I don’t have a lot of experience with RPGMaker games and frankly, the association I have with them isn’t necessarily bad or anything but still, I sometimes end up coming across as if I don’t like them, which isn’t necessarily true. The other day on my stream, Roybert (who is a great blogger if you ask me, so check him out!) asked me if I didn’t like RPGMaker games and frankly, the answer was quite lengthy but it boils down to:
- I don’t necessarily dislike them,…
- But!
It’s a tricky subject given that RPGMaker as a tool is interesting and I like that it exists. So far, I’ve played a few games made using RPGMaker but I haven’t played a lot of them. A lot of the experiences I had with it has been pretty great. Heartbeat, for instance, is a lovely game if you look past the fact that there has been a fair bit of drama surrounding one of its devs and her girlfriend. Meanwhile, I also had some bad experiences with it. There are a few games that I didn’t necessarily like, To The Moon, for example, and when I think of RPGMaker, I often have that negative connotation with the term and concept. There are games that are slow-paced or not well made and that’s entirely based on the experience that the developer in question has. RPGMaker is an incredibly powerful tool that allows people to make games even if they don’t know how to code and I love that. It’s amazing and I’m glad that it exists.
A lot of the time, I may like a game and I may not know that it’s made with RPGMaker. There are also times when I may know that a game is made with it but it doesn’t matter because the game is still very enjoyable to me. Weirdly enough, though, games like Oneshot, Rakuen, Grimm’s Hollow and Omori don’t spring to my mind when I think of “RPGMaker-made Games”. Instead, I just have this negative connotation with the subject even though I can’t even name the games that I played years ago that I didn’t like.
So, to answer the question, I don’t dislike RPGMaker-made games. It’s really just a negative connotation I have with the topic that I want to get over with. I mean, it’s perfectly unreasonable, actually. The negative connotation doesn’t stop me from enjoying games made with RPGMaker. Notably, the fact that something is made with RPGMaker is entirely unimportant to my enjoyment. In reality, I don’t even think that you can say something like “I don’t like RPGMaker Games” with a straight face, given that every single game is different. Omori is very different from, say, Pokémon Uranium. Meanwhile, Heartbeat is different from Rakuen and OneShot while Grimm’s Hollow looks super cool actually and is also very different from these other titles. It’s not like “RPGMaker-made games” is a genre or anything. It’s literally in the title that you use the programs to make RPGs. If you don’t like RPGs, you may not like these games, sure, but personally, I actually enjoy a fair few RPGs quite a bit. So, it’s not that I dislike them but rather that I had mixed experiences with them. Anyway, I just thought I’d talk a bit about this. How do you feel about games via RPGMaker?
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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