This engine is capable of almost anything. It sometimes gets a bad rep because it's so easy to make a simple game, that thousands of people make thousands of horrible and simple games using the default assets. That being said, here's why you should or shouldn't purchase it.

This is a longer than average in-depth review, if you want to understand the many different aspects of the engine.

---[PROS]---
1) You'll have everything you need right from the start.
The game comes with assets/graphics/music/examples/etc for placeholders. If you want to make a professional game, you can design it then replace the assets later. It's easy to replace the placeholder defaults with custom content, especially for gfx designers.

2) There's a lot of support for it.
You'll find dozens of websites loaded with free and paid assets, and another dozen websites just for plugins (which are scripts to alter core elements of your game from what the engine can provide). Even moreso, there's several very big discord networks with hundreds of users who are familiar with this engine and using it regularly.

3) The eventing system in the engine is fantastic.
This system is how you control what happens in the game, from storyline to npcs. It's very easy to use and yet has a lot of complex elements to play with once you get better. I find it allows for almost any type of gameplay or setup to be built.

4) The deployment system lets you render your game into a Windows, Mac, *Mobile (See Cons #2), or Web game. It allows for encryption to prevent easy file theft, and renders almost instantly as the game is designed from a mostly ready state at the start.

5) Testing the game is literally one hotkey away, so hunting down bugs or trying out maps can be done on the fly as you design. The game also has a console to help determine plugin and scripting problems fairly quickly, and with great community support on discord and forums, you'll never find yourself completely stuck in terms of developmental challenges, only your own inspirational ones. :P

6) No coding/scripting required.
There's already so many scripts (called plugins) out there that can be installed, tweaked with settings, and used without any coding or advanced computer knowledge at all. If you know Nothing about javascript, you'll still be fine. Knowing javascript just opens up the door to the first sentence of this review: "This engine is capable of almost anything". You'll want to get plugins for your game, as the default systems are somewhat bland and overly simple, but there are so many on a dozen different websites already, you'll almost always find all the tools you need for all your ideas.

7) Of all the rpgmaker engines, this one is by far, miles ahead, my favorite.

---[Important]---
1) The battle system is the classic snes style cutscene. While you can modify all the aspects of that system easily or with plugins, building a separate different combat system that's entirely different, will present time consuming challenges. The most important thing to research before you purchase is the battle system. See how others did it across youtube (and find the best examples of it). If you like it, then shoot for the stars. If you want combat/battles to be entirely different, and have no knowledge of scripting or are a complete newbie, you'll likely struggle.

2) To better understand what this engine is:
- The engine is designed from a stripped down naked chrome browser.
- The plugins and any custom scripting you'll do are Javascript.
- This engine is both Standalone and Steam oriented.
* If you purchase it on steam, you'll be required to have internet & steam open for the engine to launch.

---[CONS]---
1) The default assets are so overused, you will Never (make note that I state NEVER), have a popular game unless you replace them. If you have absolutely no plans to change the graphics (by googling free ones, buying paid ones, or hiring a graphic artist, or designing your own), your game will look like thousands of others and get lost in the shuffle. The same could be said about it's default music, which is great, but very very overused.

2) Mobile Development is a struggle. There are those who do it, and the engine comes with the feature for deploying to mobile (andriod and iphone). Furthermore, there are many guides on producing to mobile, even one that is included with the engine itself. But it's NOT EASY, infact it's quite a challenge. If you're looking to make a computer game or a web game, you'll do just great... but if you're looking for a mobile game.... well just be prepared for the long challenge. That said, It is very possible to just build it as a web game, and loads just fine on mobile devices (but it'll be a bandwidth hog downloading resources so much).

3) Advanced capabilities: The engine can do almost ANYTHING, I keep saying it because it's so true. With the pixi systems (requires either plugins or custom coding) you can create beautiful partical effects on maps and battles and have incredible games that don't even look like they came from the engine.
**THE CON PART** - That said, as simple as the design looks, using these capabilities will cause folks with snail PCs to struggle loading the game. It's friendly to crappy computers until you start playing with advanced beautiful graphical things. Many people don't use such capabilities out of lack of understanding how, but if you decide to do this (and I personally do with all my games), you'll cut the bottom 20% of customers away because they'll lag too much... but the same can be said for any game.

