Slow build up or jump into the action?

[Wolf Kanno]

Does that eight hours include the resetting after deaths and the exploration of miles of repetitive dungeon? Or is it actually about thirty hours in that it starts to explain what's going on?

We are talking about pacing of the action here. And both Nocturne and SMT IV threw me into the action so fast (and the action was of such annoying difficulty), that I never cared enough to bother with the rest of the game.

This is the problem with jumping right into the action. If there's too much action (and especially if the action is too hard), then it becomes a block to the rest of the story. And if that action comes BEFORE the story, then the player has absolutely no reason to continue.

"Oh, hey, there's all the awesome story, you just have to wade through twenty hours of boring, repetitive, and difficult combat to get to it!"

Sorry, I'm not going to take the game's word for it. If it introduces me to the world first, if it lets me see what's going on, gives me a reason to engage it, then it gives me a reason to fight for it. I'll press on and engage the combat because I WANT to. Because I care about the world, the NPCs, the story, etcetera. I WANT to see how things turn out, and I press through because of this.

This is where SMT fails. It just tells you what to do, without giving the player any actual motivation to do it. Because it doesn't take the time to set that motivation up. It just goes: Here's the dungeon. Go to it, and I'll get back to you in thirty hours.

Honestly, a 15-20 minute turn around from start to combat is about the norm for most JRPGs. SMT is pretty fair about that, hell SMTIV actually fills you in on the world and characters much more than usual and even the combat/dungeon crawling in the game is largely piece meal style compared to other entries in the franchise; meaning it's actually a slower case of getting you into the thick of things. The game doesn't even go full dungeon crawler until the Black Samurai shows up and even then, the game's dungeons are surprisingly short and to the point compared to earlier installments and even Persona.

You're introduced to them, in a "hello, this is such-and-such" type manner. You don't get to really KNOW them. Then you're in a dungeon for an hour and a half and you die five times and you just give up and forget about it because you have no connection to the characters or world, and don't care enough to finish.

Maybe that's just me, but both Nocturne and SMT IV got that reaction out of me. I didn't actually KNOW the characters, and I didn't have any reason to care about getting them to the end of the dungeon. I didn't learn enough about the world to care about saving it. It wasn't worth the trouble. Too much action early on, without setting up what it needed to make me want to finish, and the stupid difficulty just made it all worse.

What about having the characters actually grow with you? I mean I'll give you Nocturne but in the case of SMTIV, Flynn is pretty much meeting a group of people who will be his comrades and training with them. He's thrust into a situation they don't know and they all try to learn to make the best of it. You actually learn more about Walter, Jonathan, and Isabeau as you travel together and experience the world setting. Frankly, while everyone comes from a different background that shapes them, the events are just as new to them as you the player. It's actually a realistic setting because it happens in our everyday lives when we start new jobs or go to new classes. What is suppose to be propelling you is not some emotional hook, but rather one out of curiosity. SMTIV's world is filled with little strings of plot begging to be pulled and they do pull you in. Mikado gets quite a bit of set-up in the early parts of the game and it's how the place feels "off" and trying to uncover why, that makes the story engaging. You do get the emotional payoff because the party learns this terrible truths together, and soon a wedge begins growing between everyone as their ideologies begin to create conflict. There are quite a few heartbreaking moments in the game, and it's the wonderful cast that's responsible, you just need to give them the time to develop. Persona does the same thing as the situations towards the end of their games could never be as impactful with just the introduction of the characters if you didn't have the hours of gameplay filling in the emotional gaps.

The slow start of the Persona games actually helped. You're introduced to all the characters in a way that lets you see their personality, actually start to care about them as characters, and engage with the world before being forced to fight for your life. What's more, since the games are based in our world, you already have a reason to care about it. Unlike SMT IV, which is set in some strange pseudo medieval world, from what I could tell, that I didn't care about at all. Or Nocturne, in which our world is destroyed in the first fifteen seconds, so you're thrust into a blasted hellscape that gives you nothing to care about or fight for.

