They were pretty neat. It's hard to come up with a new idea these days but I thought the first-person weirdness and unreliability was enough.
Yeah, originality is difficult. Esp. in the fantasy genre- feel like there are two, maybe three fantasy frameworks, and not much deviates from that. Ultimately, a fantasy novel better have something going for it in terms of style, tone, narrative structure, etc or it's gonna feel like LOTR 8.0. Trying to think of an original contemporary fantasy, coming up goose eggs- maybe Curse of Chalion? That was pretty good. I liked the two Kingkiller books the way I like, say, Star Trek TNG- total comfort food. Feel shitty in any way, there are certain things you can hang out with on the couch and they'll just take your mind off for a while- that's how I approach those two books. That's plenty for me when it comes to fantasy these days.