4) Plugins are either on or off... by YOUR choice, not the players.
If you've been paying attention, Plugins are ready-made-scripts out there that you can download and install, and customize/use on the fly without any coding knowledge. But there's a catch to plugins: A plugin basically replaces or inserts new code into the engine, so there's no 'adding options' to enable or disable a majority of plugins (some can be, a majority cannot be).
Why is this important to know? In many games, players who lag would just go to the graphic options and slide everything to it's ugliest setting. That's not something you'll be doing in MV most likely.
Say you added plugins to create really advanced beautiful partical and smoke effects across your game (as mentioned above)... you won't be able to have the player simply 'disable them in the options' and continue on. So if their computer is a dinosaur, they'll likely lag too much to play. Two workarounds for this; [1] deploy two versions of your game, one HD (with the big plugins) and one without... [2] It's not impossible to code in options for these plugins, but that will absolutely require a working knowledge of javascript to do.


---[The Verdict]---
I have nearly ten thousand hours in rpg maker, and have been a very active part of it's community for a while. I very much enjoy my decision to buy the engine because I have a passion for game design. If you want to buy this to make little fun games with your friends, or if you want to buy it to build a full length big famous game.... I implore you to get on google and do your research to make sure this adventure is right for you. It was right for me and many many thousands of others, but I've seen a lot of people not do their research and then get discouraged by what they didn't expect. Hopefully this review alleviates much of that and gives a broader sense of what were playing with.

Again, we're designing video games here, so it should be fun! And it is!

I've put an evil amount of hours into making a game that will never see the light of day.

10/10 would buy again.

I shall clarify I am a person who's spent over 2,000 hours in VX Ace, I have a VX Ace game on Steam (Close Your Eyes), and for my projects, most, if not all, of the assets are created by myself and a partner, so some of the issues people have with RTP stuff not coming until a later date don't bother me. What RPG Maker MV has done though is make a number of changes to the RPG Maker program that I'm loving.

I've spent 40+ hours in MV at the time of writing and have been making a little community Halloween game on a stream. Some of the changes to MV are very appreciated both from a developer and a player viewpoint. At first it seems quite similar to VX Ace, and indeed those who've spent a lot of time with Ace will probably immediately feel right at home, but the layout has been made overall easier, with new shortcuts around the window to access things easily and quicker, and the documentation included with MV is easy to find and more helpful and detailed than previous entries, in my opinion.

The first thing about anyone using the program compared to previous versions may notice, or anyone who's played RPG Maker games in general may notice, is that the default tiles and window resolution are much larger than previous entries (for a VX Ace comparison, VX Ace used 32x32 tiles, and the default window was 544x416, with the maximum resolution it could obtain being 640x480. Meanwhile, MV by default has 48x48 tiles and the tile sizes can be changed through scripting to any size you want really, and with a default resolution of 816x624, but can easily make HD resolutions and even reach 4k resolutions with some plug-ins if you really wanted to, though you'd need to design maps with that in mind ). And something I deeply appreciate on the user-side is now RPG Maker MV games can be resized manually; clicking the sides of the screen of an MV game will allow you to re-size the window, scaling the game to the window while also not ruining aspect ratio. Helpful for those in the past who hated the unchangably small window of past RPG Makers with only fullscreen as a usual alternative; now windows can be made any size manually.

Mapping is the next big thing people may notice a difference in compared to VX Ace. While Ace eliminated some of VX's mapping restrictions, MV basically abolishes VX Ace's restrictions in turn. You can now easily tile things from the B/C/D/E/etc tilesets over each other while mapping, and can via plug-ins make infinite layers and far higher sheets per tileset if you desire. And also as a result of the tiles being bigger, mapping also has gained an edge in ease, in my opinion.

To get this point out of the way: Plug-Ins. They're replacement to scripts in MV which use Javascript as opposed to Ruby (which the past iteration used), while MV needs time in the oven to have more publicly available plug-ins for the masses, how they are implemented are a lot better than scripting was, in my opinion. The restrictions on the engine being removed does aid this for more versatility, and the overall easier and more common language of Javascript is already doing wonders of accessible plug-ins and coding. There's definite promise this element will only grow with time and with people sharing their output. Being able to call, turn on and off, and easily modify Plug-Ins, as well as implement them into MV easier than scripts were to VX Ace, all help ease of use.

