THE GOOD:- Extremely customizable.
- Possible to use your own resources for the whole game.
- Plenty of default resources within the program to start with.
THE BAD:
- Takes a lot of digging to figure out everything due to lack of explanation on everything.
- Requires a load of scripting knowledge to make your game fully custom.
- Default battle system is stupid.
SUMMARY:
RPG Maker XP, as everyone may know, is a program used to make your very own RPG game. You are able to have your own characters, your own maps, your own stats, your own weapons, your own story...anything. The only thing the program doesn't have is your imagination. RPG Maker XP is an extremely useful and very addictive program. However, for beginners, this may not be the case, at first. There is a Help section within the program, but it tells the obvious stuff, and it does not go into detail of the stuff you really need to know. Lack of instructions on what everything does makes the program pretty confusing from the beginning. With enough determination and testing, you'll be able to surpass these problems rather quickly, figuring out what everything does.
Aside from scripting and extra resources, you're already able to customize your game in a large variety of ways. Characters, story, maps, music, weapons, skills, leveling up rate, enemies, you name it. The amount of things in the program is downright amazing. In fact, even a game without all those extra resources and scripting can be really well done. The downfall is the battle system. Scrapping side-view and switching over to front-view just doesn't seem all too innovative. Just seeing artwork of your characters at the bottom and artwork of the enemy up top isn't very engaging. To make the classic side-view again, you're going to have to do a lot of scripting.
Scripting is where the real meat of the program comes in. If you are a good scripter, you can make your game just about anything you want. You can have side-view battles, real-time battles, and shooters...and even go down to the most simple of things such as better menus, enemy HP bars, different types of text boxes, anything you could possibly want. To do this though, you'll have to be good at scripting or search down other people's premade scripts. All in all though, this adds much-needed depth to the program that the other RPG Maker programs simply did not have.
Default resources not enough for you? You can have your own graphics and music in the game, if you wish! Upload character files, music, pictures, maps, animations, sounds, etc. This means you can have an endless warp of resources, and make your game fully custom, if you want.
Once you get past the lack of explanations, your imagination can do the rest. The program can get a tad bit tedious at times, requiring even the most specific of details to be correctly inputted, but with enough determination on your part, you can easily make a fantastic game. The program is for both beginners and experts alike. It's only sixty dollars, which makes this quite a wonderful deal.
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