When comparing RPG Maker VX Ace vs PICO-8, the Slant community recommends RPG Maker VX Ace for most people. In the question“What are the best game engines for point & click adventure games?” RPG Maker VX Ace is ranked 35th while PICO-8 is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose RPG Maker VX Ace is:
Built for ease of use to get your game made quickly!
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Quick and easy to learn
Built for ease of use to get your game made quickly!
Pro Plenty of premade assets to get you started
Super high quality art assets get you making a game quickly without it looking terrible.
Pro Steam support
Get a ton of great assets for the community by the community through Steam’s Workshop support.
Pro Large community
Never a shortage of user tutorials, assets, or support.
Pro Simple scripting implementation
Quickly script simple events with a few clicks. This powerful part of the editor allows you to get through the tedious amount of content for quests and other in game sequences quickly.
Pro Creating maps is simple
Choose a tileset and get to mapping! Supported tiles will connect automatically to help you speed through the mapping process. Setting events on tiles is easy to do and populating your world with NPC’s and other items is easy to do.
Pro Uses Ruby as a scripting language
Need more power for things like battle systems, plugins, or awesome effects? RPG Maker uses Ruby along with its own library to bring you the tools you need to stand out.
Pro Powerful Database for everything you need
Everything you make is done through this powerful expansive database. You customize every character, weapon, enemy, and skill through this and so much more to make a designer's life easier.
Pro Ton of customization options
Create things quickly with things like the character customizer or the experience curve editor. RPG Maker is made to let you change every single thing in your game swiftly and simply.
Pro Relatively cheap
Although not free it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to get RPG Maker VX Ace. You can buy RPG Maker for $69.99 or get a free trial to see if it’s right for you.

Pro Takes away the pain of having to wire things together
Because it's an all in one product, you don't have to worry about things like how to load sprites.

Pro Very simple programing language
It's lua with a few modifications.

Pro Encourages building simple games
As a beginner it's all to tempting to try to make the games you like to play, like Zelda or Call of Duty when we should probably be making pong.
Pro Restrictions of tokens count "forces" to write code effectively
When you reach 8192 tokens, you're screwed. However, this limit can teach you to take a look at entire code and think how you could optimize it.
Pro Possible writing code in external editor
Since launch of 0.1.12c version of software, you can now write and include external script using the same directive just like in C / C++.

Pro Perhaps one of the easiest sound editors around

Pro Share the game in a .png file with other Pico-8 users

Pro You can read the code of any game you play

Pro Lots of examples
Almost every game made for the Pico-8 is open source (if you can download the .png, you can see the source).
Also there's the fancy Pico-8 "fanzine" that has lots of code examples as well as other great tutorials in a beautiful physical or PDF form.

Pro Easy to get things going very quickly
Cons
Con Windows only development
With the ability to only work and deploy on Windows RPG Maker misses a major opportunity to create awesome RPG’s that anyone can play.
Con Multi-user development can be a hassle
RPG Maker was not really intended for multi-user support. There are a few tactics but for those of you who are used to with multi-user development may get annoyed.
Con Isometric not out of the box
Want to make a tactics game? Well you’re going to have to do some extra work to get those awesome isometric tiles in your game.
Con RPG Maker stigma
There is a major stigma with using RPG Maker since it does have such a low bar to entry. If you do use this engine just make sure your game is so awesome that no one will care what it was made in.
Con Only one tileset per map
While a tileset in RPG Maker can encompass many files it also can be a hassle if you want to use multiple tilesets on a map. You can switch tilesets through code for multi-world game though.

Con No collision library or other common things
Pico-8 is very minimalistic and as such doesn't come with really any abstractions whatsoever which means often you end up re-inventing the wheel.

Con Code editor leaves some things to be desired
Such as code completion and automatic indentation.

Con Costs 15$
Unlike many of the other frameworks it's not free. However this is kind of a feature because it means it's much more likely to be supported.

Con Memory restrictions could be confusing or frustrating to a beginner
