And just thinking some more about this game (sorry, I'm awake for some odd reason), the stuff that happens in the beginning of the game:
- You see the young knight guy get married to Ashe
- You see the young knight guy die and then Ashe kills herself.
- You become another young soldier and meet Basc. Enter tutorial level.
- You all die.
- You become Vaan so we already have lots of random character introductios and changes. Fine in a book, bad in a game.
- Oh, Hi Penelo! I bet you're cool, oh wait you have to go. Nevermind.
- You do a lot of pointless quests.
- You do hunts and get caught up in that for a while
- You do more pointless quests (damn darkstones)
- O, Hi Penelo again! You're staying this time. Awesome. Oh, you mean you're leaving in 15 minutes? Damn.
- You muck around in sewers for a while
- You finally start doing something interesting when you break in to the castle...except it just wasn't done well.
- Big invasion of the castle. You meet two completely random characters for some completely random reason join you and don't outright ditch you. At this point, you've already stopped caring.
So yeah, by the time you start doing anything memorable you've already gone through many character changes and introductions and done A LOT of pointless quests that are just busy work. On top of that, you've probably also taken the time to do things like hunts and fiddled around in the desert. By the time the game actually starts to begin, you're invested into the game time wise, but not story wise.
-edit-
And I got farther than that point, just that's the point when I really didn't care about the game and only continued because I had already invested time in it. That wasn't even enough to keep me playing though.
