i have to say even though the art of the modern RPG Maker Game makes them far more aesthetically pleasing and palatable to most audiences they're also far less mechnically dense and barely play around with engine limits in ways that astounded me back in the early-to-mid-2000s

before people would program entire strategy RPGs and overly unnecessary minigames in the worst click-and-code engine imaginable and now the most popular RPG Maker games are like "you walk around and open the menu to use an item and maybe we'll have yanfly engine battles idk"

some of this shit wasn't good (a lot of it was bad) but at the time it seemed like everyone was trying their best to differentiate themselves from each other not just artistically but in the way their systems are presented

meanwhile these days the most popular games are all uh, this — and these games are literally among my favorites too i'm just saying the UI and system design these days is very samey, i guess because people don't want to fuck around too much with code they don't understand?

i guess it's also just a perfectly functional UI layout and there's far more important things to worry about like Actually Finishing Your Game

ok honestly i only started posting about this because i am a huge rpg maker hipster and people who think that the rpg maker scene started with shit like yume nikki and ib and mad father (which isn't even an rpg maker game) make the horrible Anger Gamer in my brain be a fucker