You don't play RPG-Maker games for prettiness.

Devs using the RPG-Maker engine can focus on the story, characters and gameworld instead of optimizing gfx. So if you are able to live with mediocre gfx you can find some RPG gems among many RPG-Maker releases.

It is very similar to the NWN1 modding scene.

Thanks for these recommendations. It's nice that someone's finally wheedled out some HiddenX stuff.

Is the issue the engine or the effort to come up with better sprites/terrain ? I play these sort of games time to time (such as eschalon and jeff stuff) but it is hard to judge the rpg maker games since so many look the same.

Great Gaias is an excellent game as well, I think it kept me fully engaged for almost a solid month.