Some of the new additions include: - Improved layering/mapping There's 4 layers to begin with, but you can also manually choose which layer you are drawing tiles on Tile size is confirmed to be locked at 48x48 I think. The latest MZ previews introduce quite a few quality-of-life improvements that really makes the whole program sound very promising imo. While particle effects are what's being advertised, it doesn't look like the old method of sprite animation is going away. With a little creativity, you can get a loooot of mileage out of using both particle effects and sprite animations. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on this. I'm not saying that there isn't a way to edit frames by hand, but I haven't found a way to do that yet. However, it does mean that individual frames can't be reused in other animations without copy/pasting sprites from one part of the sheet to another. Unlike Ace which makes you frame each effect by hand, this approach will save you a lot of time. Limited flexibility: The approach I took to creating the above animation was to designate a start point and let the animator play the sprites from there. I don't know if that size difference will be consistent or not for larger animations, but it's worth noting that a possible decrease in overall filesize is possible with this new method. efkefc file that would go into RPG Maker MZ is 2.73 KB.
File size: The sprite sheet used in the above animation is 3.29 KB. Now that animation work takes place outside the engine, no such blanket limitation exists, so you'll have more control over the specifics of each animation. In Ace, you had one single framerate for all animations. To create the above animation, I designated the start point, the frame size, and how long each frame would last. You can create whatever sized sprite sheets you want with as many frames as you want.
Some thoughts (I only have VX Ace knowledge to compare to): - Highly versatile. To answer your question: Yes, it's quite easy to have sprite based animations for both characters and effects if that's the approach you want to take. I imagine it will take less than a few minutes to import a spritesheet and have a simple animation exported into RM MZ. All in all, this wasn't too difficult to create once I learned what the right steps were.