Brentai reminded me, but speaking of Valkyrie Profile, they finally seem to have gotten over the "far too long and talky intro" for Covenant of the Plume, which I've been playing lately. It's still talky, but it's only about two battles worth of talking and moves along at a fairly good clip. [spoiler]You'll be sacrificing your best friend for power in no time![/spoiler] Plus you can skip scenes now. It's still got some issues, like battle animations for everything in an SRPG and I don't want to have to [spoiler]kill the plucky assassin girl to win the next battle instead of the asshole guy just because I'm not good enough friends with that guy yet[/spoiler], but that's pretty minor.
Also as far as I remember all dungeons in VP are escapable, so you can always run away. If you're good enough you can freeze and dodge all monsters anyway so you don't have to be worried about getting wiped on the way to the exit. Most of the time.