One of the first concerns that came to my mind when starting with the PVGames characters was that with the weapons attached to the character sprites, it initially looks like each character will be locked to a specific type of weapon. For years, I have locked myself into that perceived limitation.
However a recent discussion in Discord led me to go back and re-think this, and I realized that a character could easily use up to 5 different types of weapons by using Yanfly’s Action Sequences.
There is a little more setup to this, since each skill has to be tied to an appropriate weapon. This can be as simple as making an Attack Skill for each of Mace, Sword, and bow. Or you can take this as an opportunity and make flavorful Attack Skills Bash, Slash, and Shoot for each weapon.
After the skills are set up, weapon-appropriate attack animations can be set in the action sequence so that he character appears to have the correct weapon equipped.
Here’s the breakdown on the full setup:
https://zyphli.design.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/weaponanimation_attackonly.pdf
It is possible to take things further and have the character walking around with a weapon drawn, but it does have more limitations. Perhaps there are plugins that can do more, but for this, I am using events for all weapon swaps to be able to change out the entire graphic sheet of the character. This works for me since I am using a weapon upgrade system instead of finding/buying random weapons, so only one character has a weapon swap skill to change between using his Sword or Mace. The up side to this is he can also use this skill mid-combat to change his tactics during battle. Taking it further in this example, I also added the ability for the character to upgrade from equipping light armor to heavy armor, which also affects his character sprite and face graphic.
I have not written out a full tutorial on this setup since I don’t believe it will be of use to most people with the restrictions it places on finding and replacing weapons.
Zyph's Game Design 