Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a great iteration on the formula set by the original Dragon Quest Builders. It's longer, more polished, with a lot more items to play around with, and a better written story and cast. Do I like it more than the original? ... Eh.
But I'm just being cheeky. It really is a better game! It's just that I feel the first one was funnier and more experimental. I do like a lot of the quality of life they added in (traversing the world in the first game did not feel great, it's much better in this one) and it's fun watching Malroth go through his growing pains. The new items are great, and swapping blocks around has never been faster and easier. That said, I'm not a fan of the changes made to cooking, and I do miss the points system when it comes to town-building. I feel like ultimately I didn't actually have to do much building to finish the game, especially since it has NPCs handle a lot of the structures for you. On one hand, I can understand why; the main blueprints are often massive, and would be slow and complex to build and gather for alone. On the other... well, maybe I did want to build more of the giant pyramid on my own, game. How about that!
Overall, though, this was a better experience than the first game, and I would love to see some version of this where it's possible to have more rooms and more little guys on your island. You have a great creative mode in there so it's sad that you can't do whatever you want with your main island.
But I'm just being cheeky. It really is a better game! It's just that I feel the first one was funnier and more experimental. I do like a lot of the quality of life they added in (traversing the world in the first game did not feel great, it's much better in this one) and it's fun watching Malroth go through his growing pains. The new items are great, and swapping blocks around has never been faster and easier. That said, I'm not a fan of the changes made to cooking, and I do miss the points system when it comes to town-building. I feel like ultimately I didn't actually have to do much building to finish the game, especially since it has NPCs handle a lot of the structures for you. On one hand, I can understand why; the main blueprints are often massive, and would be slow and complex to build and gather for alone. On the other... well, maybe I did want to build more of the giant pyramid on my own, game. How about that!
Overall, though, this was a better experience than the first game, and I would love to see some version of this where it's possible to have more rooms and more little guys on your island. You have a great creative mode in there so it's sad that you can't do whatever you want with your main island.
Fucking fantastic. Took the great ideas from the first game, and went to the moon and back with them. It's so much fun, that I would recommend this to anyone in a heartbeat. Also going to other people's worlds absolutely kills the framerate, and that's funny.
fun
I absolutely adored the first Dragon Quest Builders when I played it a couple years ago, and was really stoked to hear a sequel was coming out. It came out in Japan a long time before it came out in English, and I was tempted to buy it but put off buying it for long enough for it to come out in English. I really like how the DQ games are localized, so I opted for an English copy (also because the English version of this game is already pretty darn cheap for a game that isn't that old). DQB was a game that I loved, and DQB2 enhances it to the point that it's sorta mind blowing just how much of an improvement it is while still feeling so familiar. I did almost all of the tablet challenges and got every achievement for the game over the course of a week. The game doesn't keep track of play time, but I'd hazard I played it at least 45 hours if not more.
Like DQB1 was based on Dragon Quest 1, DQB2 is based on the story of the original Dragon Quest 2. Hargon and Malroth have been defeated by the Scions of Erdrick, and his followers are in full retreat across the land. You play a builder who was unlucky enough to be caught in a slave raid by some of these retreating followers, but in the process of the ship's captain asking you to do odd jobs around the ship, you begin to develop a kinship with the monsters who've captured you. That is until you get caught in a horrible storm and the ship sinks. You wake up on a mysterious beach next to another unfamiliar person who wasn't on the ship. He's lost all his memory, but knows his name is Malroth. The Builder and Malroth embark on an adventure to figure out the mysteries of this strange world as well as build their Isle of Awakening into the best kingdom it can be.
I really enjoyed the story and the writing for this game. It has a lot of silly puns (especially the monsters) and quirky characters but put together with a story that still has something to say in the end. It almost feels like an animated kids movie in that regard. It has some tone problems at points, where narratively some pretty serious things are happening, but the dialogue, art style, music, etc, don't really mesh well with the gravity of the situation the characters find themselves in. Despite that, it's a really sweet story about how coexistence between presumed opposites is possible, and the duality of destruction and creation. It's hardly gonna win any awards, but it was far more than I was expecting from the game, and is a really neat reimagining of the DQ2 universe (and remarkably, in a very different fashion to how DQB1 reimagines the universe of DQ1).
