1. They dont take 20 years. My issue with cutscenes is that it typically involves, well... acting. Acting and cinematics and ugh. Waiting for VAs to slooooowwwwwlllllyyyyy read out their lines, waiting for some slow camera pan or something... cutscenes are very similar to so many things in TV and movies, and TV and movies are both far too slow to hold my attention. Movies in particular: It's been at least 10 years since I watched one. They test my patience far too much. Even anime... I still watch it, but I gotta be in just the right mood, which isnt often.
Undertale, as well as a great many older story-focused games (such as Final Fantasy 4, for instance) use dialogue boxes and very limited other effects. When it comes to dialogue boxes, I can read it at my own pace (aka, warp speed). But also, the nature of the writing changes. I notice often that in games that focus more on actual cutscenes, story sections which would be fast in a game that wasnt doing cutscenes will take 50 years WITH the cutscenes, because of how the writing tends to be done when actual acting and cinematics are involved. Something that could be explained in 30 seconds now takes 8 minutes, because reasons. Apparently it sounds better or some nonsense. I dunno, I'm not a TV scientist.
Lastly: It can also depend on structure. Undertale actually works as one of the best examples: It tends to weave gameplay and story together in many sections. Conversations will happen DURING battles many times, instead of ONLY between them. So, character will say something, then there's one of those dodging sequences of gameplay, and then character will say the next thing, and so on. So basically, the gameplay isnt broken up as much. You dont have these enormous chunks where you arent DOING anything. Alot of the games I'm into (that have real story or lore to them) will have that quality. But, even when it's not that, when it's more normal sequences.... yeah, they just dont take all that long. It's all text and I read fast, and the writing isnt all stretched out.
2. Depends on how they're set up. It's hard to say... in the games I play, they are very rare. Mostly I'm just not really into adventure or RPG games to begin with, so I just dont run into them. Though, if I'm watching someone playing Skyrim for instance, I can tell it'd drive me crazy because even though there are choices to be made, it's still characters talking both A: slowly, and B: ALOT. But yeah, I really just dont see it much, so I cant say too much about that. I will say though, that the important thing would be for the choices to have real weight to them... if you choose from 4 different things, but those 4 different things all just lead to the same boss fight in the end or something, then it's just pointless fluff.
I'm more used to branching story paths done via actions instead of dialogue.
Oh yeah, Nintendo was freaking weird back then. My favorite was their old rule about HOW MANY games a publisher could release in a year. Like, what? But then they also were too stupid to figure out that alot of publishers were just getting around it by making fake seperate "publishers" with different names, so many companies released however many they wanted to without much effort. And all because of "quality control", yet even WITH that, you still sometimes got games like Super Pitfall...
Well... Nintendo is STILL freaking weird, I guess. Just in different ways.
