Also known as "No, my beloved peasant village!", this is extremely common in quite a lot of RPGs. Just how common you ask? Well off the top of my head I can tell you which ones employ this cliche.
Legend of Legaia, Xenogears, Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 5, Soul Nomad & The World Eaters, Tales of Phantasia, Suikoden III, Breath of Fire 1, Breath of Fire 3, and the Legend of Dragoon.
So the Doomed Hometown rule. According to the grand list, the main character's home will be pretty much destroyed in some way, and often before the opening parts of the game are over. All of the above games do this, and there are other ones that count too. Phantasy Star 2 does involve the destruction of Palma, the home planet in the previous game, but it's an oddball since not only is it never explored by the heroes, the heroes all hail from Mota (Motavia) anyways. And then Phantasy Star 3 makes it even more mysterious, since the entire game is in a spaceship of biodomes, almost assuredly assuming that the planets in Phantasy Star 2 were wiped out as well even though none of the characters hail from there.
So what about the games I mentioned. Well, Tales of Phantasia, Xenogears, Suikoden III, The Legend of Dragoon, and the Breath of Fires have this happen in the opening acts. Ryu wakes up unceremoniously in Breath of Fire 1 to find his town being destroyed during the whole dragon civil war, and Seles in The Legend of Dragoon also gets destroyed in a similar motive as well. All the other examples including Breath of Fire 3 all happen once the main characters return from doing regular errands, long before the game really does end up running its course. Though the motives for many of these are all mixed. You can grasp the meaning of the destruction of Totus in Tales of Phantasia easily because they were after Cless's pendant. The other ones? Not so much. It seems like the hut in Breath of Fire 3 was set on fire by Balio and Sunder as a mere act of revenge. And why did the Karayan village* need to be burned again? What did Lahan do to deserve a whole bunch of gears fighting in it? They made this one even nastier since Fei ends up being the one responsible for most of the destruction and deaths that occurred. There are a few other potential examples of doomed hometowns at openings, like the one in Star Ocean 1 where most of the inhabitants in Ratix's town turn to stone due to a virus, as well as the freezing of Crysta's inhabitants in Terranigma that spark Ark's main adventure.
So the other doomed hometowns tend to happen at times different than the opening sequences. In The Legend of Dragoon, Dart's actual hometown of Neet was destroyed long before the game starts, and the same can be said about Nibelheim in Final Fantasy 7. Soul Nomad & The World Eaters has the Hidden Village get destroyed mid-game (though every villager somehow survives). Numerous character hometowns get sucked into a void in Final Fantasy 5, one of which you may not even get to go to if you don't look for it. And Legend of Legaia? Apparently Conkram was pretty much eldritched well before the game started, and Rim Elm suffers this fate near the game's end. So not even the homes that survive to the very end can be considered fully safe by JRPG law.
Most of these are pretty odd, and what's odder is how many of them don't get rebuilt or anything similar. Again, there are some outliers, but the bottom line is most of these hometowns don't seem to improve. Although Totus does become the town of Miguel in the future, and seems alright in the past, the present town doesn't seem to improve. The Kung Fu master's abode in Live-a-Live never gets rebuilt. Seles and Neet are never rebuilt. Neither Drogen nor Rei's hut are rebuilt in the Breath of Fire games. You can't go back to Lahan, Karaya Village, or Clatos once the plot kicks in for those games. And Conkram is probably the single most nightmarish case of a truly doomed location.
So what are the outliers? Well they aren't what you can consider homes, but Marbule and Viper Manor both get rebuilt in the Home World of Chrono Cross. Kant and Boyzby both get rebuild and actually fully operational after the opening acts of Thousand Arms are over. Ien in Lunar: Walking School gets attacked multiple times but after the chapters are done, the next one shows everything seems to be alright there. So there are at least some characters willing to restore things the way they used to be. Rim Elm is incredibly lucky to be fully restored after Juggernauts defeat, and the same goes for the towns in Final Fantasy 5. Nibelheim is an outlier to the outliers, since it's rebuilt but there really is no indication that the town was really rebuilt at all especially by two of the witnesses in the main party that know of its destruction.
What do I think of this cliche? I like it in spades, but hate it most of the time. It was interesting in Legend of Legaia, really and truly, and Suikoden 3 did a good job with the perspectives on Karaya village (and to a lesser extent Iksay village). Xenogears was perhaps the most interesting of all due to the main character being responsible for Lahan's destruction. His alter ego Id would also destroy Solaris, home to a number of major characters in the story. Though the motives really do need to be much clearer than just "destroy everything" At least some games make it clear.
*I would like to point out in Suikoden 3, only Hugo loses his home, at the end of his chapter. Chris's first chapter deals with the exact same ordeal except from another perspective, and even Geddoe's first chapter has them in the village at the time as well. It seems in Hugo's chapter, things went wrong with the truce delivery, but the retribution for it was mundane.
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