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Some neat things you can do with effects if you know a little bit of editing, especially for outdoor scenes. Raycast MMD can probably do all this, but not everyone knows how to use it and it's slow.
1) Use fog. Ever played World of Warcraft? There's fog EVERYWHERE, or at least there used to be. Here's an OK use of fog, where the trees in the distance are faded. It might even look fine to use indoors, "artistically".
2) Change ambient lighting. 'Toon rendering' in MMD makes shadows be a constant percentage of the brightness of light areas (which varies for each component). This isn't how lighting works. When you're outside, a shadow is illuminated by BLUE sky while bright areas are illuminated by YELLOW sun (which is mostly white, especially combined with sky illumination). With some simple changes, you can make shadows be more blue than light-facing surfaces, and even make upward-pointing shadows be slightly more blue than downward-pointing shadows that are illuminated by white, or green etc, ground and objects.
3) Make objects refract, and appear to bend, when they enter water. The math is pretty hard, but once someone figures it out, it's easy to "plug into" an effect.
4) Make things more saturated when you turn light intensity down, because with 'toon rendering', the true color is more like the shadow color and the base color is desaturated since it's supposed to be bright. So models won't look so pale and sickly with the lights turned down.
There are other things you can do, like add extra lights (of whatever colors you want) to a scene that affect fps a lot less than extra effects do, but this takes a bit more work.