The gameplay will be very familiar to anyone who played the first DQB, but it also has many meaningful changes that really shift how you play the game. The first DQB is very much an action/adventure game with Dragon Quest aesthetics & setting all around the mechanics of a Minecraft clone. Most significantly is how a multiplayer mode is not some sectioned off piece of content from the main game. In the first DQB, the main game was a series of stages totally separate from each other, with nothing carrying over to the next island you went to, and the multiplayer mode was a cooperative building mode that used recipies from the single player mode but was otherwise an entirely separate entity. DQB2 changes this entirely with the Isle of Awakening where you start the narrative proper. You go to a series of islands, but under the conceit of collecting new inhabitants and materials to create your kingdom on this personal island, and activities both on and off this main island make up the bulk of the game's narrative. You can invite other players over to your island to cooperatively build your island together, and you can even go off to procedurally generated extra "explorer's shores" islands to collect new materials (and if you explore those extra islands well enough, you can unlock infinite supplies of certain common crafting materials so grinding for materials like wood or string is just never a thing). I don't have PSN online, so I never tried this, but it's a fantastic reworking of how you can enjoy building with other people.
Beyond that, there are a lot of other mechanical shifts as well. No longer do weapons break. Tools are a thing you always have, can be shifted between with the X button (which also sometimes means you're talking to people/activating things instead of it, but it's fine most of the time) and activated with R2. This includes a hammer to break stuff, but also a trowel to swap out blocks or put them down a bunch at a time, a bottomless jug to actually manipulate liquids (a feature totally absent in the last game), as well as other tools you'll unlock as you complete challenges on the Isle of Awakening (which themselves are all about building and crafting). Even your weapons don't break, although combat itself is largely the same from the first game. This is all on top of other things like being able to recruit and utilize monsters (for everything as a mount to a terraformer), build buildings in a way to have your villagers automate things like food production, and customize how you physically look irrespective of what weapons and armor you're technically using. The last cherry on top being that the mission design has also been refined a fair bit. It's a fantastic mechanical overhaul that I never realized the series needed until I played this, and now I can't imagine not having them (despite how much I wanna go back and replay the first game X3).
The presentation is fairly similar to the first game in many ways. There's a lot of new furniture (with most all of the unused old stuff being unlockable eventually in the post-game) and block types, but also not THAT much that the game looks totally different. The aesthetic and presentation is still very much that Dragon Quest Builders-style of chibi Toriyama designs, Dragon Quest music, and blocky landscapes, and if you didn't like that in the first game you won't like them here either. I liked them, though, even if the music does get a bit old after a while (especially while story things aren't happening).
Negatives are mostly little quality of life things. The fact that your inventory has been MASSIVELY expanded so you basically never need chests (you can hold hundreds of items at once) is nice, but finding things in it can be very irritating without a search feature. The same goes for finding a recipe you need in the ever-growing crafting list. The same thing being bound to the same button is also kind of a pain, particularly with how R1 is run but also "climb onto monster", which not infrequently led to me getting clobbered in the face when I was trying to flee but instead climbed onto my Sabercat's back. The game is also really weird with how it doles out certain aspects and mechanics of building on the Isle of Awakening, locking them fairly arbitrarily behind completing certain building challenges on the island. It tells you about the challenges, but not about what rewards they might actually hold. It's nothing ever super duper significant, but knowing beforehand that those were there would've been nice, and there's nothing ultimately deal-breaking about any of the game's shortcomings.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you liked Dragon Quest Builders 1, this is an absolute must-play. It is everything a sequel should strive to be and more with how well it refines the first game's building mechanics, multiplayer mode, and quality of life features. Even if you aren't a huge fan of the building aspects (I'm not reallllly a big fan of them, but I liked putting new rooms together), it's still an excellent action/adventure game with some Minecraft-esque trappings. I would never expect Omega Force to produce a game like this, but I'll be damned if they didn't absolutely outdo themselves with this one, and I really hope they keep going with this series.
Like DQB1 was based on Dragon Quest 1, DQB2 is based on the story of the original Dragon Quest 2. Hargon and Malroth have been defeated by the Scions of Erdrick, and his followers are in full retreat across the land. You play a builder who was unlucky enough to be caught in a slave raid by some of these retreating followers, but in the process of the ship's captain asking you to do odd jobs around the ship, you begin to develop a kinship with the monsters who've captured you. That is until you get caught in a horrible storm and the ship sinks. You wake up on a mysterious beach next to another unfamiliar person who wasn't on the ship. He's lost all his memory, but knows his name is Malroth. The Builder and Malroth embark on an adventure to figure out the mysteries of this strange world as well as build their Isle of Awakening into the best kingdom it can be.
