Well cutscenes (or "people standing around with dialogue boxes" in the much older entries) were very short in the first five games. In 6, 7, 8 and 9 I did eventually get tired of having to rattle the action button to skip dialogue boxes I'd already read about forty times before, but a turbo-fire controller with a bowl on the action button served as a passable solution for that while I checked my email or sent a text to a friend or something for a couple of minutes. Actually the fact I used a bowl made me hungry for cereal, heh. Even that lifestream sequence that I found rather dull after just the first time in FF7 only takes about fifteen minutes (still too long, though) with that technique, everything else is way shorter.

Yes, I do have films and TV series I've watched all the way through more than once, but after a while I just put them on as background noise while I do something else; I don't give them my full attention. I treat cutscenes in games I've given multiple playthroughs the same way. Unless I can skip 'em.

FFX's cutscenes occasionally let you cut off a line of dialogue but the pause still seems to be there as though they said the entire line anyway. There is no way to make them go by quicker. By FFX-2 they finally saw the damn light and added a skip function, so that's the game where I don't understand the complaints about its content :P

And like I keep saying, I was essentially browbeat into playing the game by my friends just so my opinion on it would be respected (people thought I would come around; they were wrong, and they've never used it since, with me now citing FFX as one of the games I use as my good reason not to give a game a chance if I instantly hate it... what really bit them in the ass was I was now constantly giving them advice with battle strategies because I had gotten better than they at the game in no time at all because it was so damn easy) so stop using the "shouldn't have played it" argument, because then I am roughly 412% certain you would instead argue that I couldn't knock it if I hadn't played it all the way through and "given it a chance."

Okay, you've earned it. I'm going to admit that I think a lot of the endgame content (dark aeons, other optional bosses and so on) is mostly really good, although some of the Sigil-earning minigames can smurf off and rot in a pit of cancerous AIDS flu.