Outstanding RPG maker games that everyone should try

This thread is about games that were made with RPG maker.
The great ones, like ib or, more famously, yume nikki.

I'll start:



A game that I recently played was OFF.
It's an originally french game. This game shows that the word 'Bizarre' really has a French origin. It's about a stoic batter (paranoia agent, anyone?) who comes to purify the zones. You are the one controlling the 'puppet' batter. A cat called 'the Judge' has his cryptic ways of leading you the way through the first zone and he randomly appears in other zones as well.
All I can add to this without giving spoilers is that it gets very weird very fast and it keeps on getting weirder. There is no relief from this spiral anywhere in the game because of this: you keep on learning about the world, but everything there is weird, so everything you know about the world makes the whole game weirder.

spoiler: almost every numberic puzzle ends with a 0

Download links to the original and the english translation can be found here: http://offgame.wikia.com/wiki/Downloads

This is the game with "The Batter" I think? Someone told me about this game but I have never looked into it yet. Mainly because it has a battle system and anything in RPG Maker with a Battle System makes it too slow for me. I know that's kinda mean but AHHHH. Battle systems in RPG Maker is bleh and it just makes the game longer.

I need to play all the Yume Nikki fangames one day though.

I really enjoyed Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea! I downloaded it from a free game pack and kinda went in without knowing anything about it and I was blown away at how much effort was put into it. The endings are great!

Also, I really liked Dreaming Mary, there's some voice acting in it that's actually pretty surprising. A quick disturbing game if you're looking for something like that!

I wanna say more about the games but I'm too afraid that I'll spoil them in the process. Plus it's more fun if you go into a game without knowing much about it, imo.

my game

I used to be a big... not a name, but I was really active within the RM community from like... 2004 till 2009. So I kinda have a huge repository of "good" RPG Maker games stored in the back of my head. I'll list them all out and if people are interested, I can point them in the right direction.

A Blurred Line - dystopian sci-fi about a man named Talan and I wish I could remember the rest of it but it's one of the Golden Games of RPG Maker.
Ara Fell - super pretty maps, an all-right story, and PotC battle music. Praised at the time for... the super pretty maps.
Legion Saga - Three games, basically Suikoden clones but still pretty well written.
Phylomortis - if you like really REALLY flowery and complicated language that actually written fairly decently and a semi-interesting battle system, this is for you.
Balmung Chronicle - does stuff with the default 2k3 battle system you wouldn't even know were possible. really well done with Rudra no Hihou rips, winner of a few code-off awards.
Kinetic Cipher - EXCELLENT dungeon and puzzle design, kinda meh battles, but the story is decent.
Love & War - probably the best story telling of any RPG Maker game I've ever played. Really well written too. Random factoid: every single bookcase has unique text with it. Lots of unique text.

There's probably a bunch of others out there too that I haven't actually played all the way through yet, like Hero's Realm, a number of XP, VX, and VX Ace games (my heyday was just as XP came out), plus probably a ton of really good ones that came out after I left the scene proper. tbh I could probably tell you games to AVOID better than games to actually play.

(as a note for the top comment, i've been working on a game of my own for 11 years now that i still haven't been able to crank out. IT'LL GET DONE I SWEAR as soon as i remember what the heck happens in chapter 5)

shamefully leaving this here game list