Here is a quick reference sheet of tips that I'm writing purely for myself to remember, but I thought it might be useful for other beginners, so I'm posting it here.
The purpose of this guide is a list of settings to tweak in order to quickly make your RPG Maker game feel how you want it to feel, rather than feeling like out-of-the-box default RPG Maker.
You might not care whether or not your game "feels like default RPG Maker", and that's totally fine. But if you do care, here is a way to change or undo some of RPG Maker's default settings to tailor it to what you need.
In general, RPG Maker has a lot of weird bells-and-whistles that make it feel not-quite retro, not-quite modern. It's kind of in its own pocket universe. If you want your game to feel more intentional and more from a particular era of console/handheld gaming, you probably want to tweak these settings. You can change and trim out a lot of bells-and-whistles so that your game feels more streamlined and less distracting.
This guide is written for RPG Maker MZ + VisuStella MZ Plugin. However, I think that you can probably find a lot of similar options in RPG Maker MV + Yanfly Engine Plugin.
Guide begins under the Read More.