Having just sunk 60 hrs into the game...

It's cause it's two games stapled together. The first half is a short 'Tales of' game, with some ridiculous anime bullshit setpieces (in the best way), the second half is a monster hunter clone, and probably the best monster hunter clone ever made.

I can sorta understand why the devs would add that for the people who just jived with the monster hunter combat portion of the game and weren't down with watching some of these really long story cutscenes about the power of friendship or whatnot.

Do people even like stories and art anymore? Not a JRPG player or fan, but I'm hating this general trend of stripping out and removing everything.

Tbf gacha games and it's spin off games all have terrible and boring stories delivered in a VN-format, if I play this I'll probably take advantage of this

Is GranBlue story any good though? Seems perpetual damsel in distress coded

JRPGS are the game equivalent of switching between reading a book and playing chess every 20 minutes. They're great on their own but the story and the gameplay may as well be entirely different forms of media.

Nier was fucking awesome but it should have been a book instead of this 15 hour game filled with fun but basic combat.

A lot of JRPG’s have pointless fades between movements in the dialogue. I skip stuff and can infer everything that happened, especially when it’s like I want to go to the casino on the map. There’s a guy sitting on the steps. I have to talk to him in a little cutscene that resolves in him moving out of the way. But there was some funny dialogue there. Ok. Sure. Whatever. I don’t need this skip plz.

I immediately wish the Tales Of series of games had this. god that game is so incredibly disrespectful of your time when its telling you its 'story'