OKAY. After a VERY long time of wondering, I can now finally review this resource.
Truth be told, this is absolutely a five-star plugin in practice (at least at time of writing, after a long stretch of updates), but there's just no getting around how sketch-feeling actually GETTING the plugin is. VaM admins have had to put up a banner regarding just how deep into your files this modification goes, in ways that makes them (and me) uncomfortable. No other plugin, aside from maybe the dev-approved vamX, seems to modify the base application so deeply, and you're even required to give a license for your individual machine just to obtain full-access. With VaM itself costing only $8, and said full-access to this costing $20, all that mess has left many people in consternation over time, and it drops a star just for that. It's also worth noting that that's a high monthly cost just to support continued updates after initial purchase, which I have been (perhaps overly) critical of elsewhere on this site.
HOWEVER! That does not stop this plugin from being fan-fucking-tastic in operation, and props to the author because I can say from personal experience zhfx themselves is actually very keen on providing users support (even without the special "extra support" tier). More importantly, the plugin itself blows the old VaMVMDPlugin I used to use so far out of the water you could shoot at it a few more times in the air for target practice.
I was very specifically waiting until getting my 4090/i9-13900k rig to take the dive on this plugin, and after some initial techincal hiccups I can say it was so very worth it, even at $20. The most important part of this plugin is that it is actively tweaking VMD files to fit your scene/chara, and while you have minimal ability to affect that on the user end, it does such a good job that you don't even need to think about it. This has been GODLIKE and has actually restored many motions to usability for me that were simply too jank on the free VaMVMDPlugin, or more often just had one jank sequence that broke the immersion. While I haven't tested out it's ability to more natively interact with other VaM components, it can lord that over free alternatives as well.
So yeah, I'll probably always be just a little uneasy while rocking this mod, no question about it, but I'm only a few clicks away from the kind of perfect VMD bliss that'll make me forget all over again.
