RPG Maker MV (PS4) Review

Creating your own hardcore levels in Mario Maker, concocting your own extreme songs in Hatsune Miku’s Edit Mode or building your own massive island in Dragon Quest Builders are just some of the things that I would’ve loved to do if I didn’t have the attention span of a goldfish. As such, making an entire video game from scratch is an entire level of dedication on its own.

RPG Maker MV is something that achieves that and literally just that… it’s a tool more than it is a game for creating your own expansive RPGs that are only limited with your own imagination. It’s one that even a child with no real coding experience can play around with and could possibly create something truly impressive. But it’s also a huge “what if” scenario where you’d have to be interested enough to actually make use of what it has to offer.

In a nutshell, you’d either have to be a young enthusiast for game development or have enough patience to complete one. And RPG Maker offers a robust game-making tool from creating your own maps from pre-installed tilesets to the more daunting tasks like setting enemy parameters to scenarios and events that take place in the game.

As soon as you fire up RPG Maker, you’ll be greeted by its opening tutorial that lets you in on the little intricacies you’ll have to know to start building your own retro fantasy RPG that isn’t named Final Fantasy of any Roman numerical number. This lets you get to know the basics of placing tiles, creating waypoints from one map to the other or setting up the events to make the game run which is something you’ll have to know before you can start your own little adventure.

What’s interesting about the way RPG Maker is done is with its tile-based system that offers a variety of different environment styles across different types of locales… and there’s a shit ton of them. There’s a lot of tiles and added flair that could make it interesting enough for its 2D art style that you can easily put your own unique mark without it being generic and uninspired.

You can also easily set up your party of heroes, set a monster’s behavioural patterns or create the most basic to the more meaningful events to fully make your own living and breathing RPG come to life. There are plenty of things that are cramped in the entirety of the database that while it seems intimidating at first, which it is, could definitely be understood once you get to try it thanks to its clear presentation and its brief opening tutorial on the matter.

However, building your own blocky and minecrafty cube home isn’t something you’d build in a day… or maybe it actually is but all I’m saying is, taking your time to learn its ins and outs, learning from other creators or asking for help isn’t exactly something to be ashamed of when it comes to making your own RPG. After all, it takes a certain level of hard work and dedication to craft a game from scratch even more so for the googly-eyed goldfishes like myself.

And going from one menu to the next is actually pretty clean and direct. While it’s no mouse and keyboard, the Adobe Photoshop-like menu is easy enough to navigate with the controller. From selecting specific kind of tiles to the way it’s neatly organized, RPG Maker offers a pretty beefy line of resources while still manageable to navigate. It’s the only real issue is having some awkward stuttering issues every once in a while. Though it is worth noting that while it does include the basic tutorial to get you started, much of it is left to tinker on your own or with the help of external resources.

THE VERDICT

For the young budding creators, it’s a great tool to get your project started without the need to know how to code or whatnot. There are tons of resources to pull out from the software itself, which makes it even easier to patch together even for the weirdest of map designs to the most basic and generic of dungeons.  But for the non-creators such as myself that only wish to enjoy what others create, this might very well be a treasure trove of the smaller scale RPGs you won’t find anywhere else.

RPG Maker MV is available now on PS4 and Nintendo Switch

This Review is based on the PS4 version of the game.

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