I'll repeat this here for those who aren't named Rocky. (Since I said this to him on MSN.)

1. Story is 25'ish hours or so. It is highly recommended to make Leonardo and Yulie into archers for a quicker run.

2. You only need a keyboard for chatting purposes. Andro already touched on this; while talking is fine, keyboards are best because of the chat logs and being able to look back into them after you come back from AFK, where you can't do that when someone just talks to you through a headset.