Ever played Lost Odyssey?  That is a good example of a traditional RPG being fun.  The story is nothing special but the characters are interesting,especially Kaim and the subplots are pretty engaging and mature.  There is also the dreams which are very well written, coming from an award-winning novelist

I care that they take up less than 10% of the actual game time and are skippable. Story and setting are important to most games but when you're paying 50-60$ it's even more important that you're not paying for a glorified movie.

I almost exclusively play story-driven single player games so obviously I care a great deal about stories in games. I care more about whether the story is told well or not, rather than how it is told so I only like cut-scenes when it helps the telling of the story. I don't like cut-scenes just because they are cut-scenes.

Well, for me, it depends.  For a game like HL2 or BioShock, there is no need for cutscenes.  In any story-driven game, there is a need for cutscenes though not necessarily as much as MGS4

Being an Rpg player most of the time, i'd say story is very important, cut-scenes slightly less...
Back in the days the graphics for your typical Square games' fmv were absolutely stunning because the gap between gameplay graphics and fmv graphics was HUGE!
Which made those cutscenes a real pleasure to watch and you'd really 'lay' back and enjoy!
Nowadays the difference in graphics is much less, and more often cutscenes are used even at times when there is absolutely no need for them.
Which makes m less of a treat to me.
Storywise however i don't mind listening or reading for an hour, if the story is as intruiging as in Xenogears or Xenosaga but alas, it seems so hard this century to come up with a great story AND a good game.
To me a good game feels like reading a book and watching a movie at the same time, not many games however accomplish this. So that is why i sometimes do read books or watch movies...

Most JRPGs just seem to keep using the same 'teens(or kids) save the world from evil' plot.  Even Lost Odyssey's main plot was nothing special though the dreams and the subplots are really engrossing and quite mature I might add.

No, I don't.

Kingdom Hearts II is my favorite game because of its BRILLIANT gameplay.

KHII did have great gameplay but it also had a great story though a few might disagree with me

Hell yes! Main reason I like MGS. Main reason Id never play a Splinter cell game.
Story keep the game really interesting. cutscenes are also a big part for me.
Im wont hate the game if it doesnt have any or are short but cutscenes are like a nice bonus.

Hi guys! I'm new in the forum and thought that I can drop some lines on the topic.
Video games as a medium have a long way to go before implementing cutscenes in an effective way. You can partly blame that the video games industry is a new and, naturally suffers from toothing problems and partly that in our times most games follow the Hollywood style of scripts that, let's face it, are getting worse by the day. How long did it took for movies to start weaving cohesive stories and for directors understand what rhythm and story mean in a film? The answer is at least 35 years, except from some shining examples that went unnoticed at those times and now they're held as masterpieces. Games have been around for about for an equal time and some games show promise and try to be the Battleship Pottemkin of gamers. One paradigm is Shadow of the Colossus that opts for less and actually gives more. By letting the gamer fill the gaps without too many cutscenes it succeeds in fully immersing the player. Because the gamer except from being the guiding hand of the character he gets to experience the story as he sees it, he gets to fill in the story as he sees fit. Sadly most games use cutscenes to implement something more tangible to an interactive medium and tell a story in the manner of a roller coaster ride. Rpg's are more like soap operas with extremely dramatic scenarios that draw out for hours and hours and get tangled in their own web of incoherence. Games like MSG use more time for cutscenes than the actual game and suffer from the same problem as RPG's, but on the other hand they deliver melodrama tongue in cheek a cinematics nd end up being a more palpable experience. Another example is games like No more heroes and Devil May Cry that throw at you wacky and stylish cutscenes without caring too much for the story but succeed because the cutscenes only augment some facets of the game and don't actually guide them. In the end by getting drowned in too many cinematics we loose the essence of gaming which is just having fun. I'm not waiting to get fed a really good story from a game, thank good there are books and movies for that purpose. Game designers and studio heads will understand in time that video games are a completely diff semi erent medium and can't be guided by the same narrative approach of a book or a film. Games are meant to be interactive and not a stifled semi cinematic experience.We will just have to wait.


P.S. Fellini once said he loves operas because their form is finite after centuries of tinkering. He thought that operas offered something silly with their stories and something majestic with the perfection of the music and set pieces. I just hope that games don't end up like opera.