Ancient-Red-Dragon: I recommend this, it's amazing and one of the best RPGs ever:
Trails in the Sky ChainsawGenie: I, personally, couldn't get into that title (mainly because of the poorly written and unskippable introductory cutscene and the tedious 'tutorial' afterward) so perhaps you found diamonds where i saw dirt. ^_^U
If this is a 'turnstyle title' (ala Fallout 1) that gets better after the first dungeon, I may give it another chance but I'm not entirely sold on guiding a spoiled brat and her 'lapdog' to their 'destiny'. -_-
I have better worlds/universes to explore.
I see what you're saying, but I'd say a large part of what you described is because it's a very slow-burn type of game. It does start out pretty boring, but gradually ramps up the quality of the story, character-development, and world-building to epic levels.
But to discover what the game is really about will require patience and slogging through some boring early parts until it eventually gets cooking.