The game is nothing but boring sidequest after boring sidequest. If you took out all of the pointless missions, the game wouldn't be half as long. Let me give you an example.
The quest is to go overseas to find Doulmagus, and kill him. But first you need to find a boat. You find the boat but it's beached and can't be moved, so you go back to your castle to research a way. When you can't figure out a way, the weird harp playing guy comes along and says that he will move it with his magical harp. Yey! But his harp isn't strong enough. First you need to go a neighboring kingdom and see if you can have their harp because you helped them in a sidequest earlier. The king says yes, but when you go to the underground vault, a bunch of moles dug their way into it and made off with the harp. So you need to track them back to their hideout and fight them for it. Now you have the harp to get the boat into the water. You make your way across the sea to Doulmagus but he's protected himself within 'the darkness' and now you need some means to blow away 'the darkness'. So you look for the mirror with enough power to do so. But the only mirror powerful enough to do this is one of another kingdom’s treasures and the king can't just give you a relic of historical importance. So the only way to get it is to first help his majesty's son go through his puberty ritual because he's too much of a wuss to go and do it on his own. Now we can get the mirror. But the mirror has lost it's power. So we then need to go to the west and see the magical sage who will be able to restore its power. But he can't and tells you to first go to the open water and find a certain shark that hits you with a light based attack and when it hits the mirror, then it will be recharged. Now you can blast through 'the darkness' and fight doulmagus. *phew*
BTW, every last VA with exception to Yangus is terrible. Almost as bad as Star Ocean 4.