
If any modern system can lay claim to the JRPG throne, it’s the 3DS. In the six-or-so years since Nintendo’s little handheld hit the market, aficionados have been treated to all sorts of adventures new and old, from Dragon Quests and Bravely games to Shin Megami Tenseis galore. That sort of library encourages serious RPG literacy, and that means 3DS players are uniquely positioned to get the most out of a tool that lets you create your own RPGs. Enter RPG Maker Fes.
The latest in a long line of popular game-making suites — mostly confined to PCs and import PlayStations — RPG Maker Fes was released in Japan last year before being brought Westward by NIS America. While it has its limitations, RPG Maker Fes is an incredibly impressive toolkit, and its massive potential, relative ease of use, and stellar sharing features — any 3DS owner can play the games you make without owning the editor — make this a fantastic way to tell a turn-based tale.

When you jump into RPG Maker Fes, you’ll be greeted with a basic menu that lays out the three main components of game creation: Maps, Events, and the Database. There’s no tutorial or real guidance given at this stage — we’ll come back to that — but diving in, it’s relatively easy to get a feel for how each piece works in concert: maps are where you’ll create the geography of your game, events are the tools you’ll use to tell the story, control behaviours, and ‘program’ set pieces, and the Database holds all of the information that gets called on to make your game unique — characters, monsters, weapons, and so on.
We started our initial tour of RPG Maker in the Maps section, and that felt like a good choice. Here you’ll be able to create up to 99 different areas, and eventually link them together to tell your tale. Maps come in four basic types: world maps, cities, dungeons, and interiors. There are preset samples in each category — which helps enormously in getting off the ground — but you can also start from scratch. Either way, map-making is relatively straightforward: you pick graphical elements from a palette, and then ‘paint’ them onto the canvas using the stylus, or buttons if you prefer. Options like an area fill, move tool, and copy/paste streamline the cartographic creation process a bit, and you can jump in and test play the area at any time to get a feel for how it will work on the ground.

Once we’d made a few maps, we tried our hand at stringing them together, which involved our first foray into the world of RPG Maker’s ‘Events’ system. These are the visual, relatively intuitive pieces of programming you’ll use to turn your collection of maps, characters, and dialogue into a coherent game. They can get complex, but at a basic level they’re very easy to get to grips with. When we wanted to link up our world map to the first town in our game, for instance, we created a ‘Move Location’ event, specified that we wanted the party to change location to the first town when this event became active, and then placed its trigger over the town icon on the world map. Then, when our still-unnamed heroine bumped into that icon from the opening overworld view, she was transported inside the gates of the town.
That’s a simple example of the kind of logic behind events, but they can do so much more than teleport a character from one map to another. You can use events to display messages, emotes, or branching-path dialogue trees; you can start or stop timers, change the weather, or shake the screen; you can increase or decrease gold, HP, or EXP, remove characters from a party, or cue in a sound effect. There’s even a handy selection of pre-rolled ‘Easy Events’, so you can set down frequent features like save points, inns, and shops without having to work out the nitty-gritty details.

The possibilities are pretty endless, and really start to expand when you add in the ability to make conditional event triggers with ‘pages’. These let you set up more than one outcome (‘page’) for a given event, and then specify what conditions lead to each page being put into motion. That means you could create a villager NPC who greets you pleasantly if you’re wearing a certain piece of armour, but coldly if you’re wearing a different one; a town where you can only enter buildings if you’ve read a certain sign; or a barkeep that will serve you for free if you have an attractive party member alongside you.
Those are all examples of binary triggers — things that are either true or false — but you can also create variables for your game to track and use in triggering events, and with those, you can get into some truly creative territory. You could set up a ‘charisma’ meter, for instance, which raises on visits to hot springs or when you drink certain beverages, and then have NPCs react differently if your score is at or above certain levels. You could leave Korok-style hidden objects around your game’s world, and give rewards when players have found 10, 25, or 50 of them. Or you could use variables to add in dating sim elements to your game, keeping track of ‘affection points’ for multiple love interests and triggering different romance events depending on the player’s actions.

