@arc you can get them to work with actiony systems. actually, i've seen people make stuff like bullet hells and metroidvanias. it's definitely not what the engine was meant for though so you've gotta do a lot of finangling and i've never tried it myself.

i have tried the action battle system scripts, where it still uses all the RPG stats and such but you can swing your sword around on the map and everything. that's pretty cool and honestly not that hard to do, i was making little games like that when i was like 14.

so i guess it depends on what kind of action game you're looking to make. if you're trying to make a platformer, it's better to stick with something else probably. but something like secret of mana would probably work a lot better.

rpg maker is also a one time buy license and it's always been that way, so that's cool. MV and MZ are a lot more editable and use a friendlier coding language (JS). so if you're going to look into one i'd do one of those. MV is going to be better if you're trying to modify the engine a lot and don't want to pay more money for the plugins. the vast majority of MV stuff is free, but with MZ more plugin authors charge for their stuff.

@PurpCat @arc @beardalaxy MonoGame is great if you want a framework instead of a full-blown engine, but don't want to get into the complexity of something like SDL or SFML. The only problem is that despite being fully FOSS, it's dependent on Mono/.NET Core which is obviously Microsoft controlled. If you do use it, use it with VS Codium instead of VS Code, as VS Codium removes all the Microsoft telemetry.

https://vscodium.com/