izigame.me

I figured it was time to update this review, given I have a lot more time in the engine than when I first wrote it.
My overall feelings of RPG Maker MV have not changed.
I am going to structure my edited review into two categories: the good and the bad
The Good:
JavaScript -
The best thing about MV is that is runs on JavaScript now. JS is a light-weight and comparatively easy to learn language compared to RGSS. This means making plugins, or editing existing ones, is much more accessible now.
This is a good thing. For those looking to get a bit more oomph out of the engine and are willing to learn some coding, you can do a lot now. With the RGSS system of prior RPG Makers, you could also do a lot, but the effort required to get the "oomph" was much higher and scripts were often messy, hard to decipher, or hard to consolidate when conflicts arose.
There is still some of that in JS, you are at the whims of the plugin developers of the plugins you are using. Hopefully those devs are writing good, readable, clean code... That said, it is easier to deal with the one's that don't in JS than it is in RGSS.
For those that have a lot of experience with coding and in JS, the engine is your playground. You can do a hell of a lot with it; you can even bypass the engine all together and work with Pixi directly for more control over visual elements.
And since MV runs on top of a browser runtime, you can import JS libraries into RPG Maker and use them in your games. This is a neat trick that I don't think many devs know about.

Mostly the same RPG Maker we've been using for ages -
This is both a positive and a negative, to be honest. While nothing has really changed from VX Ace, that also means that you don't have to re-learn much. There are new things, though. For example, the auto-layering system, as broken as it is at times. Or that the tile size has increased from 32x32 to 48x48.
For the most part, your assets from previous engines can be used in MV with some resizing; you can even load in past RPG Maker RTP if you own the engines.
Community Resources -
This has gotten much better over time. More assets are available for purchase or free use, more tutorials have been made, and plugin development has been maturing well for MV. This is probably the best time to jump into RPG Maker as a noob.

The Bad:
Auto-Layering System -
Yep, this complaint is back for this updated review. Nothing has changed about this, it is still broken. If you place more than three tiles on top of each other, the bottom layer gets removed. In order to get around this, you will have to merge tiles in an image editor and place them in your tile sheets, or use events if you can get away with it.
Because of this system, the layer selections were removed so not only does this system have issues in the editor and can break in-game when it looks like it should be find in the editor, if you have to go back and make changes to the map, you essentially have to remap that entire area because all of the tiles used are on the same layer.
This was a horrible system and it was implemented in a messy way. I don't know why they can't back port the layer system from MZ down to MV.

MZ -
MZ is in the bad column here because it should have been an update to MV; there was no reason to make a new engine for the small number of changes that were made. All they did, pretty much, was implement a new particle system for battle animations, cleaned up the code base, added in the layering system, and some other minor changes.
None of that warrants a new $80 engine. On top of this, expect to pay out the nose for plugins as there still is not enough competition in the plugin dev ecossytem for MZ.
MV plugin's won't necessarily work in MZ. If the plugin has any kind of window related features, they will not work without being converted. So if you wanted to upgrade to MZ from MV the cost is massive; full-price engine, cost to convert plugins if you can't yourself or larger cost to source new plugins.
The reason MZ is here is because MV suffers from Degica attempting to force people over to MZ by withholding quality of life updates to MV that were implemented in MZ.

Lack of Content -
Mentioned this in the previous version of this review, but MV released and still has less content than its predecessors. You can make all of the arguments you want about "oh, just make your own stuff", but that isn't the point. For $80, you have to expect, and demand really, a certain level of assets. The engine by itself isn't worth $80.
Instead, the true value of RPG Maker lies in the assets and always has. MV and MZ both should have been $40 to $50; MZ especially. MV isn't even RTP content-complete; there are sprite sheets missing for some things (though that isn't new, most RPG Makers have that problem).
I did the deep dive in the old version of this review.

Weird Decisions -
There have been a number of occasions where features were requested, such as the ability to select single frames from sprite sheets in Movement Routes. These suggestions, which were wanted by many in the community, were proposed to the developers who then declined to add them stating that there was not enough support for adding them into the engine.
There are also some very strange decisions that were made for MV and in places within the code base, the code looks like it was written by someone off of Fiver (not the good Fiver coders either). They had an opportunity to make MV the best version of RPG Maker released so far, but squandered that opportunity for reasons unknown to me.

The Editor -
So, black boxes. These are things that are locked behind encryption or are otherwise inaccessible to users. The Editor is one giant black box and that's a bad thing because the Editor itself is the largest barrier to making your game the way you want to.
Want to add new item types? Too bad, you can't. The Editor doesn't allow you to because the select list is hard coded. You have to implement them via plugin and use note tags or some other way to inject the data into your game. The fact that a work around exists is beside the point; it shouldn't be needed at all.
There are a number of these types of limitations that exist just because the developers of the engine said "we think this is all that is needed". So, we devs have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get what we want to put into your games into them. I seriously hope that future versions of RPG Maker will open source the editor or at least externalize anything that deals with hard coded selection lists so that we don't have to rely on plugins to add new types of stuff to our games.
For certain things, it makes sense that we can't change what's available (like for targeting), but it would be cool if we could change that stuff too without plugins. That would require a great deal of examination of the engine and solving some tough questions so that won't ever happen (maybe I am way too cynical).
There are some things we can deal with though, like the limit of 5K switches is not actually real; if you edit the system.json file you can add more but you need to be very careful. The max number selection IS limited to 5,000 even if you bypass that limit through manually editing the file, so if you ever go into the max number of switches setting window and hit OK, you will lose all of your stuff above the number you have set.

So overall, I still love RPG Maker; it gives me a tool set that I can jump into a screw around with and make deep game mechanics systems while not having to worry about the visual side of things so much.
There are still some really bad things that come along with it though and all of the usual RPG Maker quirks as well. If you are thinking about jumping into RPG Maker, start here. MZ has a much higer cost of entry. Or if you are looking for more challenge, check out the older engines which can offer some interesting limitations.