I really enjoyed the story and the writing for this game. It has a lot of silly puns (especially the monsters) and quirky characters but put together with a story that still has something to say in the end. It almost feels like an animated kids movie in that regard. It has some tone problems at points, where narratively some pretty serious things are happening, but the dialogue, art style, music, etc, don't really mesh well with the gravity of the situation the characters find themselves in. Despite that, it's a really sweet story about how coexistence between presumed opposites is possible, and the duality of destruction and creation. It's hardly gonna win any awards, but it was far more than I was expecting from the game, and is a really neat reimagining of the DQ2 universe (and remarkably, in a very different fashion to how DQB1 reimagines the universe of DQ1).
The gameplay will be very familiar to anyone who played the first DQB, but it also has many meaningful changes that really shift how you play the game. The first DQB is very much an action/adventure game with Dragon Quest aesthetics & setting all around the mechanics of a Minecraft clone. Most significantly is how a multiplayer mode is not some sectioned off piece of content from the main game. In the first DQB, the main game was a series of stages totally separate from each other, with nothing carrying over to the next island you went to, and the multiplayer mode was a cooperative building mode that used recipies from the single player mode but was otherwise an entirely separate entity. DQB2 changes this entirely with the Isle of Awakening where you start the narrative proper. You go to a series of islands, but under the conceit of collecting new inhabitants and materials to create your kingdom on this personal island, and activities both on and off this main island make up the bulk of the game's narrative. You can invite other players over to your island to cooperatively build your island together, and you can even go off to procedurally generated extra "explorer's shores" islands to collect new materials (and if you explore those extra islands well enough, you can unlock infinite supplies of certain common crafting materials so grinding for materials like wood or string is just never a thing). I don't have PSN online, so I never tried this, but it's a fantastic reworking of how you can enjoy building with other people.
Beyond that, there are a lot of other mechanical shifts as well. No longer do weapons break. Tools are a thing you always have, can be shifted between with the X button (which also sometimes means you're talking to people/activating things instead of it, but it's fine most of the time) and activated with R2. This includes a hammer to break stuff, but also a trowel to swap out blocks or put them down a bunch at a time, a bottomless jug to actually manipulate liquids (a feature totally absent in the last game), as well as other tools you'll unlock as you complete challenges on the Isle of Awakening (which themselves are all about building and crafting). Even your weapons don't break, although combat itself is largely the same from the first game. This is all on top of other things like being able to recruit and utilize monsters (for everything as a mount to a terraformer), build buildings in a way to have your villagers automate things like food production, and customize how you physically look irrespective of what weapons and armor you're technically using. The last cherry on top being that the mission design has also been refined a fair bit. It's a fantastic mechanical overhaul that I never realized the series needed until I played this, and now I can't imagine not having them (despite how much I wanna go back and replay the first game X3).
The presentation is fairly similar to the first game in many ways. There's a lot of new furniture (with most all of the unused old stuff being unlockable eventually in the post-game) and block types, but also not THAT much that the game looks totally different. The aesthetic and presentation is still very much that Dragon Quest Builders-style of chibi Toriyama designs, Dragon Quest music, and blocky landscapes, and if you didn't like that in the first game you won't like them here either. I liked them, though, even if the music does get a bit old after a while (especially while story things aren't happening).
Negatives are mostly little quality of life things. The fact that your inventory has been MASSIVELY expanded so you basically never need chests (you can hold hundreds of items at once) is nice, but finding things in it can be very irritating without a search feature. The same goes for finding a recipe you need in the ever-growing crafting list. The same thing being bound to the same button is also kind of a pain, particularly with how R1 is run but also "climb onto monster", which not infrequently led to me getting clobbered in the face when I was trying to flee but instead climbed onto my Sabercat's back. The game is also really weird with how it doles out certain aspects and mechanics of building on the Isle of Awakening, locking them fairly arbitrarily behind completing certain building challenges on the island. It tells you about the challenges, but not about what rewards they might actually hold. It's nothing ever super duper significant, but knowing beforehand that those were there would've been nice, and there's nothing ultimately deal-breaking about any of the game's shortcomings.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you liked Dragon Quest Builders 1, this is an absolute must-play. It is everything a sequel should strive to be and more with how well it refines the first game's building mechanics, multiplayer mode, and quality of life features. Even if you aren't a huge fan of the building aspects (I'm not reallllly a big fan of them, but I liked putting new rooms together), it's still an excellent action/adventure game with some Minecraft-esque trappings. I would never expect Omega Force to produce a game like this, but I'll be damned if they didn't absolutely outdo themselves with this one, and I really hope they keep going with this series.
