The best rpg games like Dragon Force are Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen, Shining Force II and Unicorn Overlord. Below are 8, 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 Dragon Force 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.
Same era, same idea — armies on a map, battles that resolve semi-automatically.
Sega's other great strategy RPG, and the character roster is just as large.
The clearest modern descendant, and openly built on Ogre Battle and Dragon Force.
For the recruit-and-build-a-roster half.
An indie strategy RPG built specifically to be Ogre Battle again.
Commanders with squads under them, remastered and easy to get.
Kingdom map, knight recruitment, squad battles — very close in structure.
Saturn-era tactics with the same bite.
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.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Dragon Force that are not rpg games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Dragon Force — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. Same era, same idea — armies on a map, battles that resolve semi-automatically.
No. Dragon Force released on the Sega Saturn, 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 Dragon Force 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.