Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a marvelous upgrade to its initial brethren. It offers up a bigger world, well thought through RPG construction, and keeps you exploring and building.
I hate Minecraft. I hate it. I hate the fact that it essentially took the idea of LEGOs, sprinkled in a dash of Little Big Planet, and then called itself the best idea since sliced bread. That bothers me to my very core. I get that it has turned creativity ‘on’ within a generation (or two), who has freshly kept the game alive, much like the PC industry has kept alive Skyrim, but as a traditional gamer of 38 years…I hate it. It’s purposeless to me. You build, you create, you look at it. That is essentially the entire construction of its gameplay. I do know that there is a story component to it, but that’s not why people play the game. It’s a makeshift sandbox piece of entertainment that is comparable to Play-Doh, where it might have good intentions on the outside of the box, but rarely do people care about those intentions. Rather it’s just building whatever people want to build. And yes, it is the very definition of ‘sandbox’, but that doesn’t make me love it more or hate it less.
Why am I droning on about a game I don’t like playing? Well, because, you know…Dragon Quest Builders 2 takes that core Minecraft gameplay, wraps it in an RPG, gives you goals to put your building skills to work, and encourages you to…(sigh)…build…and it’s fun. There, I said it. Building in a game is fun thanks to Square Enix and developer Omega Force, as they have put together a sandbox game that keeps your focused with RPG-driven goals.
Huh…maybe I do secretly like Minecraft. Hmm. I’ll have to revisit it. ANYWAY!
Let’s get right into this thing.
If you were fortunate enough to dive into the first Dragon Quest Builders game, then you understand the idea behind Dragon Quest Builders 2. If you’ve never played the first, then let me sum it up for you — you build, survive, and improve. Those are the main components of gameplay design in the series, certainly ones borrowed from Minecraft’s ideals, and the components that will keep you there well after the game’s story has concluded. This second game in the series, which releases tomorrow (Friday), adds a thicker layer of RPG elements to the entire process, a better story, social engagement, and new building pieces to expand upon the creative freedom the first game provided.
Starting with the story, the crux of Dragon Quest Builders’ gameplay is wrapped in a narrative that features a dominant religious cult who has ravaged a land down to its bone (that sounds familiar…hmmm), and who is spreading their dogma to everyone whether they like it or not. Your character (mine was named Larry David) starts the game trapped on a boat with this religious group, who is verbally abusing him, but ends up in a boat crash due to a mysterious weather storm, and marooned on an island with another boat crash victim. As you can imagine, you gain a partner and begin to search the land for material in order to survive the situation. During your survival journey, you run across other folks who are persecuted by this religious cult and who need help/guidance to survive, as well as a bit of boosted confidence to overcome the religious groups’ hold on their livelihood. The game’s story presents you with two goals:
1) Help out the people of the ravaged land re-build their lives figuratively and literally.
2) Take down the religious cult.
The story has a lot more twists and turns, but this is the gist of it. For me, instantly this makes the idea of a Minecraft-driven game far better than it should be. It gives the building element a purpose. Gives everything reason, and the story actually motivates you to build bigger and better things because people’s lives are at stake. I know that last part sounds ridiculous, but the story puts together enough emotion to create that feeling for ‘need’ when you’re trying to progress. It gives you well-constructed goals that make sense within the world it built for you. It’s ultimately good narrative design that makes proper use of its Minecraft backbone.
Staying with goals, the game lives and breathes off the goals it requests of you. Much like every open world game, DQB2 features main quests you have to accomplish to progress the story, as well as side quests that mostly come from monsters, farming residents, and a bevy of other characters. The main quests, as I’m sure you might guess, are massive in nature and depend on your patience. For example, during the first 10 hours of the story, you’re going to build out a farm. That farm will thrive if you locate seeds to grow material. Each fruit or veggie that you grow contains a series of instructions on how to grow them. For example, if you’re trying to grow sugar cane, then you have to build out a small pond for it to thrive in, otherwise, you’ll not be able to grow it properly. If you want to grow tomatoes, you have to locate wood in order to build a small support structure for the tomato to grow around. There are various steps and methods for this material to grow. Now, the quest. All of the above in mind, one main quest that I ran into was needing to plant 250 veggies/fruit in the village I was maintaining. It made sense why we needed it, but the tedious task of doing it was wholly other. I think that I spent 5-6 hours finding material to accomplish this. Granted, it probably didn’t help that I was distracted by building other things or that I wanted to explore the land a bit more (so that 5-6 hour timeframe is probably considerably smaller in hindsight), but it still was a tall task that was built on and depended on my patience to accomplish it. That’s how the main quests work. They will grind you a bit, but also give you actual purpose on ‘why’ you need to do them, which helps the process, and keeps the game interesting.
