When talking to people, they should say everything they have to say THE FIRST TIME! It seems to be a trend in games lately that speaking to NPCs more than once results in more dialogue. I want to hear everything they say but dammit, don't force players to check to see if they have more. This becomes annoying because most of the time, this doesn't apply to every NPC either so you have to double check every single time and then if go through the same text if there's nothing new. ARGH!
There are two other things I think all RPGs with tons of text should have:
A. A text log. If some character tells me some important info in the midst of a town full of characters who are all telling me long and boring stuff, I don't want to have to run around the whole town talking to everyone to find it again. And if the person tells me something straightforward that isn't supposed to be a secret/puzzle, then have it highlighted in the text log (or hell, just have a separate log for important info...)
B. Skipable text. Or at least, skipable if its not important. Or if I died. There is nothing more annoying than dying at a boss who has a crapload of text in front of him and having to button jam through the text again... just to die again and do it over and over.
A. Can't say I've ever had that issue... then again usually if I see something of importance that I might forget later on, I just write it down. So yes, in a way an in-game text log would be helpful
B. YES! PLEASE! I never beat Paper Mario: TTYD because of this. You know that final boss that asks you to join her? I said yes, thinking it would give me a humorous scenario BUT NO IT KILLS YOU AND HAS YOU GOING THROUGH THE ENTIRE DAMN END SEQUENCE THAT TAKES FOREVER! Then I tried again and made it to the actual battle... but died cause of a few cheap turns. And I think I died a third time as well, by then I was so bored that I just gave up altogether. This would be useful in so many games...
Both Tales of Symphonia games have a log of stuff you may've missed, showing up in a "diary" format. Extremely helpful when you haven't played for a week or so and I can't remember what you're supposed to be doing exactly. Of course, this shouldn't go into scoring the game at all since its violently useful and not a lot of other games -- I can't think of any that do it like this (the only ones that come to mind that are SIMILAR but far inferior are Midna in Twilight Princess and the Map function in Metroid Prime that tells you where theres a new energy source (?) , or something) -- have this function at all.
i like games that give you guided, question-based dialogue trees, ala old Sierra games like Heart of China/Rise of the Dragon or even Beyond Good & Evil
Anything dialogue in any game should be skippable whether you've watched it once or not. Because maybe you watched it once, got your ass kicked and just turned the game off? Then the game counts you as having not watched it. It's like, why do the developers give a fuck? Your story isn't going to be Oscar worthy 90% of the time anyhow, so unless they're telling me something vitally important to progressing (Read: Not stuff the "characters" but not the player needs to know.) then I may want to skip it.
This isn't even for me personally, I can read/listen to cut-scenes or text logs in any game, love that crap. But it's common courtesy, dammit!
I actually like having to talk to NPC's multiple times. One of my favorite things to do in Chrono Trigger was talk to people multiple times. Sometimes they'd give you a reward for giving a crap about what they have to say. Maybe that's just me, though.
Skippable scenes/dialogue would be great. Just so long as there is a "confirm skip" feature. I don't want to accidentally hit the 'A' button and skip an important scene. Make me press 'A' and then ask me to confirm the skip afterwards. Make sure I didn't hit the button on accident.
My biggest thing to fix: Make the "proceed through this text" and the "initiate conversation" buttons SEPARATE!!! You know those times where you're pressing the STFU button repeatedly to get through the conversation when you inadvertently start the whole process over again because you didn't stop at the right time. I'm looking at YOU, Zelda!
I SWEAR that inverted Yes/No was done on purpose just because Nintendo KNEW it would drive some people crazy and they could get a laugh at frustrating people who tried to go too fast.
