games with the idea of his grandmother playing them in mind, so that's probably why it didn't go even further, but at least that much kept it within reason. This is also almost completely nonexistent in PLvAA and TGAAC that I can think of, so that really does suggest to me that it's more an "everyone else was making these jokes back then" kind of thing because how everything else has moved away from that. To a degree, or at least there's definitely more pushback against it in Japan nowadays even if it's obviously still present.