Sometimes when life is feeding you lemons and pushing you to beg for a positive moment, that moment comes in the form of a game. And that gaming reprieve came in the form of blocks, dragons, and quests. Square Enix’s oddly satisfying answer to Minecraft, Dragon Quest Builders, is back! And it’s just as I remember it from 2016 – fun, satisfying, and endless.
The last time I reviewed Dragon Quest Builders was back in 2016, it flourished on the PlayStation 4. It brought some good times with its building component and its Dragon Quest charm. The mix of building structures to your delight, while conquering large gobs of enemies and bosses makes for an entertaining time.
So, get that hammer ready to knock down blocks and trees, and let’s get adventuring.
Fantastic backdrop and balance with story and quests
The story of Dragon Quest Builders surrounds a builder that is awoken by a land’s goddess to help rebuild her fallen land and people. What caused the destruction isn’t immediately clear, nor is it clear to the residents, but a potential villain named the Dragonlord probably had something to do with it. Regardless, your character is tasked with repairing the land, stopping the Dragonlord, and bringing the land’s residents back to a normal life. You know, simple stuff.
Dragon Quest Builders’ story progresses through its residents. As you begin to rebuild the city you’re residing in, you’ll slowly start gaining tenants who request things from you. Sometimes it’s as easy as going to search out materials to build items, maybe something as simple as a furnace or maybe large steel doors. Other times you’re sent on a quest related to the main story to defeat giant bosses that produce nice things you can collect and use. Whatever the quest might be, the items involved in it are methodically put together to push the story along in one way or another. The tasks usually take between 10-30 minutes a piece, depending on the difficulty, but the outcomes drag on throughout the adventure. Square Enix did a great job of making the quests the right size and rewarding the player with the right number of goodies. The game is incredibly rewarding for the player’s efforts, as they balance completing meaningful tasks and using the rewards from story/questing to build wonderful constructs.
Now, while the story and quests help create player agency, the crux of your time will be spent building and thinking about designs. Let’s dig into that right now.
Getting that building and crafting fix
The crafting portion of the gameplay design is amazingly rich and addictive. The tools the good folks at Square Enix give you help make the collecting of elements quick and easy. For example, somewhere at the beginning, you craft together a large hammer to bash pretty much every portion of the environment. You can bash trees, rocks, statues, and whatever you can find (including enemies). Early on, as you progress with quests, you’ll acquire a spin swing, which allows you to charge up your hammer and then spin powerfully in a circle knocking down tons of enemies and elements at once. This tool and this technique can get you elements quickly, which takes away from any monotony. It certainly kept me far away from feeling like I was playing Minecraft (yes, I realize I’m the only person in the whole damn world that doesn’t enjoy it. Deal with it.).
Breaking environment elements and collecting them is easy, which makes the process fast. I never felt like collecting elements to create items was a chore, which was my fear going into this game. It felt quick and rewarding and the meaningful quests, short and long, made me want to keep pushing to find new things. It was a rush searching for new things because the game is built for you to find them easily, which means you can complete quest after quest quickly.
That’s what you want from a game like this.
Now, if you’re going to craft things in this game, you’re going to need a recipe of items to do it. Part of the collection of the game, which feeds the exploration of the title, is finding and gaining access to new recipes, which equal new items. Each item you gain has a recipe attached to it, which allows you to replicate the item when needed. For example, if you need to build a steel broadsword, a recipe is needed, which details finding iron ingots, which are in mountainous areas, and then converting them to steel using a mixture of iron and coal. Mixing those elements equals steel, which can equal new armor, swords, or hammers. The more recipes you find, the more items you acquire, and the better the experience becomes with Dragon Quest Builders. It’s a circular process that is richly rewarding.
Okay, so what about the building portion of the game? The building is easy, though my only gripe with this game can be the camera angle when you’re doing the actual building.
Building buildings can be a building experience
Once you find elements, craft them, and produce whatever item you’re set to produce, take for example the steel door that I installed early in the game, then it’s easy to install. You can take that door, build a wall around it, and then choose it from the options menu and place it nicely in front of your structure. You can begin using it immediately, or you can even move it or scrap it. It’s just that simple to create and use your items. Individual creation and implementation of crafted items is a breeze.
Now, having said that buildings have certain itemized requirements when it comes to being identified as a structure. For example, early in the game, you’ll be asked to build a bedroom, which requires a light source (torch), a bed (a bed), and at least a door with two-block tall walls surrounding it all. If you don’t meet these requirements, then you don’t get credit for the build. There is a certain point scale allotted for certain builds with certain items in them. As you go beyond the bare minimum requirements, you will get more points. More importantly, you’ll get a cooler-looking place — regardless of what the build ends up being. It can be incredibly frustrating, though, if you miss an item and can’t recall what should be in the structure to legitimize it.
