RPG Maker for Playstation: A quick review

Well well well, I knew I would get to this at some point but here it is folks, my review of the very first RPG maker for the Playstation. An exclusive to this blog for the record.

Okay I lied, this is the third RPG Maker game, but it is the first as far as a console version goes, and quite frankly, there's not a lot of it to go by. I went with it for two reasons. One, since I'm a classic fan at heart, I would naturally go by making something that doesn't have way too much to offer, and what better to try than a console version? Second, and this pertains to something that has happened in real life, I actually LOST my internet connection for a few days, yeah it totally sucks. Therefore, having to NOT use something that requires an internet connection was pretty beneficial for the time being.

Anyways, RPG Maker is split into two parts, the obvious RPG Maker, and Anime Maker, which is really just some MS Paint thing to integrate your very own graphics and animations into the RPG Maker stuff. I have so far not really utilized this much, but given that this exists for a console version it's actually a nice little feat.

Now for RPG Maker. You can create your world field, dungeons, your playable characters, your magic and items, your parameter names (if you wanna get creative), and your general info. It's a time consuming process, but it's pretty quick and dirty here. You don't have an unlimited amount of character models, magic spell animations, and field and dungeon objects at your disposal, nor do you have a whole lot of monster models, although you do have some palette-swapping abilities. Perhaps the big issue with this game is that it will of course take up quite a lot of space on the memory card, so having an empty one beforehand is a good idea. That's probably the main criticism I have for this game. This is to be expected though, after all, this is a console game.

So far I have decided to work on one for my own play, but it's not finished yet. There's still some clunky things this offers, with some actual translation goofs. For one, Critical Hit in terms of a monster action actually is an instakill attack. Also the Town function when working on the field is used for EVERYTHING on the field, which is pretty strange. I have just started on the Dungeon part of my RPG, and again, it works for the towns, caves, actual dungeons, etc. And apart from that the only other thing to deal with are scenarios, which sort of interest me in a way because it just reminds me of Romancing Saga, and if that were the case, I could have multiple different storylines like those games. So far though, I don't really think this is that bad overall. It's RPG Maker at its least complex (console-wise of course), and is a good way to start small as they would say.