I could ask you a similar question: why play an RPG if you don't care about playing? Go watch a movie.

The point of many posters, I imagine, is that there is too much non-playing parts all at once, it's not strictly about them not being skippable.

This is especially damning when the long unskippable cutscene is during a boss fight or something which you might fail afterwards and cannot save.

> This is especially damning when the long unskippable cutscene is during a boss fight or something which you might fail afterwards and cannot save.

Some games have started to get this right, either by making cutscenes you've seen skippable, or by just automatically skipping straight to the battle if you've already been through it once. I suspect one reason it didn't happen on older games was the need to explicitly save, rather than autosaving.

Unlike a movie, when done well, the combat/grinding add to player engagement because it places the player in direct charge of the characters' growth from a nobody to a legend. You can't get that from a movie.