The installer ran smoothly. Too smoothly. When he launched the engine, the interface shimmered like heat rising off asphalt. He dismissed it as his old graphics card struggling.

NPCs spoke lines he hadn't written. "You steal, you break," whispered a village elder. A merchant's price tag read: $79.99. Leo laughed nervously and deleted the text.

Leo stared at the blinking cursor on his cracked laptop screen. "RPG Maker MZ Full Crack" sat in his downloads folder—three gigabytes of promised creativity without the $80 price tag.