Preferably in the high fantasy or sci fi genre.
I enjoy playing games like Chronotrigger, Tales of Symphonia, Witcher 3 (easiest difficulty), Mass Effect (in Story mode), Outer Worlds (in Story mode), etc.
Basically, story first, mechanics second. What’s your fav?
Disco Elysium
As people already said, Disco Elysium for sure.
Baldur’s Gate 3 on the lowest/story difficulty.
The old RPG Arcanum. Great steampunk fantasy setting and story. If you play a persuasive character you can avoid combat and skip entire dungeons. The game has some balance issues (magic tree is fine, but the tech tree is underpowered, and early combat encounters are horrible to dela with). Various fan patches and mods are available, including a balance mod, a bugfix patch, and an HD patch. Since it’s an old game I recommend getting it from gog.com, since sometimes they fix up older games a bit to run properly on new systems.
Dragon Age, since you liked Mass Effect. Though, I personally found the combat more annoying in Dragon Age than Mass Effect. Mileage may vary.
The Outer Wilds (different game than Outer Worlds). It’s a sort of an archeology/space adventure game. It’s not strictly speaking an RPG, but if you want a story game it’s top tier. Please do not look anything up about the game and go in as blind as possible, as the feeling of discovery and exploration are the main draw of the game and once you have something spoiled you can’t un-know it. Also, I recommend getting the dlc immediately with the main game, as it’s a huge expansion that fits into the main story perfectly and affects the ending of the main game.
Not scifi or fantasy, but have you heard of Pentiment? It’s by Josh Sawyer, lead designer of New Vegas. You’re an artist in 1518 Bavaria completing your masterpiece at a monastery, when someone gets killed and you must collect evidence. There’s much more to it than that, of which I can’t speak without giving anything away. However, I can tell you that the game has no combat, it’s just exploration and dialogue. The whole game looks like an illuminated manuscript, and you walk around engaging in some of the most captivating conversations ever to be in a video game. The character creation is extremely unique; in the beginning, you pick where you spent your year abroad, what you do in your free time, what you got your Master’s degree in, and what your favorite subject was at university. All of these determine your attitude on and knowledge of pretty much every subject in the game. It has one of the most unique speech check systems in any RPG, with entire conversations counting toward convincing someone, showing you what you said right and wrong at the very end. Masterpiece.
If you’ve not yet played through the Kiseki (The Legend of Heroes: Trails) series, I highly recommend them. They are very story heavy. You’d definitely want to begin with the Trails in the Sky series since every game in the series is connected (and if you want to get the whole picture and experience the greatest impact from the events that happen throughout the series).
Cloudpunk is nice, although it’s more of a “walking simulator” than a fully-fledged RPG. It’s a cyberpunk-ish indie game in which you’re a delivery driver, although with a flying car and a sentient dog.
Planescape Torment, Disco Elysium.
