In case you're interested, there's a trial version of MZ for Windows/Mac available here:
Offering a trial download for all the RPG Maker programs!
www.rpgmakerweb.com
There are also two official English sample games here:
Hello everyone, thank you for your amazing support as always for RPG Maker! Degica provides you with two sample games with custom graphics and the like, free to use on your games and expand on! You can edit these sample games as a base or something entirely new. It's FREE. We hope that it will...
forums.rpgmakerweb.com
If I recall correctly, though, they're in project format, i.e. you'll need RMMZ to play them.
MZ requires WebGL support, whereas it was optional for MV. Particularly old integrated graphics chipsets (e.g. pre-Intel HD 3000 -
reference specs) will probably not suffice.
Other than that, if you're using MV animations then I think the MZ code base is much the same as MV: it's been optimised a bit and runs on a newer version of Node/nw/PIXI. From my limited experience of making/playing MZ games so far, I'd guess the increased CPU/RAM requirements are for Effekseer.
Note: if you're on a laptop with a dedicated GPU, make sure it is being used rather than the integrated graphics (e.g. Nvidia control panel > Program Settings). I tried playing the "Wolfgang" sample game on integrated graphics (Intel HD 4600) and the big Effekseer animation at the start slowed the game to a crawl, haha. Was much smoother when using the system's dedicated GPU.
