I have been using RPG Maker for like 23 years now. You'd think after all that time I'd know the ins-and-outs of its eccentricities. Yet somehow I keep finding — or remembering — new and curious things as to how it handles some stuff.

For the most part these are things I simply never ran into because I've designed/coded around them, or I've compensated for these quirks without realising it. But recently I tried doing some things only to find them behaving in ways I didn't expect, which then lead to a rabbit hole of realisations. So I thought I'd share some of that.

I've been replaying Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. Not Re:CoM, the original GBA version. Mostly for wanting to look for foreshadowing and other details as they existed in the original release, and then it became just plain playing the game as some downtime.

The game is good, actually.

Chain of Memories has always been popular to hate on. I wasn't very fond of it for a while either, and the PS2/HD remaster did nothing to alleviate those feelings. I wouldn't call its battle system unintuitive — the rules are pretty straight-forward actually — its that the way it works runs counter to how you're often expected to play an action game, especially coming off of the first Kingdom Hearts game. Once you get your head around the way it wants you to play things go much more smoothly.