Famous Fantasy RM Games?

I've noticed something some time ago and I can't get it out of my head. Outside of any RPG Maker site, the only RM Game fanarts, fanfics or anything else I see are about the Horror Games. (Yume Nikki, IB, Ao Oni etc.) But what about the Fantasy Games? Or SciFi? Where are those? RPGs are usually fantasy games (at least, that's what most people would expect it to be), but why are the Horror Games more popular? I don't want to say they'd be worse, definitely not. But I was just wondering.

I'm thinking it's because horror games generally have more shock value or use more art assets that aren't default (especially in case of Yume Nikki and Ib). They have less characters and don't usually take as long to play through them so it's a lot more accessible to the general artist who then posts their works about it on places like tumblr and get the horde on the bandwagon.


On the other hand the fantasy games are a different case because out of 1 or 2 really good titles, you have a lot of the other default-stat RTP-only games that drown them out. It's a lot to sift through and until anyone notable gets the word out about it, it's usually pretty hard for them to get a fanbase. But that's just one theory.


Another one I have about them is because RPG games generally get compared to the likes of say, Final Fantasy or Tales of, like if anyone wanted to play a good RPG, they might as well just go check out the ones on their game consoles rather than play a 'fake imitation'. Horror Games on the other hand hinge on how well their gameplay mechanics work and how vulnerable it makes you feel in the world, as well as their application of events and puzzle making. Because of that their gameplay can be pretty diverse and it makes it hard for anyone to expect anything, though I'm not sure if someone goes playing a horror game wanting to derive any fun out of its mechanics or because they want to get into this smoking hot fandom that all their friends are currently into...


RPG games also take a while for the player to get used to their protagonist and their teams because of all the build-up you have to do to make their characters very in-depth. Like, it took me until Chapter 5 of Master of the Wind to really understand Stoic and his past, and it took 70+ parts of 10-15 minutes videos of the prequel to said game, Clean Slate to get to know the world of Solest a lot better. Not saying that Clean Slate and Master of the Wind are bad games by any measure, but RPG games kind of require pacing because of all the action parts and the need for lull periods in between to let some of all that story sit in before you head to the next action-packed part.


Meanwhile Horror Games just simply immerse you into a horrifying situation that you're kind of glad you get any interaction with anyone at all (probably Ao Oni, definitely Ib), and because there's such a stark contrast between the scary atmosphere of the game and the goofiness of Garry in Ib, it's not really hard to understand why everyone loves him so much despite having much less dialogue than a standard RPG Game.

the games you had mentioned too have gained exposure from popular LPers on youtube, or were games that were popular in Japan but gained no western exposure until months/years later. Give it some time until we see an RM fantasy game with crazy amounts of fan art from it. 

Because they take less work to make than an RPG, which makes it a more reasonable task to make a really good one. You can run a good horror game purely on art and atmosphere, whereas that really just doesn't fly in an RPG. You don't have to worry about balancing or combat or character growth or even writing a lot of the time. As long as it feels right, it can work. It doesn't even have to be fun, as long as it's a memorable experience. It just requires a much smaller set of skills to do well than an RPG does. They're also shorter and more entertaining to let's play, which makes getting word out about the game easier to do.

An RPG on the other hand, takes a lot more than that to be memorable. You can't just make a pretty game, because that gets old after the first couple hours. You can't run it on atmosphere and feel alone because there's that gameplay thing. You also can't make something people have already seen a thousand times, because they just won't care unless you manage to do it better than most prior implementations of that, and that's generally very hard to do. There has to be something interesting about the gameplay itself or people won't bother with it. I mean, just for example: you spend the vast majority of your time in most RPGs either in combat or doing something related to combat. Yet, how many RPG maker games can you remember off the top of your head that are running something beyond the default battle system with a paint job?

A game could have a great story, but if you're slogging through hours of tedious random battles just to see the next few minutes of dialogue, it can be hard to keep going when you could be playing Star Ocean or Dark Souls or Last Remnant or Fire Emblem instead and actually having fun killing things. If it's going to be a story game, then the rest of the game needs to get out of the way so you can enjoy the story, but often that doesn't happen.

We appreciate it because we know how much effort it is to just do even that much, but the rest of the public is only judging by comparison to everything else out there that they've played and seen. I remember browsing through some "recommended RPG Maker games" list, put together by people who don't use it themselves and there was an entry for Star-Stealing Price - a game we can probably all agree as good. Yet the description read: "uses lots of custom assets, which is nice, but plays like any other RPG".

I can think of several RM RPG games that make me say "oh yeah, that looked really nice", or "oh yeah, that story was really good", or even "oh man, that game was hilarious". I can't think of nearly as many I'd recommend on the basis of "oh yeah, the mechanics on that were great, it was really fun to play", and that's often the number one thing that will keep people playing an RPG for a long period of time - which is what leads to the popularity and the fanart and all of that. That's why most of the games that get attention are Horror or pure story games, and usually not fantasy RPGs.