I like a good story in an RPG, but a good story cannot make up for lackluster gameplay. The reason for this is that gameplay is, as has already been mentioned, most of what you are doing. As I get older, I find I have little patience for townspeople who have little nothings to say, leaving you hunting around town for the dialogue you need, fighting to separate it from all the "flavor" dialogue that's actually pretty bland, overly simplistic, and/or badly written. I love CF2 when I was a kid, but I would probably lose patience pretty quickly with it now because of the seriously hobbled combat system.
The best RPG combat system:
1. Is balanced in the challenge department. It is frustrating having to grind mooks for 2 hours because the next area is WAY harder than the earlier one. The flip side is wasting time fighting encounters that are just button mashing. If you don't have to engage your brain at all, why is the encounter even there? This balance can be pretty hard to achieve, and IMO separates the truly good RPG developers from the wannabes.
2. Is complex enough to be engaging, with clues about strategy. I dislike overly simplistic battles, because they often devolve into button mashing and disengagement. I also like to have an idea of what's going on. Final Fantasy 6 and 7 were particularly notorious about throwing weird enemies at you that had no place in the environment/ecosystem, with weaknesses that could not be guessed and/or made no sense without straight-out experimentation. I like strategic battles. That said, I don't want every RPG battle system to be like Tactics Ogre. I'm OK with the good guys on the bottom or the right and the baddies on the left or top of the screen.
3. Provides you the option to be turn-based instead of real time. I don't always like to be under a timer. Sometimes I have things to do, and the RPG is what I'm doing while I wait. I want to have to think, not to twitch. Nothing wrong with RTS games or real-time battle systems, but I like to have the option of turning it off so I can take my time and relax. For this same reason I don't like battle systems where to get the truly effective or powerful attacks you have to play rhythm games (hitting the right buttons in the right sequence with the right timing) in the middle of battle.
4. Distinguishes between character abilities. One thing I didn't like about Final Fantasy III/6 was that everyone could use any of the Materia spells. You could soup up every character with a list of spells the length of your arm. By the time you were done playing with Materia only the base character abilities were different. Everyone could heal, for example. Sure, some characters were a bit better at it, but at the higher levels it didn't matter, really. Everyone could cure status effects, too. You didn't have to have a dedicated healer at all. FF III/6 was tolerable, but other games in the FF series were worse, as were other games in other series. Grandia got this right, IMO. You could equip spell eggs on any character, but the spells they got from the egg were different because the characters were different. I don't want characters who can do everything. I want to have to strategize.
5. Is quick and user-accessible. Because balancing challenge is so difficult (see 1) and people may breeze through some areas or grind in others, you cannot always account for an absolute level of challenge (and to do so with auto-leveling enemies has its own share of problems). For this reason, combat needs to be fast. If text is super slow or complex animations are unskippable (I'm looking at you, FFVII summons) you can really got bogged down by easy encounters, in part because they are no challenge and not much fun but they take forever to get through. On the other side of this, if the menu and interaction systems are overly complex or badly designed, you can end up making silly mistakes in an important or difficult battle, or lose an important item in your inventory because you have to spend so long digging around for it. A complex interface can also slow down easy battles.
Yup, I'm pretty demanding, but any company that can hit all of those square on the head deserves my money, and lots of it.
