Hey everyone! Just a quick question: do you prefer RPG Maker MV or MZ, and why do you like it?
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I own both MV and MZ, and I mostly prefer MZ. The current version of MZ is much more flexible than MV. MZ can do almost everything MV can do, except for some plugin compatibility issues.
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Always go with the latest.
Hence, MZ.
I use MV, but that’s just because when I started, MV was the latest.
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Thanks for sharing! That’s good to know. I also like how MZ has become more flexible over time. Are there any MV plugins you still miss when using MZ?
That’s Good 
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I wouldn’t always agree on “always go with the latest”, but MZ is definitely quite a bit better than MV. It just adds a lot of little quality-of-life improvements.
If for some reason you can’t update your MV project to MZ because it uses lots of plugins that don’t work in MZ, you can still use MZ to edit your project – just be careful not to use features that are new in MZ, and take a few special measures, and an MV project should run just fine being edited in MZ.
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I have MV and although I know MZ has a bunch of quality of life features, I haven’t been enticed enough to move off MV. That and I feel the plugin market on MZ can be a bit outrageous at times.
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I prefer using MV. I compared the event editors of MV and MZ and found that their content is almost identical. For the types of content I create (Japanese-style horror puzzle games), MZ doesn’t offer any revolutionary breakthroughs compared to MV. There are no extra features in MZ that cannot already be achieved or replaced by plugins available in the MV community, which is quite disappointing. Moreover, MZ has compatibility issues with MV plugins, meaning that switching from MV to MZ would require me to search for new plugins all over again.
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The MZ event editor does offer quite a few new features. For example:
- The “Last” section of Control Variables → Game Data
- The “Designate by Character” option of Get Location Info
- Move route preview
- Picture preview
- Interpolation mode for picture movement
- Balloon preview
- Updated plugin command system
I’ve probably missed a few.
But to say that it’s “almost identical” is still true. On the other hand, to say that MZ doesn’t have additional features that MV plugins can’t provide is false – plugins can’t customize the editor. The new engine features in MZ certainly are something an MV plugin can provide, but it’s the new editor features that in my opinion make it worth upgrading.
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MV is cheap and really powerful if you know how to use JS but even just as is without plugins and stuff it’s a solid engine, MZ is basically just a quality of life improvement with some nice features but nothing warranting the price difference.
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Generally MV and MZ are pretty similar, BUT MZ I do think is overall a bit better, as someone who has thousands of hours in both (have around 15,000 hours in MV and 5,000 hours in MZ at the time of writing). MZ has a few features in eventing and Quality of Life improvements that MV never had, for plug-ins the scenes are similar but with some key differences (MV has existed longer, but it has an issue that some updates broke various plug-ins between various updates to the engine so there’s various old plug-ins that only work with specific versions of MV, meanwhile MZ never really had a update that broke many older plugins just added compatibility for some new plug-in features in later updates).
I am going to name a specific issue I had which is why I switched. In MV with games that were a bit technically impressive, I’d run into issues of more than one project of mine crashing without being able to figure out how to fix it. The issue kinda’ has to do with how MV handles its cache and situations it’s loading a lot, doing a lot of effects, while also doing complex constant math problems. And MV tends to crash whenever it has an overflow issue (or any issue really). MZ handles these incidents more gracefully, instead of crashing the whole game it’ll have a quick lag spike and then continue running, it has a higher cache than MV so it happens less, but even when it does happen MZ tends to power through moments it’s overloaded where MV tends to give up.
Small thing but it was sincerely my reason for deciding to move onto MZ earlier in because I’d run into this issue enough times in a few of my projects, but given I was really pushing the engine to do things it wasn’t built to naturally do so my “issue” with MV was a very specific finnicky case. But MZ does actually fix the issue I had with MV here, and I’d say generally a pro MZ has to MV that’s selfdom mentioned is MZ has a higher cache, bigger database, and better crash handler than MV does.
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Thank you
MZ.
Because I can use the layers separately.
And the other newer options too. I never liked VX/A’s mapping, I still don’t like it, and I probably never will!
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Thank you
I’m not sure if this will help or not, but here’s my two cents.
I don’t really have any experience using MZ. When I got into RPG Maker, my initial game was put on VX Ace. When MV came out and I looked through the database, the option for more equipment slot options is what convinced me to port the project over to MV.
I’m happy with MV for my current project (so far, anyway). I expect I’ll make the jump over to MZ at some point and tinker with it to see if it’s better, but for now MV serves all my needs. With the amount of work I put into just the “demo” portion of my current project (which is still unfinished), transferring it over into MZ would be… not ideal. Especially as a project I’ve dabbled with for more than 10 years.
If you’re starting out brand new, I would recommend probably the newest version of the engine in hopes of taking advantage of anything it has over other engines. But, I don’t know anything about MZ at this point, so my opinion on it probably can’t be trusted or relied upon.
If you’re buying one of the engines and need to know which to buy? Just get the latest. It’ll have support for the forseeable future.
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I bought MV in 2023 thinking it was the most recent one, but then I realized MZ exists. I bought MZ a year or so later but never switched. I just like MV and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Might try making something in it at some point though.
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