RPG Maker WITH review

Being unfamiliar with the RPG Maker series, which has been around in one iteration it another since the late 1980s, I went into RPG Maker WITH hopeful but with no expectations. A few utterly bewildering hours later, I had a basic forest path, a character to walk down it, and a chest to open. And no solid idea of what I was doing at all.

That RPG Maker WITH doesn’t open with a tutorial is mind-boggling. You can find one, of sorts, in the Maker Plaza, which allows you to wander around and interact with things in a little JRPG village to see a tool tip on the command used to generate it. But unless you’ve a photographic memory, this is utterly useless as a guide.

The idea here is that you can build an environment with a fairly large tileset, and include characters, enemies, events, even dialogue choices, combat encounters, and multiple interiors and dungeons. And I’ve no doubt that in the right hands, it’s all possible. But it seems to assume prior experience, and doesn’t set itself up for newcomers very well.

The basic map is an empty space with a main character in it. There’s no way to create a specific biome or preset. I managed to download the one free village preset, but populating it proved incredibly frustrating. As a newcomer nothing felt intuitive. You can place down tiles easily enough, drop a chest with some treasure; I added an innkeeper and wrote some dialogue.

But things like combat encounters and trigger events were beyond my ken, and the lack of even a simple step by step tutorial seems like madness. I get that it wants you to learn by doing, but as someone with zero experience with the series or game development, I was lost. I’d like to be able to say that it got easier, but even though I eventually managed to place a few creatures and a patrolling villager, I realised I wasn’t having a lot of fun doing it.

It being on Nintendo Switch doesn’t help. Played on the big screen it was easier to see the details, but it cries out for mouse and keyboard controls. The viewpoint and sprites are likely to lead to a lot of similar creations, which is one of the more common complaints aimed at this game’s predecessors. There are lots of tiles and character models available, but ultimately the viewpoint and art style won’t change from creation to creation.

Once I’d managed to build a waterfall with a treasure chest beside it, guarded by a pair of slimes, it took me several further bouts of frustration to get them to move, and by the time I worked out how to create a combat encounter I struggled to apply any kind of tactic or excitement to it. Opening the chest with a dazzly, sparkly animation hardly seemed reward enough.

There are different ways to approach designing your combat, with options for full-on 2D head-to-head clashes, or simply smacking each other instead. The problem is, like everything, it’s not really made super clear how to do it.

It looks pretty enough, but will be achingly familiar to anyone who’s played top down old school JRPGs before. You can modify character models and outfit NPCs and party members quite freely, but there’s not a great deal of visual customisation to make anything your own. Within a few weeks of launch the Maker Plaza will be flooded with templates and uploads by others, and this is likely when the game will become truly worth owning.

It has menus and sub-menus galore, some of which I didn’t even find until I’d been playing it for a few hours. Again, little here feels intuitive and it’s often a case of trying something to see if it works. Perhaps this is entirely indicative of game design in the real world, but in this setting it’s more irritating than endearing.

For budding creators and those who want to dip their toes in game creation, this is a good tool provided you have the patience and time to essentially teach yourself how to use it (or have the opportunity to riff off others as you can download and edit even public creations). But if you’ve never dabbled in this kind of program before and are hoping for a little tutorialising to get you going, you’re probably going to be disappointed.

All the tools are here, but RPG Maker WITH seems happy to leave newcomers behind, and as a result it presents as being less feature-rich and useful than it undoubtedly is.