My experience with RPG Maker (the first one, for the PC) never went very far because of the steep learning curve. Yes, I had a small working game with a couple of towns and random fights on the map, but I never got the hang of more complicated things. Besides, it was extremely time consuming. RPG Maker 3 greatly improves these problems by offering the user a fairly easy to use toolset that transforms 2D input into 3D results almost instantly.
The main menu of game creation comes divided into three categories: world, characters and items, story and rules.
In the world editor, you create your physical surroundings, from a world map to towns, building interiors and dungeons. You can create everything from scratch or use the ready-made templates that come with the game.
Creating a world map uses a series of tools for drawing shapes, filling them with different terrain types and adding altitude changes to create hills and valleys. You can add bodies of water, rivers of lava, grassy plains, rocky mountains, deserts, beaches and forests just by placing an area filled with the respective type of terrain. Then you can test your map in full 3D by walking around in it.
You can also pick the time of day, the season and the weather and see how they alter the appearance of your world map. It’s a pretty cool little feature!
Once you have your map ready, you can add towns and other decorative objects or events. To place a town, you pick one of the available styles and place it wherever you want it on the map. Then, you move on to “furnish” your town with buildings, objects and people. Place a shop, pick the look and sex of the shopkeeper, and that’s it. Creating a dungeon is basically the same, and inside you can place traps, treasure chests, locked doors and switches. You can also choose the background music for each of the areas in your game and add animations to your villagers.
Character creation is fairly easy if you’re just making random townspeople. Party members have a lot more to them: you need to pick their classes, stats bonuses, weapons of choice and their respective sets of skills. Further customization includes the battle animation for each skill.
I do have a few “issues” (if I can call it that) with character creation. Some of the 2D graphics that you use for your character portrait are just ridiculous and seem totally out of place for RPG creation. The ones I happened to like (usually anime style) wouldn’t quite fit the 3D model of the character. I expected more variety of both 2D sprites and 3D model color customization, or maybe being able to use 3D models that don’t belong to the pre-selected class (for example, pick a town person model for the 3D representation of an adventurer).
Item creation can take quite a while if you want to name every weapon, armor or potion you can find in the game. You can always use the templates, but it’s a lot more fun to come across the Amazing Sword of Ownage than a simple Greater Two-Handed Sword.
The story and rules menu is where you create dialogs and cut-scenes. You can have characters talking to each other, faded character portraits, a storyteller narrating something, spinning objects, flashing screens… Nothing like well-scripted events to make a plot interesting!
Keep in mind that everything you can create has a set limit. You can only have this many maps, this many characters, this many objects and events inside a town, so don’t plan on creating something of epic proportions right away. Instead, plan a small storyline with only the essential, create it, and add to it after it’s done, depending on the available free space remaining.
The game does take quite a bit of space. You will need 2400MB free in a memory card for each game you want to create, and for those of you without a hard drive on your PS2 this will be a very limiting factor if you are a very creative person who wants to work on several game projects.
I strongly recommend you have a USB keyboard handy for all the typing you will be doing. Using the controller to type in all the text will drive you bonkers in no time, since it’s a slow way of doing it.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention that RPG Maker 3 also comes with a short enjoyable game for you to play. “Dear Brave Heart” is an approximately 6 hours long adventure where you can experience the possibilities of the game creator and learn a few things about it.
There is still a big learning curve in RPG Maker 3 and the editors are still somewhat complex, but building your vision of an RPG is now easier than ever.
Special thanks to Valerie Whetzel at Reverb Communications and Agetec for providing a copy of this title.