the story on final fantasy 12 has a lot of subplots, but in facts it's all politics and boring names of people who died or just don't have much to do with the player, which i think sucks bigtime
final fantasy tactics had much of that, but at least you felt like the story revolved around your team and not like your team belonged to someone else's story
and as for the gameplay, it would've been just the same to me to stay at a place and wait in real time, because when you think about it, all you really could do was walk while seeing the monsters! it wasn't real time like KH so even though you could walk your ass off anywhere you still had to wait for the damn ATB to kick in so you could hit the bad guys