The side quests are missions that playoff elements of main quests (or prepare you for them), but in much shorter stints. The side quests are essentially ongoing tutorials for you to discover particular options to use in your building journey, should you need them. Typically a side quest will consist of a villager asking/requesting you to build them something simple or search for a particular item. Once you discover this, you gain love (through applause) from the villager, some good instruction on how to ‘do that thing’ you just did, and you get XP. For example, there was a villager in one moment of the game that was concerned about the hygiene of the farmers of my village. He requested a bathhouse be built and provided a blueprint for said bathhouse. The side quest was easy, but it taught you how to read blueprints, taught you how to create a bathhouse and other small options that would lead to other opportunities in the game. Should I accidentally burn down my village (did this once with a bail of hay and a torch — not sure what I was expecting), then I have the proper instruction now that would allow me to rebuild that bathhouse. Or create a proper toilet. Or create a room where people could eat. Or sleep. Or anything. Outside of providing you with additional skills, the side quests are actually there to provide you with temporary relief from some of the longer main quests. Sometimes it helps to shift away from finding/planting 250 veggies/fruit and then coming back to it all. Side quests are generally good, quick, and serve multiple purposes.
In all that ramble, I mentioned XP. By accomplishing above quests, you gain XP. While there isn’t a particular leveling tree to follow, the game gives you small rewards in the form of recipes for your builder to obtain, as well as traditional RPG rewards of better health/strength and so on. The recipes allow you to build structures, food, and/or equipment. The latter of the bunch comes in the form of armor, shields, weapons, and tools. You build equipment with a well-placed anvil and can make armor/weapons/tools for other people in your journey. It’s a creative and expanding process that adds flavor and motivation to the game, as well as other items of interest to help you move to and fro. It also helps with enemies, especially bosses.
As for the other items you gain from these recipes, they come in the form of things you can construct. While all recipes, including equipment, require you to gather materials around the land to create whatever material you’re trying to create, it’s comforting knowing that you can improve your survival situation with an ever-expanding pallet of recipes that help to improve structures, as well as offering new ways for people to live/thrive better. For example, you could find a way to personalize rooms and set them for particular individuals in your group through one single recipe. You could also find a recipe that allows you to build roofs on your structures, which is tedious, but also satisfying. There are ways to make additional characters happy and to keep you building in fresh new ways, which makes the gameplay incredibly interesting. The game is carefully constructed to reward your progression and keep you engaged with it. That’s really quite good gameplay design.
Outside of earning rewards and recipes through quest completion, the game also throws in some puzzles so you can gain mysterious coins (not going to go into too much detail on those). You will find markers spread out throughout the land that you have to adjust/build/solve. If you solve them, you get coins. The puzzles aren’t too bad, though there is one that is huge and a bit of a brain teaser. Anyway, these puzzles help to offer up a different type of engagement that adds a different gameplay design path to the journey. They’re worth the trouble.
All of the above reasons help to make this more than just an open world/sandbox version of Minecraft with Dragon Quest characters. The gameplay design gives you a reason to push forward and keep going. Anytime you can provide gamers with a variety of tasks and puzzles to accomplish, on top of that Minecraft construction element, then you’re in good shape to have a worthwhile experience.
Shifting gears just slightly, if there is anything that the game falters on a bit, it’s the enemy variety. I have played this game for the last week or so and I’m struggling to find variety with my enemies. You have annoying blue slime, slugs, bat creatures that give you wood upon their death (that’s just weird), and occasional big bosses. As you push through the game and open up new lands, the variety of enemies trickle out instead of pour. I do realize that the game is giving you what it can within the story it has built, but it just seems a bit too repetitive for my liking, especially at the forefront. Is it tolerable? Yeah, because I’m distracted by missions and building, but it’s noticeable, which makes it stick out a bit along the journey. I will say that the game requires you to be proactive in your journey and find things that you don’t realize exist readily, which expands and opens up new enemy opportunities, but killing the same peeps over and over again is just a bit boring. Again, as you progress and unlock things, the game and its enemy variety certainly become bigger, but it’s a chore getting through this aspect for the first 10-20 hours of gameplay.
With the negative of the game out of the way, one of the bigger positives the experience provides you is social engagement. While I haven’t tried anything multiplayer related to this game, the game does provide you with an opportunity to show off your constructions with other players. When the game loads in the initial startup, photos of other people’s creations are shown off. You can keep them and/or make your own through an item you can build within the game. It’s a simple, yet neat feature that makes the world even bigger than it already is in the game. I can see the social component of this game getting bigger with future updates. That’s one element of Minecraft that no one seems to have replicated well, the social engagement with other players. It’s the reason why Minecraft still thrives so well. If you can make a bigger world even bigger with players talking/showing off their wares to each other, why wouldn’t you? It’s a community that keeps a game alive and going well past its prime, just ask Skyrim for details.
Overall, Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a marvelous upgrade to its initial brethren. It offers up a bigger world, well thought through RPG construction, and keeps you exploring and building.