Highly recommend, I'd play the first one first. This one is better than the first as it has more of RPG additions.
Great story and plenty of fun.
Great story and plenty of fun.
This game's story is more amazing than it should be.
A nice building game packed with a lot of action and love.
A nice building game packed with a lot of action and love.
I wanted a guided building game ant that's exactly what I got. The grid based building was fun, and getting things classified as buildings or sets by placing specific items was fun.
It's also nice having a building game have a plot. It plays on one major bit of dramatic irony throughout before turning it into a dramatic plot point for everyone else.
Would it surprise you if a JRPG used the power of friendship to overcome evil as a story through line?
You end up travelling to different islands, and bringing friends and recipes back to your home island. Upon returning, your friends will try to build some big feature of their section of the island, for example, a castle foundation, and you can finish it or change it as you see fit later. There are also various tasks you can do for extra progression and bonuses and such.
The final boss fight does the great thing of referencing each previous area and the friends and things you did on the various islands to help beat the boss.
Game was a liiiiitle too long for my tastes, by the end I was ready to be finished, so I stopped free building/completing tasks on my island and jumped straight to the last zone.
All in all though, a fun builder game that I might fire up again in the future to just slowly poke at my island.
It's also nice having a building game have a plot. It plays on one major bit of dramatic irony throughout before turning it into a dramatic plot point for everyone else.
Would it surprise you if a JRPG used the power of friendship to overcome evil as a story through line?
You end up travelling to different islands, and bringing friends and recipes back to your home island. Upon returning, your friends will try to build some big feature of their section of the island, for example, a castle foundation, and you can finish it or change it as you see fit later. There are also various tasks you can do for extra progression and bonuses and such.
The final boss fight does the great thing of referencing each previous area and the friends and things you did on the various islands to help beat the boss.
Game was a liiiiitle too long for my tastes, by the end I was ready to be finished, so I stopped free building/completing tasks on my island and jumped straight to the last zone.
All in all though, a fun builder game that I might fire up again in the future to just slowly poke at my island.
Allá por 2019 Dragon Quest Builders fue una experiencia agradable y sencilla que me dio la oportunidad de demostrar mis nulas dotes creativas. Lo que menos me gustó sin duda fue el exceso de farmeo para hacer tu casita de ensueño o el pueblo que se merecían tus ciudanos.
More challenging than the first one, more stuffs to do, more creativity! I hope they will continue this series in the future because I'm a big fan.
Xbox achievements complete
I love this game. It took me 3 damn years to beat the story because it's so long and I just needed breaks from it to not get overwhelmed.
I have not completed any post story stuff, but it's a cozy game with cute monsters and I am obsessed with DQ Slimes. This game actually got me into the franchise and I've gone on to purchase future titles.
I hope there is a third builders game, because this is so charming and I actually cried at the end.
I have not completed any post story stuff, but it's a cozy game with cute monsters and I am obsessed with DQ Slimes. This game actually got me into the franchise and I've gone on to purchase future titles.
I hope there is a third builders game, because this is so charming and I actually cried at the end.
das bessere Minecraft
This review contains spoilers
The fucking high-five man................
minecraft si c'était bien
Confissão: eu subestimei DQB2 quando eu vi ele no GamePass e pensei "Não acho que vou gostar muito".
Eu estava completamente errada. Esse jogo é incrível.
A gameplay é divertida e viciante, a história é simples e genuinamente cativante e emocional, e cara, eu comecei a me interessar em Dragon Quest graças à esse jogo. Eu sinto uma alegria surreal jogando esse jogo. Eu gostaria de ter jogado ele quando criança.
Em suma: Parem de me chamar pra jogar Mine. DQB2 é mil vezes melhor desculpa
Eu estava completamente errada. Esse jogo é incrível.
A gameplay é divertida e viciante, a história é simples e genuinamente cativante e emocional, e cara, eu comecei a me interessar em Dragon Quest graças à esse jogo. Eu sinto uma alegria surreal jogando esse jogo. Eu gostaria de ter jogado ele quando criança.
