I feel the real issue here is less about the need for party banter and the actual divorce between gameplay and story. If you were to actually just watch FFXII's story unfold in order, you would find the characters actually get along well. The issue, as it has been pointed out, is that the gameplay sections are long and you can go several hours between cutscenes. I can agree that FFXII's pacing as a whole is certainly off. The issue here comes down to what you're looking for, playing White Knight Chronicles which borrows several deign choices from FFXII, I can honestly say that I prefer silence over listening to the party making conversation every five minutes that we're not at our destination, because I got lost on one of the games huge maps. Of course, XII had better, less cliche characters, but as I mentioned earlier I'm sure if I had to listen to Balthier's one-liners every ten minutes he would not be one of my fave characters in this game.

Generally speaking, when I'm set upon by a task, I become pretty focused on completing it and having random dialogue sprouting out to break the silence or cutscenes messing up the flow if there are too many short ones interspersed. If I'm gaming I want to game. The idea of listening to the party make insufferable small talk or even breaking up the Sandsea with several small cutscenes of the characters trying to figure out where they are going would have made that location much worse for me. Game, let me do my job. This was one of the issues I had with Bioshock and on occasion, MGSV is that I would be concentrating on my next task or not getting killed and then some NPC started breaking my concentration because this gun fight is the best time to reveal some important plot element. Thank god Bioshock lets you go back listen to all previous conversations but damn was it annoying. With that said, I'm thankful that the game part of XII just left me in peace. While I can agree that the game could have done more to make the player be more immersed in the characters, that just doesn't really feel like Matsuno's style as his plots tend to deal more with themes than people.