Hey Himuro, you can't judge an rpg by it's battle length.
You can have a turn-based rpg where every encounter takes TEN MINUTES. But if they're all visible encounters and if there's only 5 encounters per dungeon and they're all unique challenging setups...that's fine. Now those are extremes, but the idea is you can have longer battles if you have fewer battles and they are more challenging. Nothing wrong with that at all. Obsidian is no Doublefine. They have years of experience in rpgs. I think they probably have a good idea about what they are doing.
Disagree.
Slow battles are usually a tried and true manner of evaluating battle system depth. Battles should feel efficient, fast, and fun. A turn lasting almost a minute is always bad news no matter how you slice it. If turns are that slow, imagine what else is inefficient. All you have to do is look at similar cases like FFIX and DQ8 which lack the mechanics of its predecessors. Slow battles, are usually a good indicator of what to expect from the game play. By comparison, fast paced turn based battles USUALLY can tell you the developer did a lot of other things right, like making the game fun to play and look at - something you do in rpgs for 40+ hours - with layered mechanical depth.
This matters A LOT. For me it is the first thing to look at when playing an RPG, like how I try to notice how floaty jumps are in a plat former. If you're going to be doing it a lot in a game you had better make it fast and easy as fuck to get through.
One minute turns?
Ain't got no time for that shit.
Put it another way. What is an old RPG series with slow as molasses battles and little depth (in its single player campaign)? Pokemon. Name me one slow battle system with mechanical depth. More often than not, slow battles mean "this game is for children" and usually that is on the mark.
