you guys know what i think the issue is

it takes too long to make a game nowadays

back in the day there was no body-scripted video and lip-synched vid for every single conversation

not everything had a voice attached to it

but now they gotta record all that for every single npc

i'd give it up for a text based thing as long as the story was more cohesive and stuff

radiant historia is amazing and no one talks in it. and there's only a few animations per character. it's not that hard, but the ff's have become a grand spectacle now, so a lot of the emotional subtlety disappears.