Hmmm, well to be honest I'd have to say that the deepest are probably the Shin Megami Tensei games. Which one in the series would be debatable.
I say this because strictly speaking they do everything Pokemon does, albeit with teams fighting in most cases (either as personas, or demons in your party) plus on top of that you typically have to customize the weapons and equipment of the characters commanding the spirits/demons/whatever.
I've only recently started playing Pokemon (putting a half hour into it here or there) and that's the game series it reminds me most of.
The runner up might be something like Wizardry 8 which is my personal favorite, it involved you creating a team of 6 characters from a list of like 14+ races and 14+ classes. Each character had individual skills, there were multiple magic schools with accrued spell points seperatly, variable spell intensities, and all kinds of things. "Class Of Heroes" comes close I feel but is a little too goofy at times, and also doesn't have a skill system.
For those who said Fallout, I will point out that it is the descendant of a game called "Wasteland" which was much deeper. In Wasteland you created a party of 4 characters and had more skills, while all of them were used somewhere, it could be interesting to figure out where some of them were effective.
Disgaea has a nice amount of depth as a SRPG, but I don't think the mechanics are all that complicated. I think it's mostly a matter of how far you can take those mechanics and the differant ways of buffing stats to stupid levels.
Baldur's Gate (to answer a question) was turn based, everything followed an RPG-type turn structure. While the combat ran in real time you could pause the action at any given moment. I tend to agree though that it's not a true, turn based game though, but one of the more successful hybrids (like Dragon Age: Origins).
Honestly I think the perfect RPG has yet to be created. While not massively successful I ironically consider "Wizardry 8" to be the closest so far.
I say this because strictly speaking they do everything Pokemon does, albeit with teams fighting in most cases (either as personas, or demons in your party) plus on top of that you typically have to customize the weapons and equipment of the characters commanding the spirits/demons/whatever.
I've only recently started playing Pokemon (putting a half hour into it here or there) and that's the game series it reminds me most of.
The runner up might be something like Wizardry 8 which is my personal favorite, it involved you creating a team of 6 characters from a list of like 14+ races and 14+ classes. Each character had individual skills, there were multiple magic schools with accrued spell points seperatly, variable spell intensities, and all kinds of things. "Class Of Heroes" comes close I feel but is a little too goofy at times, and also doesn't have a skill system.
For those who said Fallout, I will point out that it is the descendant of a game called "Wasteland" which was much deeper. In Wasteland you created a party of 4 characters and had more skills, while all of them were used somewhere, it could be interesting to figure out where some of them were effective.
Disgaea has a nice amount of depth as a SRPG, but I don't think the mechanics are all that complicated. I think it's mostly a matter of how far you can take those mechanics and the differant ways of buffing stats to stupid levels.
Baldur's Gate (to answer a question) was turn based, everything followed an RPG-type turn structure. While the combat ran in real time you could pause the action at any given moment. I tend to agree though that it's not a true, turn based game though, but one of the more successful hybrids (like Dragon Age: Origins).
Honestly I think the perfect RPG has yet to be created. While not massively successful I ironically consider "Wizardry 8" to be the closest so far.