Speaking of ease of use, the ability to edit your game while play-testing is a huge time saver and helps the play-testing process immensely, as does being able to trigger and change variables, switches, and nodes easily while play-testing through the press of a button (press F8 while play-testing to access the developer console, F9 to access a menu to turn switches on/off).

Some misc notes on MV: The mouse/touch controls for MV are well-implemented and I've found myself using them while play-testing. Some small things, like events finally being able to easily walk over other events, are very much appreciated details. The audio system the game uses sounds a lot crisper to me than previous iterations, and the fade-out/pitch/other audio effects sound different compared to how VX Ace handled them, but I think they're an improvement. Also for some reason, the included RTP music in MV is really good, like leagues above previous iterations. There's a lot more music than usual, and they have much better production quality, and a lot of it is pretty catchy, actually. The plug-in to let users configure mouse/gamepad controls with full implementation is a godsend. On the RTP, it's also nice to no longer need to include it in exported files and raise game file sizes by a few hundred MBs.

And a huge draw for me behind the engine as well is it being easy to make a version for Mac computers, having friends and people asking for my previous games on Mac, this is appreciated. There's also HTML5 and Mobile support, but as of the time of writing they currently need a bit more work to get going, but not advanced knowledge to accomplish and the documentation on how is done well.

The multiple platforms, Javascript coding/Plug-Ins, and the resolution thing are probably the three biggest things for the engine, but a lot of the small touches to mapping/events/layering/audio and ease of use improvements have made this a very positive experience for myself thus far.

I've heard some have been having slow-down issues, if they can sort that out for people with the problem then we'll be perfect, and those who use the RTP will be happy when the full RTP collection is eventually released later, but I have to say this has been an improvement in a number of ways over VX Ace for me, and I plan to switch full on to this from Ace.

- Make bad game
- Put it on itch.io
- 6 people see it
- 0 downloads
10/10, would make a game again!

I don't have a review on this? Alright.

I left RPG Maker a long time ago. It's nothing but a grifting platform now to milk as much money out of you as possible. They just released a tool that organizes variables that costs $20(CAD)! That should be a base feature!

Go look at Godot. It's an actual game making engine that does both 2D and 3D and costs nothing. It's also open source and doesn't take royalties either.

If you want to make a game of a decent length, and you're putting it together by yourself, prepare to spend quite awhile working at it.

Just as a reference from my own experience, the 1200+ hours I've logged in MV was to make a single game of roughly 4 hours of play time on my own. That's not counting the handful of past projects in earlier versions of RPG Maker that I worked on, and then abandoned partway through creating them, while I learned more about how the software works and what could be done with it.

The great thing about RPG Maker is that, thanks to already including the basic assets and materials necessary to create a game, you can do so by yourself even without having all the skills, knowledge, help, or budget that usually goes into creating a video game.

If you can't draw to save your life, or you don't have the slightest clue where to begin with music production, that's okay. RPG Maker MV (or any of the other entries in the series) gives you a generous selection of resources by default that you can use to create your own game, and you're free to use them without restriction as long as it is to create something within the RPG Maker software. You don't have to know how to program or code software from scratch either. The game building engine is, primarily, user friendly with a visual interface that allows you to make a game just by choosing from the options in its menus.

There is a learning curve even with that, especially for some of the more advanced features, and there is room for growth if you want to learn how to make scripts and programming, or create your own pixel art for custom sprites, etc. There is also a lot more you can do with RPG Maker by adding new functionality with community-made scripts and plugins though, and even if you do not know how to create those kinds of things yourself, others who do have shared them freely with the community, and you need only understand enough about how to use them to implement them into your game.

Overall though, the power of being able to unleash your creative ideas is what makes RPG Maker alluring, especially when you're just starting out. It takes a lot of dedication, and probably a few practice projects before you tackle a full one, but it enables almost anyone to create something in a visual way with enough patience and tenacity. It's not the kind of thing you're going to be finished with overnight, or in a week, or even a month. Creating games is a very time consuming process. Just know that in order to see any project through to completion, it's going to take a lot of time and effort on your part, even with RPG Maker doing a lot of the heavy lifting on providing resources and user-friendly tools.

