Exile 1, 2, and 3 are very good. As is the side-quest maker Blades of Exile.
You can find them by googling, fully downloadable. Exile 3 is the best, I recommend starting there.
Supoerhero League Of Hoboken
Tropical Oil Man, Captain Excitement, Mamadamoiselle Peperoni. Crimson Tape. Heroes in a post apocalyptic New Jersey. Challenging. Funny. Free at Home Of The Underdogs.
I enjoyed it much more than I enjoyed the first NWN. For one thing, I liked the cut-scenes. The load-times are long, but really not that bad; especially considering that the game runs smoothly once it loads. I don’t care about online play, and I get the impression that asterion doesn’t, either. So, yes, in all the ways that count, NWN2 is much better than the first NWN in my opinion.
Of course, if you are going to play Kingdom Hearts, then you must also play its even better sequel KH2. Although, I would not play them in reverse order as it would probably be very confusing.
Another superb RPG for the SNES is Earthbound. Comedic gold with an art style that is very unique and fun.
I liked the last installment of NWN the best. It’s not that NWN2 was bad, just my preference. I do think it was rushed out before it was completed. Given the number of Baldur’s Gate people working on it, you would think they’d get the romance portion of the stories right. That was pretty much a universally loved piece of BG2, where the PC had choices and interactive dialog between the potential paramours. In NwN2, you get one and only one choice, take it or leave it, and it’s far more tacked onto the story than anything in BG2.
Growing up the RPG I enjoyed most was Phantasy Star II for the Sega Genesis, three wasn’t as good, the original for the Seag Master System is playable too. I’ve heard that the fourth was also good but I’ve never had the pleasure.
I also played FF Tactics Advance for the GBA I enjoyed it, but have no real frame of refrence because it’s the only FF game I’ve ever played. Reviews I’ve read give very mixed results.
Has anyone else ever played the original Might & Magic? I played that for countless hours on the C64 using the stock characters pre-loaded into the game. I never did figure out exactly what you were supposed to do. I just wandered around killing and leveling up. Was there a point? Did it even have an ending?
I was expecting the entire plot for NWN2 to be “tacked on,” so I was pleasantly surprised by how much depth it had, even if it wasn’t up to classic Black Isle standards. I figured 99.99% of the development cycle would be dedicated to the engine, and that they’d leave interesting plots to the expansion packs/mod community, like they did with the first one.
Hells yeah, I remember that game. I wish there were some modern CRPGs where a “random encounter” might consist of 5,000+ orcs. I never beat the game, either, but there was a definite plot that extended over three games:
The world you’re on is actually a vast spaceship, that’s been hijacked by a psychotic android who’s trying to pilot the whole thing into the nearest sun.
I think that was the only M&M game that I never finished, up until number eight, which was simply awful. I didn’t even try IX, 3DO having long since given up any pretext of being a viable game company interested in releasing finished, playable video games.
The high point of the entire series was, in my opinion, the way that the fourth and fifth games, Clouds of Xeen and Darkside of Xeen, both of which released as seperate, stand-alone RPGs, could be combined into World of Xeen, a single game that had content not available in either of the individual games.
I adore the Lunar games. I would also suggest picking up Grandia - I have not played any of the sequels, but the PlayStation original was excellent.
Vagrant Story is a must-have. One of the best damn games I’ve ever played.
I’m sad I missed Valkyrie Profile it’s first time around on the PS1, but there is a PSP re-release and a sequel on the PS2.
Play FFIV. I think you can appreciate the story without having all the pretty graphics. 
Seeing as you have a Dreamcast, I’ve heard nothing but good things about Skies of Arcadia.
The Tales series is popular too, and my friends love Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube. From what I can see, it really has the feeling of old 16-bit RPGs.
IV was great. When it came out I recall it retailed for quite a lot more than most Genesis games - around a hundred bucks if I remember correctly. It pleased me to no end when I found it in the KB Toys schlock bin some years later. That was how I found Shining Force I as well, highly recommended, although I really liked II the most. I still have and periodically play all three. Slightly lesser RPGs for the Genesis were Landstalker, a weird diagonal perspective (yanno, quasi-3D) dungeon crawl kind of game. Lots of fun, I’ve never finished it though. Hmm maybe I’ll do that this summer. Stupid ice boots!
I have another one - I’ll have to look at it because I forget the name. It was similar to the PC game Solstice and like Landstalker was the diagonal-perspective. Pretty easy but the puzzles were pretty cool.
If you still have NWN installed, you must (MUST!) download Adam Miller’s module sets, Dreamcatcher and Shadowlords. They’re freaking amazing – much better than the original, with fully fleshed-out romance options for all of the NPCs (for both male and female NPCs). Adam Miller was offered a job with Bioware on the basis of these modules, and turned them down, partly because he likes his current job and partly because he wants artistic control of his own work.
