Journey is a wonderful experience in gaming.

While i'm not exactly listing any particular genre of RPG, here's a few franchises you ought to look into sometime.

Mother (Earthbound in the US) is a quirky, but fantastic series of turn based RPGs. Mother 3 especially stands out to most people with its rhythm combat system, scrolling HP bars that let you have a chance at saving yourself (even if you took a fatal hit!), and an incredibly engaging story that aims to tug at your heart strings. It's my personal favorite series of games.

Disgaea is a wonderful series of "mobile your army" styled rpgs that revolve around demons in the underworld. It has a massive amount of content letting you to reach a maximum level of 9999, and then lets you reincarnate the character as another class making it possible to get nearly any move on a single unit!

Shin Megami Tensei is a brutal, yet rewarding turn based RPG series that aims to please nearly any audience with its numerous spin offs (over 40 games in the series all together!) Many aim at controversial topics and allows the player to choose their alignments allowing for several different endings. Others will aim toward self-discovery of oneself. No matter which you one you choose, I can promise an engaging experience each with its own unique twist to the turn based genre. (e.g. "press turn combat" letting you earn or forfeit turns based on your attack choices.)

.//hack is a game that revolves around the acclaimed anime series that features an online world where hackers created a program that simulates death -- even on the player themselves! The game has an action RPG system that lets you pause for brief moments to choose special attacks and items.

Xenoblade Chronicles is an absolutely incredible action RPG for the wii that deserves countless praise for its incredibly unique world. Hundreds of years after an apocalyptic battle between continent sized bio-robots, life begins to flourish once more upon the remains of the robots -- that is until mechons reawaken and cause havoc.

Fragile Dreams, while it is more of a survival horror, has action RPG elements and features the touching and unsettling journey of one of the last remaining humans after the apocalypse who simply wants a companion to share the remainder of his life with.

and that's about all I can list given the limited characters. I hope I was able to help!

If you liked the Grandia games, have you tried Grandia Xtreme? We were all Xtreme in those days. Everyone. What I meant is, ignore the title. But it really depends on what you liked in the other Grandia titles. If you like the battle system and mana eggs from the other games, give it a look. But I wouldn't recommend it for the characters or story. It's very much a dungeon crawler with a Grandia engine, and don't expect more from it than that.

A more easily recommended game from the PS2 era with an action vibe--again it's more of a crawler and in this case you're controlling just one character at a time--is Dark Cloud 2. (that was the name in North America) In addition to the dungeon crawls there are two cute leads, some fun and low-key town building/logic puzzles, and tons of things to do and collect. Excellent presentation too, really charming music and cel-shaded graphics. Done by Level 5, who also developed the Prof. Layton games and Dragon Quest VIII.