Thew

If I had to hazard a guess, it's because no AAA games/blockbusters are in conversation with each other. They'll crib notes, they'll trendchase, they'll blindly copy elements wholesale regardless of how poorly it fits, but at no point is there a holistic look at the genre as a set of iterations upon an established coda nor is that perspective used to make a meaningful set of decisions. Dozens of games are copying Dark Souls but so far Bloodborne is pretty much the only one to look at WHY Dark Souls did what it did, take those same tools, and come at the same problem with other axioms. Marvel has been making the same Iron Man movie for 15 years, they just put a different guy in the cave.

I'm less experienced with mid-budget JRPGs but I've played damn near every mid-budget metroidvania and they're also excruciatingly dogmatic in what tools you get and how they're applied. Within that repetition though is the chance for microdecisions. If the designer knows the player knows they're getting a double jump, an air dash, a wall cling, etc. how are expectations about those tools conveyed? What order are they in? How often does a mechanic serve to gate an individual bottleneck rather than being periodically required? All of these are small changes that are only visible with the genre as a whole as contrast, and many of the flourishes anticipate that a player of one game has played many of the similar ones. This can certainly fall prey to crude reference and an over-reliance on other games to serve as a tutorial, but it's an ecosystem.

Modern hero junk is all about them defending the status quo and finding contrivances for how the people who want to change it are doing it some unjustifiable way, meanwhile "fix the broken world and kill god" is the typical JRPG path. It helps that direct continuity between entries of most RPG franchises is not the norm, a whole new cast in a new or altered version of the world is standard, so they're allowed epic stories that can go in any direction, you don't have to worry about them playing things save.

I would be really interested in seeing you tease this out, but also on its face: I think “formulaic” gets used with a value judgment in a way it doesn’t have to have. Haikus are formulaic. It may be interesting or informative to work out the difference in the structures of those media to find why one works for you and one doesn’t but I definitely don’t think there’s any inherent similarity that suggests any kind of contradiction in enjoying one formula and loathing the other.