Action sequences in Adventure game, yay or nay?

I have an additional question that is kinda related so I will not make a new thread for it:
What is your opinion of sections of the game where the main characters is separated from other characters for an extended amount of time? For me good adventure games are in large part character studies/driven by their characters so to me they often appear a little dull.

Examples of the kind of sections I am thinking of:
- Fate of Atlantis, exploring the Minotaur labyrinth and Atlantis
- Grim Fandango, the factory in year 3
- Escape from monkey island, stranded on Monkey island
- The whole of the original Maniac Mansion (kind of a grey area, since it does not have traditional character interaction)
- Leisure Suit Larry 2-3, the jungle segments

I guess it depends on whether you can make scenes without characters in them interesting or not. Nice artwork with lots of detailed enviroment animations & other such things.

Simon the Sorcerer 1 featured lots of scenes with nothing to interact with because it let you literally walk to each destination on the map (which you could fast travel to later on after finding new locations), but I really enjoyed walking through the woods / forest as it had relatively nice music for most locations & there was always plenty of things like butterflies floating about & birds landing on the ground & flying away again when you got within a certain distance of them. For a pixel art game it sure looked nice. The locations covered in snow were my favorite bits. So for me personally I don't mind as long as there's stuff to look at & if there's some obstacle puzzles that aren't too time consuming / illogical to mix it up a bit, then it's all good.

I'm not a fan of having to solve puzzle after puzzle in each & every location. It just gets tiring, as does having to talk to tons of npc's. I think it's all down to finding the right balance as too much of anything will bore the player unless they happen to be an hack & slash fan & don't mind slogging through 20+ hours worth of mindless button mashing.

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For me good adventure games are in large part character studies

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If "Separation" from other Characters implies that the Player would usually be in those Characters' Company, then being separated from those is an important Part to any Character Study, namely the Difference between how a Character thinks, talks, behaves differently around People or when being alone, and possibly the Character suddenly finds out how helpless he or she is without those other Characters around.

If, however, you just mean the Player being alone for a long Amount of Time, then yes, you are right, Adventures are very much driven by their Characters, but what is a Character? Allow me to be a little broad here and make the Claim that an Environment is a Character, because it has Character. That is to say, the Environment tells a Story (or at Least it should), and thusly conveys a History, conveys Emotions, conveys Ideas, those Things that make a Character, and you also interact with that Environment.
Of Course, your Protagonist will still be making Comments about the Environment, I suppose, and thusly there still is Character Study via the Protagonist. (A nicely weird Overlapping of both Concepts is in "Edna & Harvey: The Breakout", where Edna, being insane, literally talks to the Furniture and Stuff and then starts little Mini-Dialogues... but I guess your Protagonist is a little too sane to do that.)

However, being alone in a Game where you usually aren't can also serve as a Way to evoke bad Emotions in the Player, Feelings of Anxiety and Helplessness, if done right -- but if done right in another Way, then the Player is not "alone", but in Solitude, having some comfortable Self-Time. (Which brings us back to Simon the Sorcerer, and I wonder if the Rocks having Faces helps making the Player feel less alone while roaming the Woods.)

@ CaligariMarte: well put!

P.S: I'd forgotten about the faces on the trees & rocks. I wish adventuresoft would come out of hiding & do a hd remake of the original game with overhauled voice, sound & music recordings as they weren't very clean - then again they were pretty much just a bedroom studio at that time I think.

Very interesting read both! Definitely some points there I have overlooked. The weird thing is, I would argue the exact same thing for platforming games (where the scenery is the main character apart from the one you control).