Stefan Gagne’s Penultima series (penultima - a neverwinter nights campaign by stefan gagne) is excellent as well – what I think of as “classic D&D”.
Re: NWN2, I find it improved over NWN in some ways, but the camera is not one of them. I have grown tired of exiting an area and finding that my entire screen is occupied with about 16 gigantic pixels of part of a roof tile because the camera is too stupid to realize that something is in between me and my characters. It may be a small thing, but it’s enough that I’ve stopped playing for a bit in Act 2.
Oh my goodness, and how could I forget one of my all-time favorites – Darklands!
http://www.darklands.net/
It came out in 1992, and was, um, a bit buggy. But it rocked! Character creation a bit like Traveller, and the setting was medieval Germany. No magic, but you could do alchemy and pray to the saints for miracles. Lovely watercolor-style menus for city interactions, cheesy pixel sprites for combat.
I’ll third that. Disney plus characters from Final Fantasy. It sounds like it should be god-awful, but its fun for all ages.
I’m playing X-2 now and its not as bad as people say. The game doesn’t take itself seriously, nor should you. IX is on my to-play list after Kingdom Hearts 2 so I can’t comment on that.
I loved VIII. It is the only video game I’ve ever played to make me cry. Some people just hate the battle system and can’t identify (or don’t want to identify) with the main character, which I can understand.
I’ve only ever played Wizardry 8, but I thought it was great.
Another possibility (if you want to go in a somewhat more action-RPG direction) is Divine Divinity.
clutches heart 127?!
Where do I find both the patch, and the 127 patch? I think it’s time to re-install that baby!
(Considers making someone who knows -all- technology, instead of just the dark elf with maxed-out forces who disintigrates everything in her path.)
Here’s the level 127 patch, though that’s not where I got it. I Googled arcanum “level 127 patch”, you may Google as you see fit. Here’s the game patch and here’s the level 127 patch. I don’t know if those are the same patches that I used, but I did find, install, and use patches that work on my WinXP home computer. I had to tell it that the program was compatible with Win98 for it to work. It does work very nicely now.
Ever played a character with “dumb” dialogue? Loads of fun, though there’s some quests and characters that you won’t get.
I really loved Fallout 1&2 as well as Planescape: Torment when they came out but they’re a bit dated now. Please, don’t hurl any rocks at me, I fully acknowledge that they are among the best single player cRPGs produced in the last decade. However, I find that these days the interface is so clunky and slow compared to the newer games that I have trouble playing them. Fallout 2 came out in 1998 and Planescape in 1999 which is an awful long time. Just remember that when you play these games you have to take into account when they were produced.
Marc
Both the Brokensword series and the Gabriel Knight series consist of excelent games.
Another vote for the Lunar series here. The second especially, it has a handful of what I consider the most dramatic videogame moments of all time- the only game outside of Chrono Trigger with more than one.
Given the preference, I’d go for the segaCD version of Eternal Blue, and the PSX of Silver Star. I think I’m alone in the world, but I loved EB’s magic system, and how ridiculously hard the game got near the end- regular enemies would often wipe out my entire party in one round if I made a strategic experiment.
Note, though, that Silver Star was a complete game rewrite (maintains the same plot outline, mostly the same characters) between systems, whereas Eternal Blue was just a script rewrite (with updated graphics and a handful of scenes redone- one very important).
The Breath of Fire series is also great as a whole. The overarching world & story grows with each game, and tracking the mythology (parts nicely laid out on wikipedia) is a fun exercise. The first three are a contiguous story, the second being my favorite of the series. They all stand alone, but feel incomplete without the whole backstory.
My only complaints- the first one, you basically need to look online for a few required fetch quests. The third, desert of death, it gives you the right directions once, and the wrong directions over and over. The fourth, I got to the end waiting for the “real game” to start, since every random battle took 1 or 2 rounds unless I tried to draw it out (no attempt made at levelling), and no boss ever felt like a genuine threat.
Unmentioned is the computer puzzle-rpg “The Longest Journey,” full of dark humor and a great plotline, which unfortunately I lost the discs to before I could finish. The ending might be a huge disappointment, but I loved the game, aside from a handful of “find the pixel” type puzzles.
I’d say Gabriel Knight isn’t really an RPG though. Plus, the second game was buggy as hell. In fact all the bugs in the second game have prevented me from trying the third.
“I dreamt of blood upon the shore,
of eyes that spoke of sin.
The lake was deep and smooth and black,
as was her scented skin.”
I’ll be honest, I never had the patience for that. Always made sure I had enough smarts to speak normally. I -did- do the opposite once- maxed out beauty, charisma, and mastered persuasion. I think I had about 6 followers at the end, some of different alignments and philosophies- some of the NPC arguments they had were pretty darn amusing.