RPG Maker Fes gives you a ton of freedom in how to structure the adventures you create, then, and in the Database area you also have a decent amount of control over what it looks and feels like, too. Here you can change names, appearances, sprites, and descriptions for main characters and NPCs, names and behaviours of enemies, and stats, names, and description of weapons, armor, items, spells, and even character classes (‘Professions’), all of which can have a big impact on the classic turn-based combat the engine offers. There’s a massive amount of customization you can get into here, but the Database also exemplifies the biggest weakness with RPG Maker Fes on the 3DS: the inability to create your own assets.
By default, RPG Maker Fes only comes with a ‘Fantasy’-themed asset pack — more have been promised as DLC, including a sci-fi pack, but none were available at the time of writing — so you’ll be working within the realm of mages, castles, dragons and elves, alongside a few curveballs like clowns (!). What’s here is relatively high-quality — it reminded us of a slightly nicer take on the style found in Kemco’s eShop RPGs — and there is quite a bit of variety within the pack, but at the end of the day it still means that games created in RPG Maker Fes will tend to look quite similar, even if they’re wildly different in terms of themes, writing, and tone. And while we haven’t managed to run out of unique character art in the smaller projects we’ve been working on, we can imagine by the midway point of creating a decently-sized RPG you’d be pining for new NPC portraits.

Our other issue with RPG Maker Fes is that, in order to make it to the midway point of creating a decently-sized RPG, you’ll need a solid handle on the editor’s systems and quirks, and that’s not something that it seems especially interested in making sure you have. Individual pieces of RPG Maker are relatively straightforward — it’s easy enough to create a map, to tweak a character profile, or to make a simple event — but putting it all together can be confusing, and this is the kind of title that could really benefit from an interactive tutorial to help get you up and running. Barring that, even having a pre-loaded, editable adventure to poke around in would be a huge help — as it stands, you’re thrown in at the deep end, and it can be a bit overwhelming at the outset.
Once you get the hang of the workflow, however, the interface is nice and clean, and there are some thoughtful quality-of-life touches that make spending a few dozen hours in the editor a much more pleasant prospect. The touchscreen keyboard includes extensive predictive input, for instance, and helpful button shortcuts to snap back and forth between the input field (‘L’) and the autofill options (‘R’). A convenient combination of button and stylus inputs make map-making relatively painless as well, though we do wish there was a button (rather than only a touch panel) earmarked for ‘Undo’.

Along with the snappy interface, another thing RPG Maker Fes does extremely well is perhaps the most important point of all: sharing. Once you’ve finished crafting your adventure (or at least reached a point where you’d like to let people play it), making it available to others is as easy as an upload to the servers. The real revelation here is that people don’t need to own RPG Maker to play your game; anyone with a 3DS and access to the internet can download the free eShop app ‘RPG Maker Fes Player’ and play any projects created in the full release. It’s a fantastic feature, and turns RPG Maker Fes from a walled garden playground into a real game-making tool; the fact that friends and family can download and play through your creations without having any intention of making their own (or spending any money!) is a serious selling point.
We tested out the free companion app, and found it easy to search for games by name as well as browse recent and highly-rated creations. The only issue we ran into relates to DLC (or lack thereof) — a few games we downloaded to try apparently made use of content packs not yet released in North America, and we were unable to either play the games or download the extra data they needed to run. Hopefully this is a temporary issue, but at the very least it would be nice to know that a given game requires DLC (even if it is free) before downloading it.

We had a ton of fun playing around with RPG Maker FES, and even though it has its share of weaknesses and limitations, it still feels pretty incredible to be able to curl up on the couch and have so much game-making potential on our plucky little 3DS. On that note, while aspiring designers with epic tales waiting to be told and writers with scripts at the ready will likely get the most out of that power, we were surprised at just how satisfying it was to mess around and make much smaller projects with the tools on offer. Even if you have no intention of penning the next Chrono Trigger, if you’re a big fan of JRPGs and even a little bit creatively inclined, RPG Maker Fes is worth a look. While full-sized adventures are one potential outcome, we couldn’t help but think of all the little things that could be made in the format; interactive marriage proposals and save-the-dates, mnemonic devices and study aids, short stories, message encoders, a playable recipe book — if you can imagine it as an RPG, you can pretty much make it happen here.
