The problem is that most of the time the medium is great (i.e. the graphics, voice acting, cutscenes), but the story/content is terrible. Repetitive quests, extremely stereotypical/cliché characters, underwhelming plot twists -- name it, it's all there.. I'd much rather have sub-par graphics and great storytelling than the other way around. Too much effort and money is being spent on the envelope. And I'm not even getting into novel game mechanics.
This is also what happens a lot of the time, interestingly, when a Hollywood director makes a movie "from scratch" without it originally coming from a screenwriter.
Maybe we could learn from that. What if the games industry followed the more standard Hollywood pipeline of "screenwriter writes a screenplay, shops it out for publication; some production company buys it and starts making it"? Imagine if we had indie game designers making their living writing game design documents and shopping them around to AAA companies--there would actually be a coherent game that the AAA edifice was hung upon! It might even be playtested and prototyped so as to guarantee it's fun before the AAA company even buys it!
Effectively, in games industry terms, you'd have the indie game makers creating the initial "game", but never publishing it--and then the AAA company creating a souped-up clone of that game, which is the first version of it anyone will ever see.
I think having to fit inside a game limits the storytelling, because you always need to find a reason why you have to go and battle several hundred enemies.
"To the moon" is a great example of the game you are looking for -- old school pixel art graphics, but it has a beautiful touching story. And the music... just listen to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QfPDmzpC2Q
