Dragon's Dogma to Contain Over 42,000 Lines of Dialogue

While I'm not sure if that automatically translates to a story focus and we've had no way to gauge their quality so far, a Dragon's Dogma developer blog on localization boasts some pretty impressive numbers about dialogue and voice acting: more than 42,000 lines and 20 hours of voice acting are supposedly in the game.
Dragon's Dogma is a game with not only a heavy combat emphasis, but a heavy story emphasis as well. It makes for a different mix than a lot of Capcom games, and action games in general, but we hope it will be a nice change of pace for today's gamers. The game is fully voiced, with something like 20 hours of voiced dialogue in the game, across almost 400 different characters. It was important to the development team and the localization team to get several different voices and voice actors to really get that immersive feel of a living, breathing world as you play through the game and meet different characters. As you travel through the world, you'll meet farmers, merchants, and nobles, all living their lives, sometimes affected by what you the Arisen are doing, othertimes not. And just like in the real world, they've always got something to say -- between NPCs and your pawn companions, there are over 42,000 lines of dialogue in the game.