The best rpg games like Vagrant Story are Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy XII and Parasite Eve. 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 Vagrant Story 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 writer and world, and the same appetite for systems.
Same director, same world, and the closest thing to a sequel.
The other PS1 Square game that mixed genres and got strange.
Weapon assembly as the progression system, done modern.
For the same cold, unexplained world and weapon obsession.
PS1 Square at its most ambitious.
If the weapon crafting was what you actually loved.
Timed chain inputs in the same generation.
Systems-heavy tactics from the same design lineage.
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 Vagrant Story — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Final Fantasy Tactics. Same writer and world, and the same appetite for systems.
No. Vagrant Story released on the PlayStation, 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 Vagrant Story 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.