How about a total dependence on the fantasy elements of Tolkien's world of middle earth and it's major spinoff, D&D?
Example: Orcs everywhere. Orcs overflowing every slightly fantasy-based world in western games. Orcs in your pants (don't look).
Example from today's news: Bioware announces that in Dragon Age, the Elves will be the humans' former slaves! No word yet on where the gruff dwarves will fit into this complex social milieu!
Wow, way to rock the boat, Bioware, western company famous for great RPG writing! That messes with my social norms so drastically! Imagine elves, the pointy eared smart-people of fantasy, being demoted to the role of slaves, who as we all know are normally savage and simple-minded!
Basically, from Blizzard to Bioware, American developers will manipulate the formula, but they haven't changed it in twenty or thirty years!
Western fantasy worlds always feel stagnant, like they're doomed to gravitate back and forth between Tolkein and the historical middle ages for all eternity. It's hard for people to break out of that spectrum. I think many still don't understand what Japanese fantasy creators have known for a while, which is that Fantasy is actually much closer to Science Fiction and modern day mythology than you think -- it can all be lumped into speculative fiction, when you're speaking in broad terms.
This is probably because Japanese game makers have anime to draw from, and within that industry an incredible tradition of world-building exists (see any of Miyazaki's movies, for example.) At the same time, western cartoons mostly involve adaptions of fairy tales, animal fables, and mixtures of the two.
The only notable western fantasy movies of the last several generations were live action movies like Legend, Ladyhawk, Willow, and The Princess Bride. Good movies, but in terms of world building they are pretty much a patchwork of fairy-tale cliches drawn over a feudal, medieval-style world. Fantasy worlds don't have to feel like they're taking place in medieval england -- it's just that that's what people think works for a western audience, and there haven't been many crazy geniuses in the film industry who have come along to prove people wrong. One of the most remarkable fantasy worlds ever put on the screen is of course the Lord of the Rings, which of course only served to move games back to the Tolkein side of the fantasy spectrum. I just don't think the movie industry gets fantasy. Game developers could look to fantasy novelists for inspiration, like the recent success of The Witcher, and I think on the average European companies are probably more innovative when it comes to looking at what can be done in a fantasy world than American ones.
