Not a cRPG, but these days, my attention has turned towards the Megaman Battle Network Legacy Collection.
These games made up a huge part of my childhood, and had the most unique combat system I've ever seen, still not emulated by much of anything today. It was a weird ass mix of turn-based deck building/real time action RPG. Yet there was so much emphasis on personal skill that you had people doing challenge runs using nothing but the starting setups, and you were expected to get through fights without getting hit at all (and properly countering enemy attacks in the later games). It was formerly a GBA exclusive series, but I always held the belief that the series was a whole decade ahead of its time, though mostly for thematic reasons (the series premise was basically the modern world wired to the internet in nearly all aspects of life, though since it was a series targeted at children, it doesn't go too deep into the commentary).
Evidently, much of the fanbase held that belief too, but for other reasons, some people being crazy enough to set up a multiplayer scene on the PC and then later create rollback netcode from scratch. Now the fanbase is over the moon with Capcom announcing the collection is basically going to be on every platform minus Xbox with officially supported online multiplayer. Though now everyone wonders if the official multiplayer will have rollback netcode.
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Also, let it be noted for the record that the Battle Network games also did field effects a whole decade before the DOS games did.