As you start building more and more structures, you must also make sure that each structure is well-guarded. Enemies will randomly ransack your structure, try to break in and cause incredible amounts of destruction, which also causes you to lose room status. For example, there was a moment early on when I built most of my structure out of dirt. The dirt didn’t hold during the first wave of enemy attacks. The attacks are both optional (meaning, you can decide when to participate) and random (those butts attack during the day). Regardless of when or why the attacks happen, building the right structures with the best material will keep such things from occurring, while also adding another element of crafting decision-making to the game when you’re building the structures. Overall, it’s another thing to make the experience deeper.
The not-great stuff
Now, the gripe I had earlier is directly related to building and can bite the game in the butt at times. Most of the time it’s fine and manageable, but other times it’s a pain. This would be the camera angle.
The camera system in Dragon Quest Builders is free-floating, meaning that you have complete control over it. You can pan it, tilt it, and sometimes, depending on the space, zoom into a first-person view or third-person over-the-shoulder look (generally that happens in tight spaces). The reason I bring this up when talking about building is because I had misplaced a bunch of building blocks during the construction of a building thanks to a misaligned camera angle. I can’t tell you how many times I misplaced a block on a wall, had to destroy it, and then place it again. It happened a lot. It drove me crazy at the beginning of the game, but I rolled over halfway through and exposed my belly (metaphorically) with it.
In addition, there are times when I can’t find a missing space because of the camera, where the view isn’t readily obvious because the camera is positioned wrong. This can prevent a room from becoming a room. It can also allow enemies to find their way into a structure. The camera, bless it, can be just as harmful as it is helpful. It’s not completely frustrating, but it does guarantee a curse word or two during the construction process. With that said, I understand that this type of open-world exploration and building that it needs to be off the rails and in control of the player. It still doesn’t mean that it’s a perfect decision. Anyway, expect some frustration out of this part of the game, but nothing that will hinder the overall experience.
Let me show you the world
Outside of the building aspect of the gameplay, the exploration in the game is quite good. Dragon Quest Builders gives the player the chance to go off the tracks a bit and explore the land, sometimes finding hidden treasures along the way. I think I spent a good majority of my time exploring the land in between quests. I did happen upon some goodies, especially a couple that were hidden underneath a pair of very angry dragons.
Related, the land in DQB is huge and it opens up quickly as the storyline progresses. To help that a bit, you can acquire teleports in the game that send you to other lands that feature different elements you can acquire and different sets of enemies to come face-to-face with throughout the game. The multiple lands keep the story fresh and the gameplay design even fresher, so expect some real exploration and fun. You can also happen upon structures in these far-off lands that are repairable and can act as a second home. It’s like you’re rich or something until enemies decide to visit.
Pesky, yet creative enemies
The enemies are incredibly creative in the game. Scorpions, unicorn rats, blobs, and other nasty creatures plague most of the landscapes you explore. When the day changes to night, you’ll find more powerful enemies and annoying ghosts with hats that follow you in hopes of making you one of them. Beyond the smaller enemies, the mini-bosses and bosses are surprisingly neat as they are large and in charge, though what I have run into thus far has not been too difficult. Ultimately, this game is made for a younger audience, so I would imagine keeping larger enemies more profound and easily beatable is the correct way to go with the design. Anyway, you’ll find a bevy of baddies waiting for you around every corner. Eliminating most of them usually means good stuff to acquire, so taking them out will keep you motivated to keep going through the grind of enemy repetition.
Overall, the gameplay design for Dragon Quest Builders is a stunning balance of build and adventure. I was incredibly skeptical that the two genres would ever evenly mix, but somehow Square Enix found the right spots and put together one helluva package for Dragon Quest and Minecraft fans to enjoy. It’s quite good and addictive.
PC is the way to go
As for the visuals, you’re going to be right at home with Akira Toriyama’s beautiful animation that you’ve come to know and love in the Dragon Quest series. The characters, even the enemies, are colorful, bright, and visually intriguing. The world built for them is the same, and ever-expansive, meaning it doesn’t feel small to the eye at all. Everything visually built for this world encourages the gamer to go out and explore, so it’s right on par with the gameplay design.
In comparison to the PS4 and Switch releases, the PC does all it can with its power to make it a gorgeous time. While I was impressed back in the day with the draw distance and color landscapes everywhere in the game, the PC build takes it a step further. The lands seem wide and large with visible extra places in the background everywhere. I was running this on an Intel i7/3070 Ti/16GB of RAM, so it’s no surprise the visuals were far superior to the PS4 and Switch. It’s the way to go if you can afford a build of your own.
On the music side of things, it’s equally as audibly fulfilling as the visuals are eye candy. It brings a good package of dramatic effect to the presentation, while not overdoing it. It works and kicks on all cylinders.
On that sweet note (pun intended), let’s wrap this review up.
Conclusion
Dragon Quest Builders is an absolute delight on the PC. It balances story with building and still has time to sprinkle some familiar Dragon Quest RPG essence into the mix. While the camera is still a pain within tight spots, and when building large walls, the overall body of work is still solid.