Em suma: Parem de me chamar pra jogar Mine. DQB2 é mil vezes melhor desculpa
An excellent building game that really gives you a lot of room to play around and do whatever you like. The story is charming and sweet, and I absolutely love how Malroth was written. While it's pretty clear what inspired Dragon Quest Builders 2, I would say it does more than enough to stand out in its own way.
En muchos aspectos mejora respecto al primero, como en la historia y en la variedad de bloques. Sin embargo hay una cosa que hizo que me gustase más el anterior y es que en este juego, hay muchas misiones de defensa de oleadas que se me hacían demasiado largas, abundantes y repetitivas.
Malroth went from an insane final boss to the coolest bro i've ever had, and all it took was throwing in minecraft
Why isn't there more emphasis on coop? I'm so lonely...
Game is a lot of fun, but the combat is underdeveloped, and the Switch performance can get pretty bad in a few cases. But honestly, exploring, building, and doing quests make up for all that and turn this into an experience I'd recommend.
This game's story is more amazing than it should be.
A nice building game packed with a lot of action and love.
A nice building game packed with a lot of action and love.
It is so good but may have to restart on a stronger console
This is an RPG where instead of a turn-based battle system or an ATB system or a bullet hell battle system, it's a minecraft system
Good building game. Enjoyed my time with it, but got annoyed when I was given open space just for NPCs to build their own stuff. NO. BAD. LET ME PLEASE AND THANK.
9.25
EXCELENTE! Começo um pouco chato mas depois engrena. Eu senti que jogava uma excelente história que se negava a terminar, com puzzles divertidos. Não testei o modo multiplayer.
Pretty chill and cozy game to just play, usually with these types of games it tends to get boring really fast because of having no real objectives/quests to chew on other than to survive or build. DQB2 kept me hooked for a while and I find a lot of the world and characters to be charming, but I hit a wall like I usually do where I basically no longer want to play, whenever I'm in the mood, I'll revisit this again.
The story is too long and a little bit repetitive, but love how the character develops through the story
It’s like Minecraft but better.
I like the concept of this game: it's like Minecraft but with that one aspect of Terraria where you make houses to recruit NPCs and they can do things with you. There's also more emphasis on farming and sort of creating a village, and RPG elements.
However, what ruined my enjoyment is... this isn't actually a sandbox. It's a super linear game, everything you do feels so linear that every single bit of progression feels cheap and unrewarding. I get a new weapon? Yeah well it was part of the story. I'm in a new area, I have multiple objectives: I can only accomplish them in order because that's how the story wants me to do it. There isn't much point to exploring because areas are locked into the main quest and aside from a few collectibles, it makes it pointless to go anywhere but where the story wants you to.
While the story is very funny and the writing isn't bad, the game being this linear just made me not want to keep playing. And it's so excruciatingly slow! And you don't get to choose your own pace either, because of how linear it is. Want to play more and do new things? You must sit through the story now and read for the next ten minutes before you can procede to do something.
Just imagine if Minecraft had a main story quest where you have to do things in order. It asks you to cut a tree, then make your first tools, then mine, then build your first house, then farm; every area would be explored in the order the game wants you to; you only discover new things by progressing the story. It would remove all the magic about the game! Sometimes the game will even go as far as telling you exactly what a building should look like and you have to follow a blueprint, can you imagine that in Minecraft instead of making your own wonderful structures? Well, it certainly didn't sit well with me.
However, what ruined my enjoyment is... this isn't actually a sandbox. It's a super linear game, everything you do feels so linear that every single bit of progression feels cheap and unrewarding. I get a new weapon? Yeah well it was part of the story. I'm in a new area, I have multiple objectives: I can only accomplish them in order because that's how the story wants me to do it. There isn't much point to exploring because areas are locked into the main quest and aside from a few collectibles, it makes it pointless to go anywhere but where the story wants you to.
While the story is very funny and the writing isn't bad, the game being this linear just made me not want to keep playing. And it's so excruciatingly slow! And you don't get to choose your own pace either, because of how linear it is. Want to play more and do new things? You must sit through the story now and read for the next ten minutes before you can procede to do something.
Just imagine if Minecraft had a main story quest where you have to do things in order. It asks you to cut a tree, then make your first tools, then mine, then build your first house, then farm; every area would be explored in the order the game wants you to; you only discover new things by progressing the story. It would remove all the magic about the game! Sometimes the game will even go as far as telling you exactly what a building should look like and you have to follow a blueprint, can you imagine that in Minecraft instead of making your own wonderful structures? Well, it certainly didn't sit well with me.