- Audience-Alienating Premise: RPG Maker Unite is an add-on library for the Unity engine that essentially turns the engine into classic RPG Maker. However, most Unity users saw no point in this since most programmers would rather just code their own role-playing game system in the engine, and those who are genuinely interested in RPG Maker are just better off getting the self-contained engines, which regularly go on sale on Steam. This, along with the late-2023 Unity royalties controversy, resulted in Unite getting very little post-launch support from both fans and the official devs, whereas MV and MZ still receive DLC and unofficial plugins to this day.
- Broken Base:
- Which edition is the best? Some users just go with the current newest one, as it's usually the one with the most bells, whistles and quality-of-life features and also the one most likely to support current operating systems. However, some users swear by older editions for whatever reason, usually because of a feature that got changed/removed in a later edition, more widespread plugin availability, lower price point or just because it's the one they're most used to working with.
- Whether using the pack-in assets (also known as "RTP") is acceptable. Some see the RTP assets as a sign of laziness and Creator's Apathy, and automatically dismiss any game made with them to be low-grade Shovelware asset-flips. Others are fine with seeing them, since not everyone has the time and skills to create their own assets or the money to commission them from someone. Some take a middle ground, such as being fine with them in free games or being okay with games mixing custom-made assets with the RTP as long as it does not cause too much of a stylistic mismatch.
- Come for the Game, Stay for the Mods: After getting to know the engine well, it is common for users to try and modify the engine as much as possible using custom scripts or plugins in order to expand its limits, such as allowing for games of other genres, or adding support for 3D graphics in more extreme cases.
- Dancing Bear: RPG Maker 2 and 3 for the PlayStation 2 are considered somewhat notable just because they're the only entries in the series to natively support 3D models.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: Harold, the default protagonist of any newly created project in RPG Maker MV. A stock swordsman hero JRPG protagonist with no personality whatsoever intended mostly as a placeholder character, he has grown popular enough within the RPG Maker community to inspire, among others, several pieces of fanart, an yearly game jam dedicated to games involving him, and a fanmade character
in Rivals of Aether. Works featuring him also tend to feature the other MV default characters as well: Mighty Glacier Therese, Black Magician Girl Marsha and White Mage Lucius. - Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Thanks to piracy and fan translations, the engine became immensely popular among Western indie/hobbyist game developers long before the series became officially available outside Japan.
- It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Initial reactions to RPG Maker MZ, while mostly positive, often criticized how similar it was to RPG Maker MV, with the few additions (such as improved particle rendering, built-in autosave feature and the return of RPG Maker XP's tile layering system) not being worth the upgrade to some more casual users.
- Just Here for Godzilla:
- Some users buy a particular version of the engine that they don't normally use in order to get that engine's pack-in assets, then proceed to use those assets in their preferred version of the engine.
- Beginning in the late '10s, many users of RPG Maker XP only buy that version of the engine in order to use Pokémon Essentials, an SDK that allows the user to create Pokémon fan games with the engine, as XP is otherwise obsoleted by later versions of the engine.
- Porting Disaster: RPG Maker MV received a port to the PS4 and Switch in 2017, and while playing games made with it is good enough, actually making anything is an unbearably clunky experience. Unlike past RPG Maker games on consoles, which simplified the UI to be more compatible with a controller, the port of MV is basically a copy-paste of the PC version, which is ultimately a double-edged sword — while it's theoretically just as powerful as its PC counterpart (bar the total removal of the plugin system for obvious reasons), using it quickly becomes tedious due to the simple fact that the interface was clearly not made with controllers in mind. The Switch version fares slightly better due to its touchscreen, but the interface wasn't resized to match, meaning that unless you have a stylus you'll likely end up misclicking and fumbling about anyway. The port also suffers from several Game Breaking Bugs (ranging from locking controls to losing progress and even being forced to redo the tutorial), a profanity filter that repeatedly stumbles over the Scunthorpe Problem, and incredibly loud music and sound effects during the edit screen that cannot be turned off.
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