not necessarily, because your view is always goimng to be straight down from above, no matter which direction the field of play is rotated. Look into "parallax mapping" - Wikipedia is a good place to start.

Basically, the "middle" layers contain the textures which are revealed as the viewpoint moves around. If you look carefully at the Dixie Chicks site, you can see that each building is only made up of about half a dozen layered tiles. Even the tallest building only has maybe thirteen, and most of those are repeats of lower tiles. Obviously, the finer the detail you want, the more layers you will have to use.

Hope this helped!

seems like a lot of trouble since this rpg is going to be a huge gameworld, plus that art is too hard to draw :(

Once you get one, you can duplicate it a thousand times.

Also you dont really need to see the height of the buildings in the actual playable part of the game. You can show an establishing shot of the city at it's side. This could just be a static artistic rendering.

Are you against the idea of using a broken perspective, like many other 2d games do?

i dont understand how i could have static flat art that shows the building's sides for a top-down game. the problem is that my game world is the type where "you can go anywhere" its free-roam.