YOU SIR ARE WRONG! The story plays out extremely well. It does require a lot of time and effort without a doubt but there are so many interesting stories and characters involved. It has everything! I love how they did the story and tied it all in. I love the fighting system, the robots, the in game graphics. Man please!
The fighting system is without a doubt really well done. The amount of control one has over their characters is amazing and the various scale makes for some fun times. However, the story is dragged out for almost no good reason and the characters are a bizarre mix of deeply meaning full individuals and cartoon-ish teddy bears. Hell, the first 10 hours are so mind numbingly boring that I always want to shoot myself while wandering through that incredibly tedious sand dungeon, and for the last 10 hours, the game basically plays itself, since all your characters are so wildly OP that taking on god seems like walk in the park. *SPOILER ALERT* Even during the final boss fight, there is no reason to even attack the little satellites as the final boss's attacks are not even remotely as amazing as Fei and his crew in their super gears. *SPOILER ALERT*
Well, I disagree. I think the story is excellent and really plays out well. I was quite shocked many times my first time playing at various points in the game. I know the second cd was a lot of story and not a lot of playing but it was still awesome. The various theological and philosophical ideas that were put in the game also made it quite interesting. I think the entire game plays out well and was never bored nor found the game too easy. Maybe you just leveled up your characters well. Even still, if all your complaining about is the first 10 hours and the last few hours, that is still only a small percentage of the game, which took me over 100 hours to finish. Most RPGs I finish in 20-40 hours. The only RPGs that have ever lasted me this long were Xenogears, Dragon quest 7 and final fantasy 7. Some were 60-80 hours but I can't remember all of the RPG's I have played honestly heh.
I have played hundreds of RPG's in my life, most of the RPG's ever made that is. I have owned and still own all of these systems: nintendo, super nintendo, nintendo 64, gameboy, gameboy advance, gameboy color, nintendo DS, Nintendo gamecube, nintendo wii, Sega genesis, sega cd, sega dream cast, sega saturn, playstation, playstation 2, playstation 3, xbox, xbox 360, atari, intellivision, Links, turbo grafx 16 and of course the PC. Man, now that I think about it, that's just sad, but at least I was young then heh. Started playing games when I was 5, had me an atari and an intellivision at that time. There are some games I missed but I have played even most of the obscure RPG's. Sadly, I don't have nearly the time I used to being married and all 
Not like they make all that many RPG's these days anyway, except for nintendo DS.
