The best rpg games like Chrono Trigger are Chrono Cross, Sea of Stars and Final Fantasy VI. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to rpg costs you.
Filtering to RPG means you want progression — a character to build or a party to grow — layered on top of whatever else you liked.
What you get: A reason to keep going after the novelty wears off. RPGs are the genre that reliably converts hours into feeling more capable.
What made Chrono Trigger worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the rpg part of that answer, and only the rpg part.
The sequel, and a very different game, but the same team and world.
Made explicitly to be Chrono Trigger again, and it comes close.
The other peak of the SNES RPG era, with the largest cast.
Squaresoft's other era-hopping RPG, remade and finally available.
Time travel as a mechanic rather than a plot device.
Same studio, PS1, and far more ambitious in story.
Modern Square-Enix turn-based RPG with excellent combat.
Same era, same lack of padding, entirely different tone.
The best pure turn-based battle system on Switch.
Immediacy. Almost every RPG asks for a slow first few hours, and the systems that make hour forty good are the same ones that make hour one a menu.
The full list is on games like Chrono Trigger — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Chrono Cross. The sequel, and a very different game, but the same team and world.
No. Chrono Trigger released on the Super Nintendo, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Whether the stats are the point. In an RPG the build decides what you can do; in an action game with stats the build only decides how fast you do it.
No. The picks below span turn-based, real-time and action RPGs, and each one says which it is.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Chrono Trigger list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is rpg — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the rpg guide for where to start in the genre generally.