Preface - I acknowledge that I am new to game development, and this will require a lot of time, effort, and dedication. I am willing to spend up to a couple years working on this every now and then in my spare time. I've thought this project over in my head a thousand times, and I've come here to seek advice to where to start. I have a basic understanding of computer programming from taking some courses in high school (pascal and C++), and I understand variables and all that jazz.

What I want to make:

Massive crossover of all of my beloved characters from the SNES era, and sprites permitting, a few other famous game characters. I'm talking 50+ playable characters.

Very long game with a very wide array of graphics, music and sounds.


I believe this is feasible in RPGmaker XP/VX with enough dedication and by finding a way to have one save file work for multiple games.

What I want to know is if a project of this magnitude is better on XP or VX... or if I should seriously look away from RPGmaker. I currently want to use RPGmaker for its ease of use and to not have to code my own battle system by hand.

Anyways, let me know what you think would work best, and thanks in advance!

It seems like you have a good idea of what you might be getting yourself into. A type of project like this seems very possible in either XP or VX. In reality, it doesn't matter which one you use because you can always use scripts to get what you want out of either program. I suggest that you do some research regarding the main differences between the two and reach a conclusion based upon pros and cons. I wish you luck with your project!

Thanks

Can you link me to a "definitive" thread on the differences? I've read comparisons but the only major ones I've noticed is the mapping and interface.

from my understanding, XP or VX both have the same guts, just different extensions of their toolset.

And to be brutally frank, what you wrote down isn't really enough to go by. any of the engines you named can do the job. The real question is which one will save you the most amount of work.

and THAT depends entirely upon the system you've designed for your game. For the project I'm working on right now, the only reason I'm using XP is because I see a huge community support for it, and I could re-use a lot of the base library to make the game. (even though I would have to gut large parts of the code anyway)

To be honest, the out of the box RPG maker game play mechanics is not incredibly deep and I think is really only suited for making certain types of JRPGs.