It's also not ideal for adapting other types of games outside of the role-playing game genre either. Although there are some examples where it has been done, there are better engines out there if you want to make a differnt type of game altogether. You don't need the latest and greatest version of RPG Maker either. Although the newest one will feature the most bells and whistles, especially when you're starting out, you can do just as well with an earlier version to learn how it works before making the jump to the more expensive latest entry too. While there are of course some differences between them, by and large, the majority of things transition over between versions. And even the older versions of RPG Maker are able to create fantastic games with the right dedication, passion, and folks with the right set of skills to really make their games shine.

I learned most of my early days stuff back in RPG Maker XP when that was new. I would guess about 95% of the knowledge I gained back then applied still to RPG Maker MV years later, allowing me to finally make my own fully completed game. To The Moon is a popular example that uses RPG Maker XP even in more modern times to wonderful effect. It's more about what goes into the project than what game engine version you decide to use.

At the end of the day, even if you just try it out of curiosity, there's something to be said for being able to express yourself in a creative way in a visual fashion that you can see as it comes to life. RPG Maker helps to make that possible for those who want to make their own game, but it would normally be out of their reach, and that's something to praise it for. It helps people make their creative ideas into reality, so give it a try if you find yourself interested at all. You never know, you might end up making your own game with it too.

Hi, I'm Dani. I'm not a coder (I failed out of the Classics dept. back in undergrad for having zero ability to learn others languages) nor do I come from any kind of tech/IT background. About four years ago I grabbed VX Ace off of a humble bundle and started mucking about with the engine. A little less than two years ago I made the swap to MV and have been going fairly comfortably forward ever since.

A few things I have learned over the last few years that may help others in a similar place who are just starting out and lack inherent coding/artistic skills:

1) This is a hobby first and a business fourth. Second and third are also that "this is a hobby." You can jump right to the "business" side if you're particularly driven, clever and capable, but it is very rare. Learn the engine, the skills and recognize what you can and can't do as well as what you can't do... yet.

2) The core of what makes a "good" RPG Maker game tends to come down to how unique and interesting the product actually is, at the end of the day. Many will launch straight to the clearest indication of "different battle system; original art" but that isn't at all needed to create something that will garner respect. A great story, a well-realized world, a set of simple-but-different gameplay elements... there are many ways you can leverage your existing skills to best represent what you want to create. As a writer by vocation, I know that story, world and atmosphere are my solo strengths. When I sit down to work a solo, hobby project that is what I feel confident hanging my hat upon.

3) It is easier to find collaborators and partners who can bolster your own weaknesses if you take your project as far as you can on your own. A very, very good strategy for starting out is to just do your best. Even if you have a fully RTP assets and a standard battle system, if your work shows quality in other areas, it becomes easier to get others to polish up the bits you're not great at working, yourself. A game with fully standardized assets can be re-worked by an artist, but that artist usually won't be interested until they can see what you're working on is solid.

4) Javascript is a godsend. The only reason I can write something like this is because of the swap to Java in MV for external plugins replacing the previous versions' scripting. Use plugins. Go crazy. They're user-friendly enough to allow anyone to create some out-of-the-box stuffs without much difficulty.

5) Keep it simple. Really. Keep it super simple to begin. I'm awful at this, but restrictions and limitations can help you to complete a project. Start with the most stereotypical game you can think of and go from there. Make a super-straightforward dungeon crawl with four heroes and a few floors full of baddies before the big endboss. Engage with every element of crafting the game.

6) Lastly, never ever be afraid to scrap what you have and start over. After four years with the engine and two where I felt capable of doing more than mucking about, every project I have was born from the discarded remnants of failure. The project I have become quite proud of is approaching a limited feature-complete alpha, and that was born out of my scrapping 80% of a former project and building on top of the ashes keeping what worked and tossing the rest. Sometimes things just don't work. Don't hold onto them and spark frustration and slowdowns. If it doesn't work, change it. I've gone through a few different kind of skill/battle setups in my own work, most of which were triggered by something not working quite as intended without a quick fix. Better to get a new idea and re-evaluate before you start banging your head against the wall.

