In film, one of the most important things is good editing; all of the unnecessary parts are cut. Likewise, this should be represented in video games more; I'd love to get into some of them, but they are just too long and expansive to play through.
I'm thinking one solution would be to offer the choice to play the game in "abridged" or "unabridged" mode. I'd like to play through some Final Fantasy and other Squaresoft games without the tedious leveling up, walking around aimlessly, and random, monotonous battles. If I could abridged versions of these, I would actually play them; I think that if Square offered an "abridged" version of these, it would open a whole new market for them.