Grinding can be good as long as it isn’t tedious, it doesn’t give many people a sense of accomplishment to go out into a field and run over several monsters for a few hours until they’re strong enough to go to a new area. It’s best done when you barely know you’re grinding, or you’re motivated to do extra tasks/quests (That aren’t the same tired “kill X monsters/collect X thing from X monster/deliver X to X) to improve your character while you’re also working on the main story line. The only reason a person would feel like they deserve it is because they spent too many hours getting their characters to level up enough not to be crushed into dust by next area’s common enemies, also…Final Fantasy 10 is one of the worst Final Fantasy games, FF 8 is probably only worse because it has time travel and many many many more plot holes…oh god it’s like a swarm of moths were eating the script or something.

If you think the Elder Scrolls games are like FPS games you’re the one who needs their head examined, and I doubt quite see what you mean by MMO-like because that could literally mean anything. I’ve played some FPS games like COD on the PS2, and I’ve played some really good JRPGs like Persona 4 and FF Crisis Core; other JRPGs that I really didn’t like were severely lacking in story and at some points got down right retarded with their narrative.

Final Fantasy 8 and 10 are major offenders when it comes to horrible story and lazy writing, those two games would barely be able to compete with a story that was made for a porno >_>. I haven’t played enough JRPGs to know how much variety they have, but I can safely say WRPG have a good variety; I never liked Mass Effect and can’t comment on it.

Skyrim’s main quest is much longer than 6 hours, more around 30 hours to complete JUST the main story and doing nothing else in that time. Secondly Dark Souls is a pretty good game but it’s narrative is severely lacking compared to even some TPS like Red Dead Redemption, it has very a very simple plot compared to pretty much every game I’ve played (I don’t play many FPS games if you’re wondering). Dark Souls shows a lot of influence from Western Games, also Skyrim’s best writting and narrative is shown in it’s side quests; not counting those would be like reviewing an FF game and skipping all the cut scenes.

TPS and FPS are outdated, but gamers are too stupid to recognize that so they buy the next Call of Duty without really any difference from the previous installment, of course JRPGs can’t survive that.