I wish modern games would have the same feature!
FF7 really had this nailed - flashy, mysterious cut-scene to first battle in, what, 3 minutes?
This makes replays painful as the story isn't particular interesting and in some places actually quite nauseating to watch (Miles is constantly conflicted on very straight forward things), but the game play itself is quite fun. I've looked for a mod for this game where you can skip all cut-scenes but it doesn't seem to exist.
Except when you use the Knights of the Round summon, then you go grab a coffee while waiting for the animation to finish :).
These days I want my games to be actual games.
Half of Final Fantasy X (and I think a little later they released a movie both for Final Fantasy VII and the standalone movie the Spirit Within) was Square showing off how good their CGI animation was, which at the time was very good.
CGI cut scenes went from "this is a cool thing I see between levels" on the PS1 to "this is a tedious interruption".
Last couple plays I’ve used zig-zag approach when traveling through random encounter zones, effectively ~doubling distance traveled, and encounters. Stretches those out, but removes most of the separate, dedicated grinding.
(Not defending the game design that makes this necessary, mind you)
Generally. I don't like playable dream sequences or artistic filler sequences in games. I feel like there are a lot of people that working in gaming that couldn't get into Movies/TV and as a result try to insert that sort of story telling into a form of entertainment where it doesn't belong.
The best in game story telling IMO was the Doom 2016 game, where the physicality of the character was done through the short sequences where control was briefly taken away. Unfortunately they undid this (mostly) in subsequent sequels .
I did play FFVII when it came out and I was extremely impressed and couldn't get enough of it. But I could never get into other JRPGs later.
Genuinely curious - if you don't care about the story then why play an RPG? When you're speedrunning - sure, skip all of the cutscenes, but when you're playing casually - why would you want to do that?
The point of many posters, I imagine, is that there is too much non-playing parts all at once, it's not strictly about them not being skippable.
This is especially damning when the long unskippable cutscene is during a boss fight or something which you might fail afterwards and cannot save.
Some games have started to get this right, either by making cutscenes you've seen skippable, or by just automatically skipping straight to the battle if you've already been through it once. I suspect one reason it didn't happen on older games was the need to explicitly save, rather than autosaving.
There are few games where the story has mattered to me, and even basically no games where the cutscenes did.
Edit: the presence of story and cutscenes in a game I enjoy is basically correlation and not causation (for me).
Most games I don’t care about the deep exposition. I’m fine with a vague notion and then starting from the main character’s insertion into it where the gameplay starts.
Not letting the player skip it is just hubris.
Narrative is one thing, but at least with 90s JRPGs you could go through dialog on the field screen at your own pace, generally. It doesn't take long to get to the action.
Mmm played any Kojima games? :)
MGS-4 though is has ridiculous cutscene length.
I do generally find stealthiness to be engaging and great fun _as a component of game play_ but as the main draw and, especially, from the jump I just found it to be frustrating and annoying. Maybe I'd feel different these days, though. I'll try it again some day.