Having recently gone back and played some of the classic NES and SNES RPGs I've come to realize another problem with the modern RPG, to me at least. While the length is definitely a large factor as to why I don't complete the majority of modern RPGs the graphics also, for me, hinder the game sucking me in to it. When you look at the Final Fantasy games from 7 on, or really any of the RPGs after the evolution to 3D gaming the imagination aspect of the games have gone missing and with the advent of voice acting it's only gotten worse. No longer do you have representations of your characters left to your imagination to flesh out. No longer do you have maps and stats charts to reference when playing through a game (am I the only one that misses these?). Now RPGs are essentially movies with a small bit of interaction.

Old RPGs you could beat in maybe a dozen hours your first time through. Old games in other genres you could sometimes beat in minutes if you had mastered it and yet those games are still fun today. They had replayability, which new games really lack. And on that topic, what ever happened to the puzzler games. I'm thinking along the lines of Solomon's Key, Adventures of Lolo, etc. That entire genre has died out except for on phones and, to a lesser extent, portable systems (NDS, PSP).

In the last decade it seems the "casual gamer" tag has become something of a dirty word which is rather unfortunate if you ask me.

I agree as well. This is my biggest gripe with modern RPG games. The games have become anywhere from 40 to 100+ hours games for no reason other than taking longer to beat. The story hasn't improved. It doesn't need to be as long to make it fulfilling. For me the older, much shorter, RPGs were better games because they didn't have 80+ hours of fluff added just to make the game longer.

Another thing is the cut scenes. Sure in an action game they can really move the story along or keep a player hooked. The xbox version of Ninja Gaiden did this really well, I think. It was the first game in a long time where I just had to see the next cut scene and get that much further in the game and in the end, putting in 30 hours or so to beat it didn't seem like a waste of time.

I can remember playing through the Sands of Time in one sitting. It was short, and it did get repetitive at the end, but it was to the point. The game was primarily about the puzzles, and while I might argue the puzzles were too simplistic or some poorly designed it for the most part was well done. If this new PoP game improves on that great.

Maybe I'm just more nostalgic than anything but I would love to see a resurgence of the old styles of games. Ones where could could pick them up, play for 20 minutes, and actually get somewhere. Puzzlers like The Adventures of LoLo, or old RPGs that are short enough for a casual gamer to stick with them long enough to beat them. It's telling of the quality of a game when people will still pick up a 15 year old game, play it, and get the same enjoyment out of it even if they've beat it before. With games of the past few years, there's only a handful that maybe fall in to this category and of those they're so reliant on the story that a lot of the fun isn't there once you've beat it the first time.