Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Guilty pleasure"

Good:
-Extremely easy for others to download and play games you create thanks to the ability to create standalone application files.
-Ability to import any graphics, sound effects, music.
-Slightly better art included with the standard game than previous RPG Makers.
-Use of .ogg audio files cuts down on disk space usage.
-Comes with a world map tileset and some additional features such as boats and airships.
-Community support for this game is just as good as it is for other RPG Makers. There is a plethora of resources and scripts you can find on the internet.
-New features such as parallax scrolling, improved weather effects, and double image battlebacks/title screens.

Bad:
-I don't know what they were thinking by forcing you to use autotiles for everything and making the tileset too simple to create varied graphics yet too complicated to understand without some difficulty. There's only 2 layers now! RPG Maker XP's tileset system was far better than this one.
-They removed fogs. Must use scripts for better lighting.
-Combat system is extremely dated and should be revamped to more traditional sideview RPG battle systems. Fortunately, there are many 3rd party scripts that can be used to do just that provided that you have the graphics for it.