Hope this can be helpful to some who are just starting out and are beginning to learn the ins-and-outs of this rather easy but obscurely documented engine. The search string beginning "RMMV how do I..." should be a near constant while one learns.

RIght away, I can recommend the program if for nothing more than its ease of use. If you want to make a quick little RPG, want to try and pick up a hobby that wouldn't require you to start from the very beginning, or just want to make silly joke-y games, then this is good out of the box.

However, as a person that has pushed their games commercially and continues to create such products, making something more high-end will ask of you to use a lot of plugins and designs built by other people. If you put in the time, you can very well end up with a notable product, but there comes a certain issue upon doing so. The issue is that for many people, anything made by RPG Maker is automatically thrown into the trash.

It doesn't matter if the game is good, it doesn't matter if the game has changed so many core fundamentals and mechanics from the base engine, if there's anything remotely default left behind, then the in-the-knows will work very quickly to avoid your product. This is due to the amount of people who released products made with RPG Maker that did not involve much effort put in. Default assets, terrible stories, unenjoyable gameplay - the works.

I have worked with RPG Maker since RPG Maker 2000. The program is very good for what it is and I can safely say that I know the engine inside and out to the point where I can do complex tasks without even thinking about it. However, after spending so many years on this engine, all I can think to myself is how much I wish I spent all of that time on a more proper game engine such as Game Maker or Unity.

The reality is that unless all you want to do is make turn-based RPGs and nothing else, then this program is the right fit. However, if you ever want to branch out into doing something else, then you will need to pick up a proper program instead.

You must understand this going in and think long and hard about what you want to do and where you want to be in the long run. Spending the time learning the aforementioned programs will give you greater flexibility in what your game can be, where-as RPG Maker is practically the definition of a limited engine.

Good luck and godspeed. You'll need quite a bit of the former.

This comment is coming from my fathers account, he had an amazing time creating his custom rpg games. he made very good ones too! He passed away August of 2017. As i said before he loved this very much. I am going to see if i can try to make my own rpg's. Thank you.

While I do think it's worth buying, I must warn you that the developers lack focus. They focus on what's fun for them to develop rather than actually tackling issues and really useable features. So you are left to find a weird way around these issues or find some plugin that is still hopefully supported.

There are a ton of issues that I could list, but I think it's best summed up with this: The developers have come to rely on the community as a crutch and an excuse not to turn RPG maker into something insanely powerful. They lack the foresight to see that if they would just make thier engine more powerful, they wouldn't have to hurry and push out crap addon-DLCs to try and pay thier bills.

Is this program worth it? Not at full price. Yes there are plenty of awesome games that have been made in RPG maker, but not without an INSANE amount of modding to the main client with plugins.

Its not meant for large scale projects as the variable, switch, and event interface is really only built to be readable and usable when those items exist in small numbers.

Some might read this and say that if you want to make a game you should learn to program and using plugins should just be expected. If that's you're reaction, you've missed the point here, I agree, that is true, but it is also true that without the support of those that make the plugins AND DONT GET PAID FOR IT, RPG Maker would sink. That's not a sustainable model, that's not very fair, and relying on others to make your program usable isn't very good programming.

Unless you are ready to:
-Hope and pray that there is a plugin that does what you want it to AND is stull supported
-Learn or already know JS and then study the API(which has been compiled by the community, again...lazy)
-Jerry-rig most of the advanced features you want into working,

then move on to another engine.

Now as a little note here at the end, I feel that I am obligated to state that I enjoy this program a lot and will likely continue to use it. Not because it's amazing, but because I enjoy a challenge. Much like kids who have banded togehter to survive under the oppressive overbearance of unfit parents, the community here has banded together to survive and accomplish something great. The ♥♥♥♥♥♥ parents will likely take the credit for their kids accomplishments, claiming that without them, none of this would be possible, which is true....but not to the extent that we owe them anything for the hard work that we put in.

Bottom line?
The community is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing, I love the support, encouragement and involvement from them.
F the devs, they're garbage.
Don't pay full price, they don't deserve it.
Giving a thumbs down to be honest and to provide some reason for potential buyers to read through the reviews.