Particularly with voiced adventure games, applies to Visual Novels as well.

Man: "I'm telling you to get me a sandw~"
[pause]
<click>
Woman: "Don't you tell me what to do!"

Maybe it's just my pet peeve, but it's rather immersion breaking, isn't it?

Yeah, it's a bit shit. There's no real excuse for it, just poor timing on the part of whoever synced up the audio. It could just as easily happen on many cartoons as they usually have their voice acting recorded separately for each character.

It's probably a bigger problem in dubbed adventure games where not a huge amount of care has been taken in the dub. The Whispered World has a weird problem where in English the game cuts off a little bit of pretty much every voice clip, like the timing for each line says the voice clip is shorter than it really is. The problem disappears if you set it to German.

No, it's a problem with the game engines which explicitly designed to have only a single person speaking at a time in easily click-throughable lines. I don't know what kind of hoops you'd have to jump through in AGS to get around that, for example. WEG makes some of the highest quality AGS titles, but even they suffer from this issue. That's only a problem in the "Special Edition" which was made years after the original came out. And I guess they never bothered to fix it. Better just get ahold of the original and play that one, if you wanna play it in English.

Maybe it is an engine problem in AGS games, but plenty of adventure games have bespoke engines. It's possible that they are all unable to run two clips together without a gap or it could be lazy synchronisation. I actually started playing with AGS years ago and had a bit of a (crappy) game going. I never tried anything with voices though so I have no idea if AGS really is unable to run two clips together. Yeah I know. But it's still an example of a timing issue in a dub, and in this instance the engine is definitely capable of running two clips together as sometimes characters interrupt themselves!

I remembered "The Longest Journey" (series 1) was near cinematic in it's rendition. Especially during the washed-up ashore scene after the ship torpedoing, there was a mite bit of banter between April and the bird, which was done pretty naturally.

Yeah it can be annoying but for me the worst part of p&c adventures is when they feel too much scripted. You can figure out what to do next but first you need to perform another action that validates the next one.

Ah yeah, nothing more annoying than having worked out the solution but not knowing how to get the character to work out the solution (they won't do it because they haven't thought of it yet).

I suggest you check out Oxenfree which is interruptions-the game. Which is why I hated it. They claim interruptions are natural... Well.. I would not want to live with that dudes.

I don't really play point and click games but RPGs often have similar mechanics for conversation.

I have to say I prefer that though. I hate completely automated dialogue as it's so easy to miss something if it scrolls too fast or get frustrated if it goes too slow.

I'd much rather a stop after every box where if you are distracted you can put the game down for two minutes and come back without having missed anything.

For the specific instance of being interrupted I suppose the easiest solution would be to display both characters text in one bubble as opposed to clearing it and starting a new one for each character as is usually the case.
Alternatively you could use actual speech bubbles and instead of clicking after each line/sentence you could have a larger conversation appear on screen (and stay there in separate bubbles) before a click is required.

Hi, I'm Pheace. Nice place, huh?

Yeah... I love point & click games, I really do, but there's many aspects that can be frustrating and this is definately one of them. I remember in Anna's Quest there were a few puzzles like that. You had to remember to make the character look at everything first, and only after that would certain uses of an object become available. I was long stuck early on in the game because I already figured out what to do, but I didn't "look" at the right object, so the solution wasn't available. SO I thought it wasn't right after all andwasted plenty of time looking for something else :P

So, killed any monsters yet?

There are games which implemented "look at everything" correctly. The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes is the best example. It was really nice that a lot of puzzles were based on gathering information and observation - just like Sherlock was suposed to work. But in these cases you, as a player, couldn't figure it out before a careful examination of certain objects. It made sense this way.

A lot of games with "combine clues" mechanics suffer from this problem - you know exactly what to do but first you have to make your character aware what is going on.

Ugh, I think i stepped in something.

I guess it's a sort of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" problem. For example Broken Age had the exact opposite problem - you control two separate characters who don't ever meet until the very end, and yet there was at least one puzzle where the solution was information you as the player controlling both protagonists had, but the character actually solving the problem could not possibly know.