I agree with us all being old fogeys(mentally)...
I have the mentality of a 12 year old which is why half of my posts devolve into TEEHEE VAGINAS by the end of them.
Avatar is special because in a lot of movies that are mostly production values, if said production values are as high as the ones in Avatar, you at least have acting that's not completely terrible or a coherent plot or something. With Avatar it's like, there's a HUGE damn discrepancy between the production values and the actual underlying movie. It's not even b-movie bad. Snakes on a Plane was a damn B-movie and that was far more competently acted than...........
Holy shit Avatar is this decade's Star Wars: Episode 1.
Maybe us older folks just can't immerse ourselves in "coming of age" stories anymore, no matter how pretty and shiny they've become.
Coming of age stories can easily appeal to adults if they're like, truthful and well written. A good coming of age story will cause self-examination no matter how old you are. It just shifts from "Where am I going?" to "How did I get where I am now?" Although, realistically, most people don't know where they're going and the ones that do are usually depressed corporate meat puppets.
JRPGs kind of suck at this (with a few notable exceptions. Namely Earthbound*).
(In another sense, though, this is why I loved Cid from FFVII. He's a sort of adult coming of age story. A guy that lost his dreams, ends up kind of broken, and then finds himself again. Then again maybe it's just my Wapakonetan ancestry that makes me like Cid. Whevz, braw).
Problem is JRPGs always kind of have catered towards the younger set whereas WRPGs have always catered to the older set. Only it's still questionable how well most WRPGs did that, too because while JRPGs are generally old dudes making games for kids, WRPGs are more like kids making games for old dudes, and you end up with a lot of TEEHEE VAGINAS.
* The thing with Earthbound is that while it's accurate to describe it as a "coming of age" story, that's only about half of it. (I actually feel that Lunar: TSSSC works for similar reasons, although that's an annotation for another day).
I hate to reference it since I generally hate the guy's writing, but Tim Rogers kind of nailed it. The game is a coming of age story up through Fourside, at which point it starts to shift. Moonside kind of delineates this change. Congratulations. You've made it to the big city (where people drown, and people serve...). You're a grown up now.
Most JRPGs would end the thing here with a message of discovering the true meaning of love and self or sacrifice or whatever. Earthbound sends you into some dark, creepy acid trip world.
What else? To reinterpret a line from that "Always Wear Sunscreen" song, Earthbound is also, I think, a game about pulling memories away from the garbage disposal of time and preserving/re-remembering them.
Also it really conveys the feeling of leaving home well to me. Well, not leaving home so much but a kind of aimless, lonely homelessness-even-though-you-have-a-home feeling. Getting distant from things.
I first played earthbound when I was younger. Playing it now, I'm like... seeing it differently. How you read it kind of changes with you.