Yanfly is a mysterious guy (and that, too, has been a mystery for some time) who entered the scene during the RPG Maker VX era, but it was VX Ace that made him famous within the community. In the past, one creator has been especially busy writing a thorough library of plugins for RPG Maker VX, VX Ace and MV: Yanfly. Theoretically, almost anything is possible with plugins, and many hobby developers have made valuable contributions to the RPG Maker community by writing and publishing plugins - most of them for free! There is a way to fundamentally alter your project even without any changes to the base engine, though: Plugins are (more or less extensive) pieces of code that alter basic functions or provide new ones. In other words, KADOKAWA has decided for the Dragon Quest approach instead of regularly shaking things up like Final Fantasy does. Between VX and VX Ace, there were just a handful of functional changes, and even after several updates provided by the RPG Maker Web team, the publisher outside of Japan and, in a way, secondary developer, there’s still debate whether there’s a good reason to buy MZ if you already own MV. Some ‘upgrades’ barely felt like upgrades at all, which is a criticism often heard.

However, the Japanese developers KADOKAWA have been rather conservative not only with new functions, but also with changes to the visuals. That is, in my opinion, a reasonable frequency. The RPG Maker engine sees a new instalment every 5 years, give or take. For RPG Maker MZ, I highly recommend the VisuStella library. Thus, you may want to increase the design space and the visual appeal of your games by using plugins. New RPG Maker functionality is added with each new instalment, but only very ‘carefully’.

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