Really great post. I’ve learned a lot about the engines I don’t use, especially Lex Talionis. I’m an SRPG Studio guy, so now I’ll talk your ear off about SRPG Studio things:
- I’m sure YMMV as always with ease of use, but I had much less trouble getting into SRPG Studio than any other engine I tried, including FEBuilder and LT. No doubt those are no problem if your brain is massive, but for my money SRPG Studio has easily the lowest barrier to entry difficulty-wise. (There’s always the consideration of “want”, where if you really dedicate yourself to any one of these engines wholeheartedly then you will probably feel like it’s “the easy one”. Maybe projecting though.) Even if you don’t like what you get out of the box with the engine, adding plugins to change the game immensely is often as simple as dragging and dropping a JS file into the Plugin folder. And when you’re new to it, eventing is much easier to wrap your head around when it’s formatted the way it is in SRPG Studio compared to any of the other options listed here imo. (I’ve never used any of the RPG Makers, so I didn’t realize it’d even be familiar to users of those engines. Bonus!)
- That being said, while we have several community-made tutorial series on YouTube for beginners, and there is official documentation for the engine, we definitely don’t have anything as in-depth and user-friendly for newbies as LT’s documentation. Common Lex W
- Regarding community support, the SRPG Studio community is pretty insular. I find there isn’t a huge overlap in SRPG Studio users and fans of romhacks (which is kind of bizarre, but it is what it is). You’ll see SRPG project posts here on FEU occasionally, but most of us keep to the SRPG Studio circles. That being said, those circles ARE very active and extremely helpful. There are always people around to help you learn about the engine or troubleshoot eventing/programming issues, and more publicly-usable plugins are being made pretty much every week.
- In your “Organizing Internal Assets” section, I like LT’s item menu visually, but I’m not sure what’s being shown in the video where you reorder the items. It looks exactly like how SRPG Studio does it. Is the appeal that the identifier is a string in LT (the item’s name) instead of a number like in SRPGS? Not talking shit just have no idea what the video is trying to show lol
- SRPG Studio doesn’t have world maps built in, but they can be… “faked”… with or without plugins, and they can be edited as easily as other maps. I implemented a codeless, event-only world map for a oneoff project back in 2019, and I’m using a modified free exploration plugin to do it for my ongoing Gaiden fangame Seas of Novis.
- I assume all the hype about those LT killer features is that they come baked into the engine, because for the most part SRPG Studio has user-made plugins for almost all of those features (like romhacking does). Fatigue, cooldown skills, Berwick turn order, free exploration, etc. Bonus EXP is even built in. The skill and item mixers are exceptions though, they sound AMAZING holy shit
- Speaking of skills, depending on the skill they are a bit customizable in the engine itself, but more importantly all of the skill-related code is accessible and can be edited with a little JavaScript know-how. Otherwise, there are billions of custom skill plugins out there for whatever your needs are, and they are usually easy to tweak, even if you aren’t much of a programmer. And if you aren’t, JS is SO much easier to intuit than ASM for someone who knows neither.
- SRPG Studio has the normal save types (with the number of available save slots being customizable, which I think is neat), but there are also several plugins that change it to add things like suspend saves, autosaves, ironman savescum prevention, and probably more I can’t remember.
- I can’t speak for how AI editing works in the other engines, but SRPG Studio’s is pretty powerful. You can choose from a few intuitive behaviors, but you can also make multiple “pages” of behaviors that an AI will follow depending on any kind of condition you want. There are also plenty of plugins to make enemies smarter or play as a team better, or ones that just add unique patterns, or ones that let AI use all their tools like the player can (for example, a plugin that lets them use Canto).
- SRPG Studio runs at 60fps (or 30fps, you can pick) and yeah the default (“RTP”) animations are really choppy. On the upside, MarkyJoe1990 made a fantastic plugin a while ago that interpolates running frames to make it look buttery-smooth. It’s not gonna make the animations as flashy as GBAFE, but it at least can start to compete. And with an artist on board, the animation editor is so powerful that you have the ability to make animations that do legitimately look great. (That’s just not gonna be the case for most people, unfortunately.)
- All of the UI code in SRPG Studio is editable. It’s not the easiest thing to do, so I’m sure LT has the edge when it comes to ease of use, but if you know JavaScript then the world is really your oyster here:
Some custom UI examples
Here’s a detailed unit hover window I made a few years ago. (Plus an Objective window, which the vanilla engine doesn’t have, and a display for currently bound keys, which is a recent addition.)
Here’s a custom unit menu I made for Seas of Novis. And here is a unique menu I made to let you allocate stat points from the lion statues in that game.
Here’s some UI I made just a couple weeks ago that lets you rebind your controls in-game instead of having to edit game.ini like you used to have to. All of this is custom-made.
(This was a game jam project titled “Bullet Hell SRPG”.)
Long story short, with the know-how you can make pretty much anything. It’s fantastic!
The Lex Talionis favoritism is clear and I completely respect that. Shill your favorites! Hell yes! I love it. It’s incredible that we have so many great options to make FE-style games nowadays. My high school self, struggling in vain to figure out Nightmare modules after school, would be giddy to have all these great options.
For all its limitations, SRPG Studio is easily my favorite for its power and ease of use. The amount of flexibility you get for the same price as Three Houses is a fantastic deal. (Or, on sale, a whole game engine for the cost of a meal + milkshake at Whataburger.) And, while it’s not really a big factor for me personally, the fact that SRPG Studio games could potentially be sold for real money IS an undeniable selling point. Just off the top of my head I can name nine SRPG Studio games on Steam or coming soon to Steam.
There are a few other downsides to SRPG Studio not discussed here that I think I’d be remiss to not at least mention.
Other downsides
- SRPG Studio is not open source. Scripting does have incredible power, but when you dig far enough you WILL eventually find things you cannot do. The biggest example of this is the editor itself, which is entirely uncustomizable. (I know I’d definitely change some things about it if it were up to me.)
- The engine is made by a Japanese developer and was machine-translated to English. Now, SapphireSoft is surprisingly responsive to the English-speaking community; some egregious mistranslations have been changed in updates thanks to user feedback, but there’s still always the chance of a confusing mistranslation hampering your development work. I’m sure there are plenty of odd translations that the community has taken for granted that could confuse a new user who hasn’t learned it the hard way yet. Plus, crucially, the official documentation is also machine-translated.
- You could make entire games without realizing it, but some extremely useful editor features are hidden. Tools > Options contains several checkboxes that hide essential features such as: displaying the ID numbers next to data (probably why you thought it used Slot IDs instead of Number IDs); the Original Data tab, extremely important for certain plugins; stat increases per level for enemy units; and some more I’m sure I have forgotten were originally hidden behind multiple menus. These are easily corrected once you actually know what you’re looking for, but it’s definitely a pain if you’re new to the engine.
- Windows-only, with no mobile ports, is pain. Agony even. I consider this to be SRPG Studio’s biggest flaw by far. If you could play SRPG Studio games on Android, hoo boy, what a 10/10 engine it’d be. At least games seem to work on Steam Deck with Proton GE, but I’m not gonna pretend this is anywhere near as cool as SRPGs in your palm would be. Tactile on Android would convince me to give that engine a serious shot. Until then romhacks stay winning
tldr
- SRPG Studio: GOOD
- Lex Talionis: GOOD
- Tactile: GOOD
- Romhacking: GOOD
- FEXP: TECHNICALLY AN OPTION
But
we all know real ones use FEditor and Nightmare modules. Admit it.