If you’re a console gamer, chances are you’ve played an RPG or two in your time.  And if you play RPGs, chances are also good that you’ve thought about creating your own adventure.  Luckily, the fine folks at Agetec have known this for quite a while.  Their first attempt at giving RPG fans what they want dates back to 2000 with the release of the original RPG Maker, and though the design tool utilized in the game only allowed for rudimentary battles and straightforward, featureless exploration – it was enough to warrant a sequel.  RPG Maker II is exponentially more customizable and deeper than the first game, but it is also tremendously difficult to become proficient at using.  The learning curve is a tough ride, be warned of that first and foremost, because unless you’ve got the time and patience of a Buddhist Monk it’s likely that you’ll give up in frustration before you’ve been able to appreciate everything this game has to offer.

The worst mistake a would-be RPG designer can make is to go into this game thinking they’ll be able to create a fully customized role-playing game without spending countless hours pouring over the 60-page instruction manual and even more time on experimentation and trial-and-error.  You’ll want to memorize every word in the manual before diving into the game; otherwise you’ll easily be overwhelmed with the design system’s sometimes obscure commands and abstract logic.  Even better, do what I did and get the RPG Maker II Official Strategy Guide by Prima Games.  While no bigger than a normal strategy guide (around 150 pages) it is chock full of helpful information ranging from basic game design, advanced script and event creation, and even a full walk-through for the ready-to-play-out-of-the-box RPG that comes with the design tool.

This included sample RPG is called Fu-Ma and it was created by role-playing expert developer Kazunori Orio, who some may recognize as one of the brains behind the epically popular Dragon Warrior series.  Fu-Ma is an excellent way to acclimate players with exactly what RPG Maker II can do, and by the time you reach the end of the adventure you’ll have a good idea of how far you can go with the game’s design system.

But even so, only the truly diehard will find the time to learn RPG Maker’s various and intricate ins and outs, as it were.  Make no mistake, this sequel is a huge leap over Agetec’s first attempt, and the move to 3D is certainly a warranted sign of the times, but manually creating your own personal world will mean sacrificing any real-life obligations or indeed any sense of reality you may have had prior to dedicating yourself to learning the game.  Successfully doing so, however, will mean that you’ll be able to create fully customized dungeons featuring a surprising amount of depth, detailed towns, explorable overworlds and background additions such as mountainous expanses and subterranean ravines.  Not to mention a wide assortment of choices for modes of transportation in and around your fictitious RPG-verse such as horses, air balloons, and boats.  Yes, RPG Maker II truly does offer everything an up-and-coming designer needs to realize his or her role-playing vision.

While the move to a fully-realized 3D design tool was inevitable given the advent of, well, 3D RPGs – what some may not realize is that this single formula change poses a huge problem for those who aren’t willing to take the time to individually texture each and every surface of the blocks that make up the game’s buildings and dungeons.  Not to mention the inherent complications that come with the game’s newfound focus on height and depth management.  Whereas with the first RPG Maker, you’d basically set objects wherever you wanted within the playfield, you now have to worry about aligning items and structures properly so as to not result in a confused line of sight, blocking out intended objects behind other objects.  It’s fairly simple to circumvent this problem or ascertain conflictions, but only after falling victim to it a few times first.

Every RPG fan has great ideas and innovative concepts, that’s the easy part.  The difficulty comes in implementing them and dealing with the game’s stringent rules and guidelines that initially prevent you from doing so.  For example, most would think that you can simply “place” a “character” and add an automated “conversation” that begins when the main character is in proximity.  Not so.  Instead, you must first create a “model” for an “event”, then you have to design a “script” and assign it to the event you just created, only then can you set the requirements for the script to initialize.  But it isn’t over yet, after going through all that confusion, you must attach the event to the script and place it in an environment.  It seems outlandishly needless the first few times you do this, but once you get the hang of it you’ll realize that the game was designed like this so that any script or event can be seamlessly integrated into any environment.  For depth, basically.

You’d think that since this is the second iteration of the same game, things would be drastically more streamlined and easy-to-use.  But in a weird way it makes sense that it’s not.  RPGs of today are nothing like RPGs of yesteryear, at least not from a technical and graphical standpoint.  Conversely, the creation tools used to make them are considerably more complex.  All things being equal though, it would have been nice to see more simplified creation algorithms for stuff like creating conversations, quests, and dynamic interaction. 

Visually, RPG Maker II is decidedly simple yet the huge assortment of character models, textures, and other visual details does make for quite a large palette of possibilities.  RPGs created with the tool tend to look and feel remarkably like role-playing games from the late 90s and early 00s such as Grandia or Skies of Arcadia, only without the devout attention to diversity and detail.  Plus, the inclusion of Sony’s Picture Paradise system allows you to import your very own digital images into the game, making any visual limitations of the game a moot point.  There are some notable restrictions in terms of audio, however.  You can’t compose your own music or infuse user-created sound effects.  But there is a large variety of background melodies, preset sound effects, and audio modifications that allow you to do things like fade music in and out at your discretion, and the ability to import any music into the battle sequences is also a nice touch.

Overall, RPG Maker II does go a long way to give inexperienced game developers the necessary tools to create their own personalized adventure, but the means of doing so comes at an incredibly steep price.  Time is money, some say, and if that’s true you’ll need to be prepared to invest quite a bit of both into honing your RPG creation skills.  Support for USB keyboards means that you won’t have to manually tap out each and every piece of text for your game, but being able to type text is a small incentive to drudging through all the other stifling aspects of the game.  If you’ve got the gumption then there is the potential here to create something worth being proud about, but if you suffer from ADD, as most gamers do, then you may want to give RPG Maker II a rental before making a final purchase decision.

Gameplay: 6.7

Playing the included pre-made RPG is simple, but creating your own is a daunting task that most will probably give up on before their vision comes to fruition. 

Graphics: 6.4
Contrasting the original RPG Maker, part two looks tremendously better.  But compared to other PS2 RPGs it looks horribly outdated.  Plenty of character, enemy, object, and item models are available, but none will impress in terms of graphics.

Sound: 6.2

Like the visuals, there are lots of aural additions here for you to pick and choose from, but the music is mostly simplistic and sound effects almost entirely generic.

Difficulty: Hard

If you’ve got a few extra bucks then we highly recommend picking up Prima’s strategy guide for RPG Maker II, though even then you’ll be spending plenty of hours figuring out what makes the game tick.

Concept: 8.2
There could be no better idea for a game than one you create yourself, but the design system’s limitations and learning curve is highly off-putting.

Overall: 7.1

RPG Maker II can be easily summed up by saying that if you’re interested in just casually playing the game and creating your own adventure, then don’t bother.  If, however, creating your own RPG is something you’ve always wanted to do and you’ll stop at nothing to learn how to do so, then this is the perfect game for you.