Recent reviews by Taka

Ono on suicide watch.

I waited six years to play this game.

It was worth the wait.

10/10 it's a masterpiece.

SJW Simulator

Capcom has apparently learned nothing from the backlash against Street Fighter x Tekken's ripoff DLC practices.

An absolute waste of money.

I'm updating this review now that the 4th and final DLC pack of the Season Pass has come out. I had originally posted this just after the 3rd pack was released, but now that the whole thing is here, I can give it a complete review. I cannot recommend that anyone purchase this DLC.

The first pack you get is 10 songs which are just (poorly done, in my opinion) remasters of RPG Maker 2000/2003 songs, and around 50 or so sound effects, most of which you will probably never use. Keep in mind that for a while, they were releasing remasters of 2003 songs just like these as free updates.

The second pack is a set of 16 remastered RPG Maker 2000 characters (which does not include any of the 2003 characters), in the RPG Maker MV art style, with 2 different styles of face sets. It does not include any busts though.

The third pack, released when I first posted this review, is a tileset and character DLC. The tileset part contains a tileset for the inside and the outside of a train. However, the perspective is really bad (due to the tracks being only one tile wide) and it looks absolutely ridiculous. The characters are just 8 characters in the MV art style, mostly consisting of train staff. It also includes facesets, but no busts.

The 4th DLC was originally listed as a "Surprise". While we got a general idea of what the others were supposed to be (as they were labeled as "Music", "Characters" and "Tileset" packs), we had absolutely no clue what the last pack was supposed to be. Well, the mystery has finally been answered, and the answer is... Kid generator parts.

You get a handful of parts for the character generator for kid-size sprites. Now, while some of the parts ARE actually pretty cool, there's just one teeny little problem. This is the sort of content that should have either been in the program from the start, or added as a free update. In fact, they've added more generator parts for the adult-size sprites as free updates already, but apparently we're expected to buy this garbage Season Pass in order to get kid-sized ones.

So, all in all, what do you get with this pack? A number of sprites where none of their face graphics match the face graphics from other packs in the Season Pass (or the default assets), a bunch of song remixes that were originally being given out for free, a tileset with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up perspective, and generator parts that should have been free in the first place.

Don't buy this. I repeat, DO NOT BUY THIS. It is a complete waste of your money.

Disclaimer: I received a beta key for free from the publisher. However, I swear that this hasn't affected my opinion on the product.

RPG Maker MV is the next program in the long-running RPG Maker series. If you're familiar with the previous versions of the program, you will feel pretty much right at home with MV. On the surface, it functions much like VX Ace, and those who have used it should have no trouble at all getting around the functions of MV. But under the hood, there's a lot more going on, and I think for the most part, it's for the better.

The biggest differences are the program's main selling points - the addition of side-view battles, the ability to export to a number of different platforms, including PC, Mac and phones, as well as the use of Javascript as the primary coding language of the software. This will no doubt make it easier than ever for people to not only make games with RPG Maker, but play them as well.

There's a handful of other new features as well. Most things are just expansions on what VX Ace already did, like having more Region Tags and more options in the Show Choices Event, but then you have the totally new stuff, like the Event Searcher, the ability to change the amount of equipment slots that your characters have or change default system messages, without the need for additional scripts.

But at the same time, I think that is one of the program's flaws. It feels too much like VX Ace. It DOES feel like a "step up", but it DOESN'T feel like an "evolution" of VX Ace, and I think that's what it really needed. You could say that we shouldn't fix what isn't broke, but I think that, despite all the new and exciting features it DOES provide, there are a number of things that I think would have made it all the more exciting and, especially due to the vocal public interest in such features, I'm surprised that they were not included. Sure, you can add a lot of things to the game via Plugins, but you could do the same thing in Ace. It really feels like there's just not enough "new" content in MV.

One thing I'm definitely happy with are the new default graphical and audio assets. VX Ace had a major problem where just about every project looked the same because the default graphics were so incredibly generic and the character generator was very poor. In some ways, the graphics still are generic, but I think they're much more vibrant looking, and more importantly, there's A LOT more variety, as far as the packed-in assets are concerned. This, I think, will make RPG Maker projects, even those made with only default assets, a lot less monotonous to play.

As far as the character generator is concerned, it's a HUGE improvement. VX Ace's was, quite frankly, terrible, and this one is considerably better. The graphics look exactly like the default pre-generated assets, including the face graphic generator. This allows you to make characters that are consistent with the default assets, and hey, they actually don't look terrible this time.

But there are other problems with MV. The maximum map size has been almost halved. Why? Apparently we can blame phones for that. They've also made it harder and more annoying to add Plugins and new resources to your project. There are no longer buttons in the editor to quickly bring up a resource manager or the page to add in Scripts. Instead, you must navigate to the game's folder on your computer and add everything manually.

But the absolute biggest problem with MV, in my opinion, is that there is no longer a Run Time Package. The RTP was useful in previous RPG Maker games, because it allowed you to make games with a very small file size by not bundling the RTP with your project, so that other players would need to download the RTP themselves. This made it easy to upload projects to have friends test them, or to seek quick tech support on the forums, with the experts being able to see exactly what you were doing with your project, without them needing to download a large file.

Well, that's gone. Now, every project you make will be around 400MB. Want to make a quick blank project to test something? That's 400MB more on your hard drive. Want to share your game with someone? You'll have to upload 400MB every time you make a new version of it. Oh sure, you can manually delete all of the assets that you're not using, but this can be a very time consuming process. I can only hope that this problem is addressed in the near future.

But the big question is... should you buy RPG Maker MV?

Well, I suppose that depends on a few factors.

Do you have the money to burn? If so, definitely get it, because it's the next logical step up above VX Ace. It's an almost all-around improvement and I think that if you can afford it, and you're serious about designing something with the program, then it's definitelty worth your money.

But if you can't really spare the cash, it's probably better to go with VX Ace for now. Ace is much cheaper and has a massive amount of user scripts available. Right now, MV has pretty much none, since it's brand new, but in the coming months, MV will most likely have a number of talented scripters working hard on creating new plugins for the software, and I think with the switch over to Javascript, there will be a lot more interesting and more complex scripts than ever before. This is all just speculation on my part, though.

I think that the next several months will be important for MV, to see what sort of content is created through user scripts and perhaps official DLC. If it can drum up a lot of support, then it will succeed and will be without question the go-to program for making RPGs in an easy-to-use way. But if they can't iron out some of these problems and get more people making Plugins and Resources for the program, I could certainly see it failing. We'll just have to see what happens, won't we?

Overall, I would recommend RPG Maker MV. There's still some issues, but I have faith that they'll iron them out. If you want to wait a while to purchase, I wouldn't blame you, but if they can fix these problems then I will without a doubt recommend this program.

Pretentious ♥♥♥♥. There are a million games which do the exact same thing as this game - try to tell the exact same kind of story, only they actually have content, and they are better designed in general. If this game was actually any good at what it was trying to convey, you would have died at the spiderweb. Anyone who says this "game" is good is a complete and utter moron.

♥♥♥♥♥♥ pay-to-win phone game trash.