Conclusion
RPG Maker Fes is quite an achievement; it’s a powerful, relatively easy to use set of tools that can turn your story ideas into full blown games, playable by anyone with a 3DS and an internet connection. That alone is impressive — but beyond a simple toolkit, this is a real celebration of JRPGs. Just as Super Mario Maker’s appeal extends beyond budding level designers to platformer fans in general, RPG Maker Fes is well worth a look for anyone whose 3DS cartridge slot has happily turned into an RPG warmer over the years. We do wish there were a tutorial (or at least more extensive documentation), and either a larger library of assets or the ability to design your own, but what’s here is still worth its weight in gold. If you have a story to tell, this is a fantastically fun way to tell it.
Comments 43
It's an interesting concept but man- that name- 'RPG Maker Fes'. Terrible name.
Thank you for the in-depth review!
Does the companion app only deal in for RPG Maker Fes games made on the 3DS, or does it also include games from other versions of RPG Maker?
I wouldn't expect the latter to be the case, but I just wanted to ask. :9
I love the way that you can download the free app and play peoples games. Gone through quite a lot of them, but unfortunately most of them are still demos.
One even said they had given up as there wasn't enough memory for the game he was designing so was moving on the PC.
Also created a thread for people to share their codes:
https://www.nintendolife.com/forums/3ds/rpg_maker_fes_codes
"the inability to create your own assets."
This is what killed it for me.
I poured a TON of time into various projects on the PS1 version of RPG Maker, but never actually finished one. My closest was an absurd adventure following four cosplayers to retrieve their GameCube (complete with custom art), creatively titled Game Quest. The maps were all done, the story was pretty much finished...I even learned the engine well enough to put together a pretty nice three-story water level mechanic in one dungeon.
So what killed it? For one thing, it was needlessly difficult to keep track of what your event flags did, requiring meticulous note-taking IRL (I don't know if more modern versions have fixed this at all). My notes were sufficient for a while, but useless after too long a hiatus from working on it.
The other HUGE problem which is even more likely to still be present here was gameplay balancing. I loved mapping and placing Events, but the character/enemy dynamics necessary to make the game decent were impossible to wrap my head around. Good luck making battle in an RPG Maker game riveting, but it should at least be reasonably functional and that was never my bag.
The custom asset options on PS1 were of course extremely limited, but apparently it had a rudimentary pixel editor that they didn't even bother with on 3DS? Oh well, it probably wouldn't matter too much. I mostly used stock assets on PS1, even writing it into the dialog (such as the standard robot being a terrible Clank costume).
Anyway, the RPG Maker series can be a ton of fun even if you never actually finish a game and I would easily recommend giving it a try in some form.
Only been tinkering with a map of a hospital - the first location in my game, but enjoying it so far. Readers please note that free sci-fi and modern style dlc is now available.
Also agree that the 3DS is an RPG machine. Perhaps you could argue that SNES or PS2 had more genre-defining titles, but the range and breadth of quality RPGs on 3DS is staggering. And we have plenty more to come - more atlus, dragon quest, hopefully more level 5 and more pokemon. Easily the best handheld of all-time for RPGs, better even than Vita.
Not being able to make my own assets is a deal breaker
@Kalmaro
To that end, I'd like to see Wario Ware DIY rise from the dead on 3DS or Switch with a funky fresh online share system.
@HappyMaskedGuy Agreed. I looked into the weird 'Fes' subtitle and the only similar usage I could find was in an add-on disc for Persona 3 called Persona 3 Fes, which apparently uses 'Fes' as a shortened form of 'festival'. Why they didn't just use 'festival' or even the established 'fest' (as in Oktoberfest) I do not know, but it can probably just be put down to a classic case of Engrish.
I made my first games in RPG Maker 2003 and XP (so many years ago!) and now look where I am: living the indie dream by putting games on many platforms (including consoles very soon) and not having a dime in my pocket!
Thank you, RPG Maker...
