About 6 years ago I started working on a game that I would put time into on-and-off, titled Aretisia: Tenebris Dominus. Now, 6 years later, that game is officially finished. I always told myself I'd save writing a review of RPG Maker until the game was done, so here we are.

RMMV accomplishes what it sets out to do, giving simple tools to anyone wanting to make a JRPG. Where the engine really shines is in its flexibility though, as the whole thing is written in javascript and is completely customisable. There isn't really anything stopping you from stripping out most of the engine's code if you really wanted to, but I'm not sure how well that would go.

For my purposes, making a relatively straight forward JRPG, it met my needs pretty well. Anything the engine can't do natively can be done with plugins, and you can also just make the engine run javascript directly through script calls. It can be very powerful and lets you do some very interesting eventing.

With all that said, I will not be using RMMV going forward. Not because of issues with the software, which to be honest I didn't really have - mostly because I realised over the last 6 years that the kind of game I want to make just isn't what this engine is actually made for. While Aretisia: Tenebris Dominus has been released, it doesn't live up to what I wanted it to be because of the engine choice and to make what I actually want to make I simply need a different engine.

For what RMMV does, it is very good. It's just not what I needed, which I didn't know at the time that I started this. If you know you want to make something akin to a JRPG, whether it has combat or not, RMMV is a good starting place and I would highly recommend it.

my ideas will never come to fruition :(

Bought on a whim when feeling hopeful and creative but like so many projects have sat unused for years.