VOTE 1: Ogre BattleI say we should play Ogre Battle (not
Tactics Ogre).
Very few RPGs like it have been released, about the closest are the Dragon Force games for the Sega Saturn (which do away with a lot of the formation strategy in favor of real-time mob battles) and Soul Nomad & the World Eaters (which does away with the RTS squad movement in favor of a grid-based tactical RPG setup).
The game has a great story, lots of secrets, multiple endings (good and evil branchings), etc. and it is fairly easy to locate (*cough*emulators*cough*).
VOTE 2: DrakkhenThis is another great game that is easy to come by (on the SNES/emulator, my preferred version, or as
abandonware on the PC). Every few years I have to give this game another run through, it is one of my all time favorites and the very first RPG I ever played on the SNES (though not the first RPG I've played in general).
It has a really neat pseudo-3D (sprite scaling) open world and lots of dungeons to explore,
, character creation, and a real-time battle system. Exploring dungeons is almost like a point-and-click adventure game where you can examine various things in the room (but your characters wander about as you do) while the overworld is more like the Elder Scrolls games where you wander about in first person view (until your characters step onto the field and battle). The game is not super-long so it is something that could be beaten in a reasonable amount of time (it has been years since my last run-through but I want to say it is somewhere in the ballpark of 10-15 hours long, I could be wrong though).
PC:SNES: