..it's an interesting phenomena, to be sure.

I myself have realized over the years that a lot of people claim to love games for their stories, when in fact what they are attracted to is more experiential/identification qualities. Not plot, writing, or three dimensional characters as much as the sum of the experience of the voice-acting, the aforementioned factors, the graphics, the music, the character design, the game design's ability to get the player to empathize for or identify with the protagonist, etc.

The overall experience of progressing through a character-based game and enjoying those sort of factors often gets lumped under the label of "story," and I can understand that.

All three of the games you mentioned have terrible stories - by which I mean plots, character development - by the standards of... well, anything but a video game. But when you're judging those aforementioned experiential factors, they jump up to near the top of the pile, at least for many people.