I'm not saying story is a bad thing. It's not, but it seems like a lot of devs focus so heavily on coming up with an engaging story and good visuals that they forget to actually make the game fun to play.
I think about some of the games I've played over the years, and a lot of my favorites either had fairly limited or even downright absurd plots that basically boil down to an excuse to make the gameplay loop happen.
Just a random musing.
Retro games barely had a story. It was just sort of expected to be there.
If anything, there was a period of time where screaming idiots felt the story was supposed to be le epic deep lore where everything has to fit together like some kind of fantasy novel series of books with 5000 pages. Sonic Universe. Zelda Timeline. It was nonsense. During the era I was halfway expecting the Tony Hawk Canonical History.
...a game series that would have been better off if it had stayed 2D if ever there was one...