Recommendations for a good fantasy CRPG? I want to be a wizard and cast cool spells. But I'm also poor so the big modern games are a bit out of my range

Baldur's Gate, especially BG2, where spellcasters are meta and the spell combinations are pretty crazy and also high powered.

>>715900704 (OP)
Daggerfall has a spell crafting thing.

>>715900823
Bg, nwn, iwd with mods
>>715901395
Es 2 and 3 with mods.
Together like 5000 hours of play

if you can get it working, Magic & Mayhem is very cool
from the creator and dev team of X-COM. models and cutscenes are claymation
you can summon tornadoes and lightning, turn people into stone, summon a ton of monsters, set places on fire with fire propagation. you can create an army of phoenixes to circle an enemy mage, chain electrocute them all to death and have them all explode into a ball of fire, force an enemy to fly and them drop them to their death, all sorts of cool shit

this guy has a custom installer for it
it's abandonware, I think if you get it off an abandonware site all you need to do for it to work is mess with a file (pcgamingwiki page explains it, just a sound file or something), but this is probably easier, haven't tested it yet
https://collectionchamber.blogspot.com/p/magic-mayhem.html
https://mega.nz/folder/1VND1R7S#ZFI1SjWDIbhl1ysMEIXATQ

>>715900704 (OP)
pathfinder kingmaker is 20 bucks on steam

>>715900704 (OP)
It's not a crpg, but Dragon's Dogma

>>715903862
Ugh, pathfinder games should only be played after you exhausted every single other dnd/game.
The horrible filler encounter bloat just kills any will to play the game.

>>715900823
>BG2
It uh took me a long time to figure out how enemy mages get to start the fight with greater invisibility and shit. In my defense I was actually 12.