It's also considered to be the newer Persona game's biggest Achilles Heel. The abysmal slow pace of the early sections and long start to actual gameplay ratio tend to turn off most casual fans. Hell P3 doesn't really begin to pay off the investment until you reach October, which is more than halfway into the game if we're being honest. P4 has an even longer intro of "hitting start to actual gameplay" ratio and it is damn noticeable if you want to get into the thick of things, especially since the character intros and backstory exposition could stand to use some editing. It's episodic nature keeps the momentum but I feel the overall plot suffers from it, since it lacks any depth until the near end. I honestly don't mind the long slow grind myself but I do play these games for gameplay and don't mind telling the plot to take a back seat sometimes so I can actually play the game part of it. I feel there are times when their is too much exposition in the beginning of a game. [spoiler=*cough* Dragon Quest VII [/spoiler]

The driving force of the SMT plots are not based on caring about some emotional investment in a fictional setting or character, but the nature of exploration and appealing to ones sense of curiosity. Yes, the world ends 15 minutes into Nocturne, but why? How did my character survive? What happened to your friends? What's become of the world? Who was that strange kid and what did he do to me? What is going on? The story is about exploring themes and answering questions, not a character drama like most JRPGs. If you don't care for that, it's cool because we all have our own needs and wants but it doesn't mean the game is flawed as much as its appeals lie elsewhere. Elder Scrolls is pretty much the same deal with being more about exploration and trying to make sense of it all as opposed to be placed in a setting your meant to have some emotional investment in from the get go before anything happens.

Okay, couple points here.
There's a reason why, despite owning Dark Souls, I never actually turned the game on. I need more reason to play a game than "oh, there's a lot of depth if you slog through thousands of hours of difficult gameplay". There's also a reason why I gave up on Skyrim after the first fifteen minutes. It thrust me into a world I didn't care about, gave me little to no background, and expected me to engage with it despite incredibly tedious mechanics (seriously, it's like fifteen minutes of walking with nothing interesting going on just to get to your second quest location), and nothing happening except incredibly boring combat.

It's not an approach to game design that at all appeals to me.

Fair enough, and you're entitled to your opinion on this. I'm a bit surprised you hate SMT's gameplay as I felt Press Turn would be right up your alley considering you seem to favor more strategic battle systems.

I don't know. I talk to everyone in every town every opportunity I get (I literally talk to every NPC every single day in Persona, for example). I spoke to about fifteen characters, tops, before I wound up in the first dungeon in SMT IV, and just as few in Nocturne.

You still get quite a bit of set-up for the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado with those NPCs and they actually change their dialogue more frequently than Persona 3/4's NPCs. Most of the backstory for K, Hugo, Navarre, Isabeau, and Hope is told through the NPCs in the early sections of the game. I mean SMTIV is honestly pretty good about easing you into the gameplay. Naraku is one of the longest dungeons in the game but you don't even tackle it in one setting until quite a ways in after really getting build up from both characters and the world. Even after beating it, you'll see it's actually no longer than some of the dungeons in P4.

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If it expects me to do a bunch of boring combat before I actually get to a situation I care about, then I'm going to skip it. The tediousness and the difficulty isn't worth the eventual payoff years down the line. If the game can't give me a reason to care about the fighting, the fighting had either be damned enjoyable, easy as hell (so that you can get through it quickly), or a very, VERY small part of the game.

SMT fails on all of these counts. Combat is boring. Combat is difficult. And Combat is 90% of the early game. If Suikoden is anything like that, I'm fine not playing it.

Suikoden is more of a traditional JRPG. Combat is "boring" in the sense that it's very vanilla with only Suikoden III's combat system mixing things up in a way that has divided fans. Actually Suikoden V sounds to be up your alley because the first ten hours of the game is exposition getting you to understand the world and characters so you can care. It gets hounded by older fans for taking so long to get into the meat of the game, being mostly a very linear experience for the first several hours. The early games are a bit quicker to get to that point, but even then, the games are more narrative focus than most JRPGs. It's also more on the Fire Emblem side of Idealism vs. Cynicism scale as opposed to Matsuno's FFTactics. You only get bad endings if you really screw up some rather black and white moral choices.