The best rpg games like Earthbound are Undertale, Mother 3 and Lisa: The Painful. 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 Earthbound 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 most obvious heir — same suburban-surreal tone, same willingness to break its own rules.
The actual sequel, and the one that follows through on the darkness.
Takes the EarthBound frame somewhere much bleaker and does it well.
Direct homage — modern setting, recruit ordinary people as party members.
Suburban RPG that switches between cheerful and horrifying with the same confidence.
Small, funny, modern-suburban RPG with real charm.
The comedy RPG that actually respects its own battle system.
For the aesthetic, if you want more 90s-suburban-surreal RPG in any form.
If what you liked was the pacing and the lack of filler rather than the tone.
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 Earthbound — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Undertale. The most obvious heir — same suburban-surreal tone, same willingness to break its own rules.
No. Earthbound 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 Earthbound 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.