@Spennymoor It's even more staggering when you remember that the (2/3)DS can play all of the great JRPGs in the DS library as well, not to mention the classic Pokémon games on or coming to the 3DS VC and the fact that 3DS Ambassadors also have access to an additional Fire Emblem game.
It's cool to have a RPG Maker on a handheld, but unless you're a serious fan of the program I wouldn't recommend this particular literation, some of the limitations like lack of battle events, not having ability to modify stats with events and the extremely limited skill system are pretty hard to swallow.
On the other hand it is easy to use and I'd argue the base art assets and sprites have more style compared to the ones in RPG Maker MV, but on MV you really don't have any real limits and considering at the moment you can get MV for like 20e less thanks to the steam sale it is pretty hard to recommend this one if you only need a single RPG Maker in your life.
@Rebusmind
@Expa0
You mean lack of battle events or the lack of event battles (as in, scripted battles)? Because in the latter's case, it's a total purchase killer.
@AlexSora89
Battle Events I mean (Like having dialogue on battles for example) you can't do that here.
You can still force battles via events if that's what you're referring to and I think there is a way to have the game continue differently depending on the battle outcome (Whether you win or lose).
I downloaded the player last night. I guess it's too early to expect anything other than short demos right now though.
The first game I downloaded was rated 5 stars, but I wasn't that impressed with it.
I'll probably keep it on my 3DS and load it up and month or two from now to see what's there.
@Expa0
Oh, that's good to hear. Dialogue during battles can be done without, imo. But boss battles need prior dialogue, cutscenes, and context. Thank goodness.
I giggled a little bit when you referred to the 3DS as modern. Don't get me wrong, I've played the heck out of the system and have owned 5 (America 3DS, 3DSXL, N3DSXL and finally N3DS and one Japanese N3DS) But the system is clearly at the end of it's lifespan. Or frankly should be.
On topic this game seems like a very neat idea, but I can't imagine typing out the dialogue for a full story on the 3DS. A game like this needs access to a keyboard.
Event scripting can be a real pain, but part of the fun is finding a means to accomplish what I want to occur. I think mapping could have been easier with a zoom out function and maybe a paint tile option.
On a side note, are user created games rated by any means? I'm not crafting anything graphic, but I have a seriously inappropriate style of humor and I'm nervous some 7 year old will play it off of Fes Player and their parent will be up in arms...
@Heavyarms55
The touch screen works plenty well for writing, I think so anyway, perhaps it might be just me cus I can't write decent dialogue for the life me, so I tend to keep it at minimum.
Though if you are planning a visual novel type thing which is mostly dialogue, then I suppose a keyboard would be optimal.
Been waiting for this a long time for this game and have been going hard at building my RPG since launch day to get a good game for you guys to play soon (let's face it, most of the games to download now are garbage). I'll have to start with a demo too since my game will be fairly long in the end but I'm an RPG Maker veteren and published author who pre-wrote all tje story so I like to think it will be quality enough to have people enjoy it. I have about 25 hours of build time right now with about 25 minutes of player time. Demo hopefully done by week's end!
@Expa0 Yeah, you're right. There have been a few features I've found on this version to be really neat and a step up from other versions, but also a few pretty glaring omitions that are provong to be challenging. But I like a challenge! I've deliberately kept my game simple (yet fun and different) and finding ways around the restrictions has been fun so far.
I don't have much interest in designing my own RPGs, but I'm sure as hell not going to pass up the opportunity to play free games made by other players. I'm just hoping it's not a Mario Maker situation where 95% of them are terrible "troll" games and you have to look really hard to find the quality stuff, but that's probably inevitable in any game with content sharing.
This looks so cool. I don't really want to play this on 3DS, I'm trying to wind down my backlog on 3DS for now, but wow this is such a cool looking system. Though a proper RPG with a novel and a half's worth of script might be difficult typing out on a 3DS....
Glad people have this to play but I'm not really the creative type so this is a pass.
Sounds awesome. If I had the time to tinker with it, I definitely would. Too bad you can't do an Action RPG mode besides just the turn based action, but I digress.
