RPG Maker 3 Hands-On

As captivating and entertaining as video games can be, for certain individuals the love affair goes beyond simply playing the finished product on the shelf. These intrepid souls are not content with merely experiencing someone else's work, and instead they harbor their own plans of creating worlds for others to enjoy. For fans of console role-playing games, the RPG Maker series has served as an outlet for that sort of creative expression, giving players the tools to craft their own masterpieces. RPG Maker 3 for the PlayStation 2 is the latest in line, offering up an expansive toolset to nascent developers interested in flexing their gray matter and working some of their own whimsy into playable games. We spent some time playing around with our own ideas, as well as with RPG Maker 3's toolset and possible gameworlds. This iteration of the series appears to make it easier than ever for even the most tender neophyte to create something playable and unique.

Upon firing up RPG Maker 3, you're offered a number of tools in three different categories: the world, characters and items, and story and rules, which are all obviously a part of the greater whole that you'll eventually create. Each area also has a wealth of options that let you focus deeply into, say, creating the various areas in your world or coming up with extensive sets of special skills for your characters.

The world editor tools let you create the physical game environment, which include the outdoor areas, the buildings, and the dungeons. To create an outdoor field, all you need to do is bring up the field editor and dive into the tools. You can then draw outlines of various features right on the map and fill them in with oceans, grasslands, boiling lava pits, forests, or whatever you'd like in the zone. There are additional terrain modifiers that will let you do things like lift the earth for your own custom-made hills, valleys, mountain ranges, and the like. And as much fun as we had creating a pockmarked landscape with all sorts of impossible bodies of water and lava fields, you don't even have to bother with it if you don't want to. The game comes with a number of sample maps already made, so if that's your desire, you can simply choose one of the prefabricated templates and be done with it.

The towns themselves come complete with existing templates as well, so you can choose from a variety of different town models, be it a stone-walled village, a simple hut, a great wooden fortress, or even a floating castle. After you choose the option you'd like, an overhead view of the town lets you determine where you want to place buildings and decorative landmarks. There are a number of building types, so you can choose to place an inn, decide on the appearance of the innkeeper, set exorbitant overnight fees, and voila...you now have a working inn. The dungeon editor is similar to that for outdoor maps, in that you'll draw the labyrinthine paths yourself, and then place elements inside them wherever you like, such as switches, locked doors, traps, and stairwells.

A world is nothing without its people, of course, and RPG Maker 3 doesn't stint you in the number of varying personalities you can plunk down in your new universe. You'll be able to set character classes, so you can make your ideal archer, warrior, ninja, or what have you. Extensive options let you do all kinds of fiddling with the stats for bonuses and such, but probably the best part about making a new character class is coming up with special skills for the characters to use. We made a female ninja class that used a naginata as the weapon of choice. Then we added some nasty offensive skills to the class, using poison and health-point draining effects, and we even chose how the particular move that we selected would appear during battle (we chose a twirling slash motif in purple). Once you've set up your character classes, you can go ahead and create your in-game characters based on the templates you've made, adjusting their appearance to suit you. You can then repeat this process for monster classes, which we did to create the snoob, a deadly blue slime creature prone to using critical attacks. And once you've made your snoob army and other various villains, you can join them with enemy parties of the composition you desire.

With the world and its inhabitants squared away, it's just a matter of setting the stage and telling your story, and RPG Maker 3 gives you plenty of ways to do it. You can set up detailed narrative storyboards, trigger a variety of conversations and story cutscenes between characters, set up events to occur at different times of day, and so forth. Getting all of your text into the editor using your controller and an onscreen keyboard is probably the most labor-intensive part of the whole process, but many of the game editors allow you to easily and quickly preview what you've just done, so you can see it running and then make modifications as necessary.

While running, the games use a simple 3D style that won't challenge Final Fantasy X for visual dominance anytime soon, but it gets the job done. Some of the environment types, with snowy mountains on the horizon and forests spreading out across the land, manage to look pretty good. You have the ability to set all your various areas, cutscenes, and such to a series of existing tunes with a modicum of fuss. The characters themselves tend to lumber around a bit and turn like tanks, and there's some spotty loading here and there, but otherwise the game seems to move along at a decent enough clip.

While there's still somewhat of a learning curve involved, RPG Maker 3 takes some of the pain out of building a game with its useful templates and tools, which can be visually complex but fairly easy to navigate and learn, even if you aren't used to designing towns for a living. Would-be RPG designers eager to bring their visions to fruition will have their chance this fall, when RPG Maker 3 makes its way onto the PlayStation 2. For updates on the game (and the inevitable rise of the snoob empire), be sure to keep your eyes on this gamespace.