I find that i dislike a whole lot of the genre, but I think it's unfair to blame the genre as a whole. The real problem is that only "sure thing" titles are localized into a language I can read. Everything has to be as close to Final Fantasy as possible or it stays in Japan.
There are tons of funny RPGs, modern day RPGs, horror RPGs, etc. 90% of what we get is generic fantasy (and if I WANT that, I will play Dragon Quest, because it always does it best!), with characters and settings that are just so over-designed that it just all looks like noise.
Thankfully we are pretty solidly getting Megaten games now. Too bad it took us a couple dozen before that started 8/ Even if they have standard fantasy creatures, it's normally presented in an interesting setting, and does interesting things with them (ie contact instead of fighting, overcoming boss creatures to trigger personal growth in characters, so on). Monsters have invaded the school! Grab a a mop and a stolen gun and kick their asses (or dance and make them laugh, whichever).
Current-gen RPGs I have enjoyed to some degree:
Blue Dragon is alright. It's a tad generic, but at least the save the world story has personal vendettas involved for the characters for the most part.
Lost Odyssey is a bit better overall, I don't care much for it's browngrey overdesigned environments very much but the storyline at least attemps creativity, and again, personal reasons for stopping the final boss instead of just "because you were told to do so". Also this is a game where you can become very damn powerful and it's pretty fun to be absorbing damage instead of taking it from most enemies.
Adventures to Go for the PSP is pretty fun, it's terribly generic in many ways, but the dialog is pretty funny (immature, probably not present in the original version, but funny) and the entire setup of the adventuring concept is pretty well a giant parody.
Haven't got too far into Operation Darkness, it's pretty slow, but it's one of those games i thought we'd never get in a million years so I'm happy that we did and voted with my dollar about it too. WWII tactical RPG with animu girls and zombies and shit, hey why not.
Infinate Undiscovery is pretty much everything I dislike about RPGs put together. I hate nearly every single party member in that game so very much god damn it RPGs why do you keep having kids as party members and bitchy women and complete idiot doormat protagonists? At least he eventually sort of gets better but DAMN I hate those people.
well this was quite a rant I think i'm done now. tl;dr: there are good ones still, just they don't come to america / get advertised anywhere / are Megaten and Dragon Quest.