Can anyone say how music works in this game? Does it just have some preset tunes you choose from or is there some way to add music like a music editor or something? That would make a big difference to me.
@sr_388 Preset tunes, like the graphics, sadly - a music editor would've been awesome! (But the available tracks are good!)
By the way, if anyone's downloading the Player, I recommend checking out 'Academonic' by Jenni Lada from Michibiku! It's work-in-progress but super impressive, gives a good idea of the kind of things you can create, and she's documented making the game on the site so there are helpful tutorials for how to script a lot of the cool things you'll find in it!
@zipmon thanks for the quick reply! That's a shame. I don't mind preset art (I'm not an artist), but I would have loved to put my own music in the game.
Im working on a random short story right now. Im waiting for DLC graphics packs which I hope will come out soon. I thought we were getting the 5 graphics packs included with our purchase. But I will buy it when it comes out.
Eh... as a fan of the PC makers I'm much less impressed. I'm currently trying to remake a game I have made in RPG Maker 2000... only to find myself working around issues a bit because apparently this version of the game lacks the options compared to a 17 year old program.
I'm enjoying it though. Hope the DLC will come to America soon.
I almost feel like this game needs two ratings - one for newcomers, and one for everybody who is used to the PC makers. For newbies, I give it a 4/5. For people used to the PC version, I give it a 2/5 - it's pretty inadequate if you aren't new to the mechanics and such, but it's a great starting point because it's fairly simple.
@ChibiNinja Even so, if a recommendation was for simpler functionality I would simply just recommend an older RPG Maker like RPG Maker 2000. They're pretty cheap on Steam especially with the current sale.
Not to say there aren't other reasons to get this. Portability alone is a good selling point, or maybe someone is interested in the franchise but doesn't have a computer. So I'm not going to try to ruin anyone's parade if they enjoy this.
@Rebusmind Do you have any experience with Ruby? It seems to be used in some capacity with RPG Maker VX, although I'm not sure how the scripting works. I've been wanting to learn at some point, it just seems daunting. I've read Ruby is versatile, so it seems interesting... What do you think about it?
@sr_388 For what it's worth, you can alter the pitch of each preloaded tune as well which adds a suprising level of variation to each song.
@Hikingguy Thanks man! I will keep everyone posted.
This game is really intriguing me. I've always wanted to create my own RPG, and the convenience of making one on my handy 3DS is really appealing.
Still waiting on the dlc in NA, they seem to have forgotten about us... Today was eshop update day and it's not there yet.
@Hikingguy I did! How did you know? The sequel is due out late this year if editor and cover artist hit schedule.
Dude, I am so sorry to hear about your son. My deepest condolences and prayers go out to you.
Thank you so much for your warm comments and feedback about my book. You totally made my day! As a fairly new author, your comments meant so much to me and I am that much more excited to get the sequel out before year's end. If you enjoyed the first you will really enjoy the sequel! Believe it or not I started Crimson Sun over 5 years ago and I've improved a lot since then. Not to mention there are a bunch of major plot twists coming up.
Thank you so much again for your interest and support.
Best regards and friend me on facebook so we can keep in touch!
The studio Kodakawa have an anime out called New Game.
Terrific. I rarely would award something a 9/10 but this is def one of those situations. Only reason I wouldn't give a 10/10 is due to memory limits. You can make a relatively large game but it can def be an issue if your master plan is working perfectly until you realize it's not going to fit.
Ok that said....this is a fantastic game making tool. If you really, truly want to make something unique and great.. YOU CAN. I was shocked at how much detail you are expected to put into it. I wasn't expecting it to have so many options. It's nowhere near the user friendly ease of "Mario maker" tho, it doesn't really teach you, it expects you to figure it ALL out yourself, which is fine for me but I can understand it being a turn off for some, esp younger gamers, so it's for serious LONG haul gamers that want to take the time to create something great. I did a short simple game to learn and test everything before starting my REAL full size game. 20 hours or so in and having a blast. For the RIGHT person this will be one of the best 3ds experiences you've ever had....but for the wrong person it could be one of the most tedious frustrating 3ds experiences ever lol.
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