An RPG Maker you can do Without
RPG Maker has now been around for some time and back in the early 2000s when I first started using it there were easy to use tutorials and forums where a wealth of information could be accessed, with it being on PC also made it consumer friendly easy to use, there was also a massive amount of user created resources available to extend the game beyond it’s original game files. RTP was essentially the resource package that came with RPG Maker and was limited to the original graphics and by using music, sounds and just about anything outside of this could make game files far larger, not great during a time of dial up internet.
However now times have changed and the graphics that would have taken hours to download now take just mere seconds. RPG Maker has seen many releases of new and updated toolkits and while over the years nothing really had changed. RPG Maker has had some early releases of being on console but it never really had the same feel as the PC versions and took a while to really create something worthwhile. It’s been a few years since RPG Maker MV released on PS4 which was not at all a bad iteration of RPG Maker and did feel a lot like its PC counterpart.
RPG Maker WITH is the latest edition of a console only RPG Maker but unlike RPG Maker MV it feels far less user friendly and took more time than I wanted to create something that I was happy with. RPG Maker WITH has all the essentials to create a decent RPG and has some features I enjoy and characters overall look nicer but lacks some decent features that even RPG Maker MV had which make MV a more viable option.
To create any map withing RPG Maker WITH you have to open the Submenu which is used to open any of the other Menus and go to the Map List and create a new map using the Submenu again, it does not sound much of an inconvenience at first until it really does become one when you are making small single rooms such as shops or an upstairs inside a building. It becomes even more of an inconvenience when you have to create events for moving your character from one map to the other. Compare this to RPG Maker MV where you can create new maps on the same screen as you are designing them as well as edit them, you can also create new maps from the same screen as quick as pressing one button, you can also get into the database menu from here. RPG Maker WITH however makes all these simple features much harder to use as you need to go into the Submenu for everything and the interface as a whole is just more sluggish, also if you want to make any changes you have to confirm it which means holding a button for half a second which doesn’t sound like much but when you constantly have to do this it adds in a lot of unnecessary time.
Testing the game is also proves problematic due to this overbearing issue, it takes a while to add any functions to events and then testing the game to see if the game functions how you want it to only adds on to this. Unless you know exactly how each function works you will not know and if you do then you’re most likely not going to be playing this game on console and will already have mastered it on PC. I also have had a bug which had occurred, but I had managed to fix somehow, this was copying a treasure chest event which made the new chest appear in a different part of the map entirely, not sure how this happened or even how I fixed it but I did but when the game is not as intuitive as you would want it’s very hard to pinpoint the bugs. I would highly recommend not deleting all the Database entries to begin with as this can cause your game not to open at all when testing but the game won’t pinpoint the reason. It happened with me, but I had deleted the classes so my character didn’t have one assigned at all and this caused the game not to run but did not inform me why, it took a while for me to find out.
Another massive drawback is how overly colourful the UI is in RPG Maker WITH. The UI consists of mostly bright baby blue and bright orange and fonts are overly large and unappealing. Compare this to RPG Maker MV where font is more clear and the UI is a mix of grey and black which is more easier on the eyes.
RPG Maker does have a community and you can download some of their assets which is helpful if you are not good with creating maps, again RPG Maker WITH lacks a simple random dungeon generator that RPG Maker MV does and a random character creation tool. These tools are great but are missing entirely from RPG Maker WITH and just feels like a massive step back. The game also has a shop which at the time of this review is inaccessible but will be available on release and will contain extra design assets, being a console game the infrastructure of importing your own assets is limited so this is the best option if you don’t want to overuse the original graphics which is hard not to do.
Overall RPG Maker WITH does not really change anything in comparison to RPG Maker MV released a few years ago. The interface is way less user friendly, the feature of being able to make custom characters was a nice part of RPG Maker MV that makes RPG Maker WITH limited to its customization options and uses lot of of the same assets such as Item icons. If you already have RPG Make RV and are looking for something new then I would look at getting a PC which doesn’t have to be overly powerful. RPG Maker WITH is really a hard sell and if you still want a console RPG Maker then I would highly recommend RV over WITH if you absolutely must.
A PlayStation 4/5 Review Code was provided by NIS America
