LI, you should probably acknowlwdge there are a lot of folks here who are smarter than you and don't appreciate the way you talk down when speaking about whatever you deem is or is not insightful.
Most people with a modicum's worth of story knowledge accept as common sense what you think is somehow enlightening commentary anyway. You come across like a Redditor in some kino thread talking about how story stuff happened which has meaning 'n sheit.
Yes, stories mean things. Good job.
And yes, stories have similarities with each other. FNV isn't more or less exceptional for passing the bar at simply having a story with elements other stories have.
Yet the similarities are way too many for it to just be ''hurr durr, stories use tropes''.
For example, the original Van Buren had the Brotherhood/NCR war going on full-swing just as the NCR-Legion war is going in full swing. Meaning that unlike the hapless, weak NCR we see in FNV, the NCR in the original Van Buren was powerful enough to stand its ground and fight two enemies at the same time. In fact, the NCR was more proactive in the original Van Buren; not only were they waging war against the Legion and the BoS at the same time, but they were the ones who declared war on the Legion because they saw the Legion as a potential rival.
Whereas in FNV, the BoS/NCR war is long past its peak, the BoS had retreated to the point where they're no longer a threat, so that the story for FNV can have the ''STRONG EMPIRE, WEAK REPUBLIC'' conflict that KOTOR already did. The NCR got attacked by the Legion first, just because the Legion was expanding westward and the NCR was in the way.
Just as with the NCR, the Legion leadership was changed from what it once was in Van Buren to become more similar to KOTOR's Sith. You originally had no name for the guy who would one day become ''Caesar'', he was just some no-name Follower of the Apocalypse, and it's hinted at that there'd been multiple Caesars already, since you can become the new Caesar by killing the current one.
Instead, what we see in FNV is that we have a former Republic citizen serving as a visionary, who united disparate factions into one strong army, with a mad brute serving as his enforcer, which is what formed the Sith in KOTOR.
Van Buren's original Legion vs. NCR conflict was far less similar to KOTOR's Jedi-Sith war than FNV's Legion vs. NCR conflict was. The Legion's leader was some nameless chump who killed the last guy who sat on the throne, whereas the NCR was far from the helpless ''damsel in distress'' faction that we got in the FNV game. It was able to wage war on two fronts, showing itself to be effective and efficient, not the dilapidated mess that was drowning in red tape that we got in FNV. Unlike in FNV, where the Legion is the big scary threat that the Enclave, BoS, and NCR all have to gang up on, the NCR in Van Buren is the kind of monster that can put up a fight against both the Legion and the Brotherhood without breaking stride.
