RPG Maker

"A Near-Perfect Game for a VERY Limited Audience"

RPG Maker for the Playstation is a truly amazing piece of software. It allows you to make your own role-playing game with practically any feature you could dream up. It is certainly not without its faults, however.

GRAPHICS - 2/10
RPG Maker is definitely third-rate, graphically speaking. It's about on par with an average looking Sega Genesis RPG.
Worse yet, when in battle, the enemy creatures simply appear on the screen, and do not move AT ALL during the battle. Your party is shown only as text boxes at the bottom of the screen.

The number of graphical parts you can use to make your towns and dungeons seems extensive at first, but is really fairly limited. 60+ main-screen character designs is pretty good, and 99 monster pictures is adequate. The monsters are drawn quite nicely, even if they don't move at all.

Of course, an Anime Maker is included with the game, so the artistically inclined may draw their own characters and monsters for use in their game.

SOUND - 6/10
35 background musics are included for use in your game. They are standard RPG fare, and the number and quality is adequate. 75+ sounds are in there too, ranging from dings, thumps, hisses and booms. Again the number and quality are adequate.

USING YOUR CREATIVITY - 9.5/10
As I said, you can do almost anything you want with your RPG. Rather than try to describe all the features, I will give a few examples of things you can do.
- Make a monster that talks or growls at you before the battle ensues.
- Create a conversation with another character that gives your characters choices on how to answer, and your choices can affect other events in the game.
- Create your own magic spells with dozens of possible effects, and easily create graphic effects to go along with it.
- Place random battles and specific battles in the same dungeon area.
- Place effects like screen color changes, screen shifts, explosions, flashes, etc.
- Much much more.

Of course, the standard ''pull switch A to open door B'' and such is here. Also, creating your own monsters, items, characters and all that.

MAKING THE GAME - 8/10
The interfaces for making your game can seem very cumbersome at times, but I don't see many ways it could have been improved on. Entering text is tedious, of course. Finding the piece you need for your town or dungeon can be frustrating. It is necessary to keep a running tab (on paper) of your switches so you don't get confused.
Once you get used to it though, it is not TOO bad, and everything does work well enough.

APPEAL - 4.5/10
I estimate that for every hour of playing time in your rpg, it will take 3-5 hours for you to build it. That means to make a standard 40 hour game, it would take you 120-200 hours to build. This, and the frustration involved in learning all the functions, severely limit the appeal of RPG Maker. However, add a dexdrive to your system and the appeal gets better. Hopefully, in a few weeks, some good rpg's will start to appear for download on Gamefaqs, and you will have an unlimited supply of RPG's to play, albeit poor-looking ones.

OVERALL - 8/10
If you have the patience and desire to spend over 100 hours making your own role-playing game, this is great. You can write a game based on your favorite novels, a historical based game, or a quasi-sequel to your favorite commercial RPG.
The graphics are terrible, but this only detracts slightly from the experience of writing your own game.
Also, the idea of having a lot of different RPG's to play, if you get a dexdrive, is appealing.

RPG Maker is a very worthwhile product....just know what you're getting into.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/30/00, Updated 09/30/00