Godot has a little bit of a learning curve, but easily justifies it. I've made some games in it: https://yumaikas.itch.io/. Godot, for 2D games, for me, has been a force multiplier in terms of what I can get done in X hours. For Hobbyist work, that just means you can take on more ambitious projects without having to do as much groundwork.
Barring that, you could look into bindings in your language of choice to Raylib. I've used a tiny bit of it with Janet via Jaylib.
If Lua or Fennel aren't hateful to you, there's always Love2D, TIC-80, or PICO-8. But, tbh, I really recommend learning Godot.
Games like Pokemon/Zelda are very content driven and usually don't have any sort of complex systems that require deep access to game engine internals. As someone working solo, you are going to want to spend most of your time creating fun/interesting content. Tools for this genre have been built many times before by people with far more experience building them. If you spend your time rebuilding them yourself, it's a recipe for stalling out without having much to show.
If your goal is really to just have fun building out gameplay systems as a programming challenge, I recommend using a lightweight code-oriented scripting language engine. Some good examples in this space are LÖVE (Lua, https://love2d.org/) or Phaser (Javascript, https://phaser.io/). These will allow you to jump right in to building games without needing to learn a graphical UI and are usually more agnostic about how you build your game than fully featured environments.
If you prefer the latter, but still want to end up with a finished game at the end, I recommend scoping down from an RPG to something like a Sokoban-style puzzler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban). Use a tool like Puzzlescript (https://www.puzzlescript.net/) to prototype your mechanics. Once you've finalized your mechanics you can then recreate it in the engine of your choice and add any polish. Having a playable prototype will make it much clearer what systems you will need to build.
Best of luck building!