If you spend that much time on character creation then sure. I can see it getting annoying.
But if a game also doesn't draw you in with any kind of good story or environment then it also sucks.
And shouldn't character creation take awhile for a good RPG? That's just kind of standard really. The first Fallout didn't seem like too much of an RPG in the first 5 minutes. More like a point and click rat fighting game.
I'm having trouble working out what you're trying to say. Is it the mark of a good RPG to spend time on character creation or is it in fact crappy if it takes more than five minutes?
As for F1, Vault 13 is only a place to begin, not the game in full, there's plenty of story if you allow the game a little time to get rolling, a large chunk of it comes from the large cast of characters you meet out in the world. If you're looking for a big attention grabbing thing right away, it doesn't have that, what it does have is a world rebuilding itself and lots of stuff to do to help or hinder its progress, ultimately these combine to offer rather a large story surrounding the fate of the future NCR. If you judge it to be a bad game on the first five minutes alone, that's your problem.
First, we can stop assuming I made a judgment off 5 minutes. I played for about 20. I made it to a vault in the east and experienced several crappy battle sequences. If the story gets better great, however I'm sure the combat remains terrible. The only person I talked to was a caravan trader. Yay. They could have at least started you off inside the vault rather than outside which makes it seem like they're discouraging any opening story.
Second, yes it is the sign of a good RPG to spend time on character creation. Usually, I know what I want and it doesn't take too long for me on modern RPGs simply because they're not as thorough as the older ones. If you're spending too much time creating your face then you should remind yourself that you'll never look at it and it doesn't matter. Remind me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the original Fallout ask you to pick a character with a backstory? I thought that was weird. I would rather they feed me a backstory through dialogue with NPCs, but whatever.
It has a high rating, so it must get better at some point. I was just wondering when. Then again people really love FFVII and I never could get into that.
Well, 20 minutes and 5 isn't all that different in terms of how much of the game you experienced. Shady Sands, which is en route to Vault 15 from your starting location, is generally where people stop first, in it you meet Aradesh and Tandi, get Ian in your party, fight some radscorpions and Khans and generally get a feel for how pretty much everything in the game works. I can understand people not liking Fallout, really, I can, but I think a lot of people either do what you did or they get killed in their first random encounter and just quit. It's the kind of game that requires a patient and methodical approach, and I'd really advise giving it a few hours at least before dismissing it, it just isn't the kind of game you can assess in 20 minutes.
As for character creation, in a traditional RPG like D&D, as I understand it, each player designs a character and comes up with a backstory for them, they then play that character according to the information they've decided upon. In Fallout, there are three premades with their own backstories that you can play, but by far the most popular — and recommended — option is to create a new one from scratch with whatever backstory you like. I guess it depends how much imagination you want to put into it, personally I didn't like how F3 handled backstory, it was far too prescriptive for my taste, but I can appreciate why some would prefer to have an opening sequence like that rather than having to come up with their own motivations for whatever they're doing.