RPG Maker XP

THE BAD:
Costs a fair bit of money.
Relys on Scripts alot, not many peoples favourite thing there.

SUMMARY:
RPG Maker XP allows the simplest of people make a perhaps vast and exciting Role-Playing Game within an hour.

As soon as you open it up, there are millions of possibilities available to you, enough resources to keep you happy for a while, a large amount of pre-installed scripts to you don't need to add any unless you choose too and a dead-simple interface that even the common fool could manage!

RPG Maker XP is the direct sequel to RPG Maker 03, and it's everything but worse than it. It's better, contains easier functions, better and bigger possibilities and quite frankly, awesome.

At the price of $60 USD and £34 in the UK, this is an extraordinary deal. Bearing in mind if you use your own resources and everything you use to make the game is your, you have legal permissions to sell the game worldwide! But that, unfortunatly, would take years to do, so remember to practice!

The simple layout of features and the interface allows you to do work, and have fun at the same time, its even possible to make your game online!

There are many outside things that work with RPG Maker XP, you can get scripts that allow your KeyBoard and Mouse to work in the game, you can as said earlier, put it online and many more.

THE BAD:
Much less options than previous versions. Relies more heavily on scripting. More difficult to create a game EXACTLY as you want it.In other words the game is a little harder to use. The program would be a little better if you could just make a 1000x1000 size map and use all of the scenery in the software on that map to create sort of like a GBA game.

SUMMARY:
Overall good but it has its fair share of downsides and turnaways. I'd say it's a good buy. I am having some trouble with this version because I am horrible at scripting and with a game making program relying so heavily on scripting I would definitely have problems. My favorite thing about the RPG maker series is that overall it does not rely too heavily on scripting, heck in the other versions you couldn't even access the script. Most of the RPG maker games out there such as Sphere require you to be a master scripter just to create the most basic games. The scripting feature however is usefull. I have too many scripts in my game so now whenever you try to play the game it says failed to load scripts. like 4000 lines or so in the game debug area.

THE BAD:
-Some features from previous versions removed
-Games created have a resolution of 640x480 (but can be expanded by scripting)

SUMMARY:
Here's a brief introduction for someone who has never heard of the RPG Maker series before:

RPG Maker is a program which you can use to make Final Fantasy style RPGs.
Here are some of the tools in RPG Maker XP:

-Character Editor
-Item Editor
-Map Editor
-Monster Editor
-Monster Group/Battle Editor
-Animation Editor
-Status Effects Editor
-Resource Editor for importing your own graphics and music

The graphics have also greatly improved since the previous versions, and there are alot more tilesets to choose from.

RPG Maker XP features also has a script editor (further information below) for creating scripts. But it's possible to make a game without ever even needing to add/changing a script. Therefore even people that don't have any programming experience can make RPGs with RPG Maker XP. RPG Maker 2003 (the previous version) did have more options for non-coders though.

A great new addition to the series is the abilty to change the core systems with the use of a scripting language called RGSS (Ruby Game Scripting System) which is based on the programming language used to create RPG Maker XP itself, therefore many changes can be made to the system.

The only drawback is that RGSS can be hard to learn, since there's only a small amount of english documentation. This is because RPG Maker XP was never officialy released outside of Japan. (Even though illegal translations are available for download.)

Conclusion
RPG Maker XP is a great tool for anyone wanting to make his/her own RPG and RGSS makes the possibilities almost endless. The only real flaw is the removal of some features that were present in previous versions.

THE BAD:
It doesn't have a many features as RPG Maker 2003, you have to code them into the engine, You can no longer use facesets without coding it into the engine.
There aren't that many resources available for it yet.

SUMMARY:
Overall, it's a great buy and it looks great, but it relies to heavily on scripting and this may make RPG Maker 2003 look a better option for non coders, however, if you can code with RGSS (the coding language for RPG Maker XP) the possibilities of what you can do with your RPG are virtually endless.