They should play through the entire game but in some cases they do not. I remember reading a lot of reviews for Enchanted Arm and I could tell that they didn't play the game beyond the first couple of hours. Just for background, the first 5 hours of Enchanted Arms is pretty much an in game tutorial. A good deal of reviews complained about how the game treated you like you were stupid, telling you to press this button for this or make sure you do that. If they had bothered to get out of the initial area of the game they would have realized that the game was only holding their and because they were at the beginning.
With RPGs in particular, its important to play through the whole game. I know that initially I didn't like Skies of Arcadia that much, but after getting deeper into the game I enjoyed it immensely. I really enjoyed FFXII, but about 20 hours in my license board started to fill up for all my characters and they started to play near identical. I logged in another 10 hours or so before I just became bored with the gameplay because my party was filled with carbon copies from a gameplay standpoint. The sad thing is that I made it a point to try and keep my characters unique. I won't blather on anymore but I just thought I'd give you all few examples of why I think the way I do on this subject.
