I usually prefer to write reviews when I'm one hundred percent finished with a game, but I think I'm going to be spending a heck of a lot of time just getting creative with this one! I loved the first game, but this one is... well. I wouldn't say it's better than the first in every conceivable way, because there are a few nitpicks I have and a few individual things I liked more in the first game, but overall this game is just incredible as opposed to incredible with some caveats and I wanna spend a lot of time just messing around in the postgame.

First off, I'm one of the weirdos who actually kinda liked Dragon Quest II, and much like how the first DQB looks at the first game and decides to play around with its setting and plot, DQB2 takes a look at Dragon Quest II and does some absolutely wild stuff with it. It's definitely a great story even if you haven't played DQ2, but if you're familiar with the events of that game there's a lot of points where it'll enhance the experience and actually deepen the mysteries the game presents to you. Especially, you know, with Malroth.

One of the biggest bonuses of this game is that it gives you a nigh-permanent party member in the form of a free feral himbo boyfriend, and the other NPCs have considerably better AI and more involvement than those of the first game. They'll cook food and such like they did in the first game, but if you give them a blueprint and materials, they'll also help you build stuff once you've hit a certain level of resident satisfaction. This kind of results in the game having something of a very mild city management sim feel to me rather than just a game where you build stuff, which is interesting! I wasn't too sure about the game automatically building stuff for you at first, but given the scale of what the game wants you to build, it ends up feeling very welcome.

The characters are also very charming, as one would expect from Dragon Quest. The aforementioned mysterious feral himbo, Malroth, is a great character with a really fun character arc that definitely made me cry. I think the fact that he essentially serves as the main character makes the actual player character fade into the background in comparison, which is kind of a shame given how strong the first game's protagonist was for, well, a silent protagonist. They're still pretty good, though, and you can actually draw comparisons and contrasts between DQB and DQB2's silent protagonists and their reactions to things. It's pretty interesting, honestly; I'd say they're less of a blank slate and more of a character delivered through a second person point of view. The various story islands' characters are also pretty good, and their individual stories are great, too. I'll admit I wasn't too hot on chapter 2's pacing and... much of the cast, but on the other hand, the payoff is kind of fantastic. I'm sad I was spoiled about it, but it still socked me in the jaw regardless. The antagonists are universally pretty fun, and as someone who loves the concept of friendly (and, well, unfriendly) monsters in games, this game does a lot of heavy lifting in that department.

The actual building is very fun and has some really good upgrades over the first game, with linked blocks making considerably more sense than having a bajillion different blocks for the same approximate thing. I think pretty much everything in this area is an improvement over the first game, so I'll discuss the few issues I do have. I don't really like the changes to cooking, for one; I get the theory behind giving you room to experiment with a bunch of different combinations, but it does lead to a lot of tedious trial and error whenever you end up getting the option to combine things. I guess I would've preferred more recipes to discover, honestly, because I found a lot of combinations that I thought might make something interesting just didn't work. Maybe it would've been fun just to have a failed dish for invalid recipes.

The other issue is that the water (and other liquids) mechanics are janky as fuck. I don't know if it's this bad in Minecraft because I haven't played vanilla Minecraft, but it's weirdly difficult to fill up a significant area of water more than a block high. Maybe I'm not doing it right? I don't know. The problem is definitely highlighted with the fishing DLC where making aquariums feels... bad, perhaps. It's not the biggest issue but I wish it was a little more user-friendly.

I also kind of feel like, with the scope of what you have to work with, the game limits you a bit in some ways that I think are engine-related more than anything. It kind of blew my mind in a bad way that you have this massive island to play around with and you can only make 100 rooms and have 60 residents on there, with the residents comprising humans, animals, and monsters. The endgame does offer you a bit more flexibility in giving you multiple islands to build on, but I don't know, I wanted to make my home island a set of thriving metropolises with rooms for everyone! Speaking of monsters, it kind of sucks that you just make them use the same beds as animals. I guess they're the ones that pick those beds, but I kind of wish there were monster-specific bedrooms and beds instead.

Oh well. Maybe they'll do it in Dragon Quest Builders 3? Oh, wait... the director left to make his own company... oh no... well, maybe it'll happen anyway. I hope it does, because these games are good as hell and they represent the ideal way to play around with retro nostalgia for me. It's not just throwing a bunch of references at you and hoping you'll be charmed by the nostalgia, it's a thorough reimagining that breathes more life into old games that didn't have all that much story or characterization and uses your nostalgia to play around with your expectations. I'd really love to see what Square Enix would do with the world of Dragon Quest 3 through this particular ethos, so here's hoping!

Dragon Quest Builders 2 is basically what you would expect from a block game set in the Dragon Quest universe. I had an ok time with it, but wasn't super impressed. It is a very chill game that isn't really trying to challenge you and has some systems that can make it fairly relaxing and meditative to play.

It has all the charm you expect from a Dragon Quest game, which is cool if you like the style. The graphics are colorful, appealing, and cute. Like the mainline DQ games, it is overly wordy and cutesy most of the time. I found myself wanting to skip over the dialog.

Gameplay in Dragon Quest consists of basically only (very simple) combat and (serviceable) building. The combat doesn't serve a lot of purpose and isn't very difficult, just tedious. Building is straight-forward, if a bit finicky some of the time. Certain actions work better or worse in first vs third person, so you kind of have to switch between them a bit, which feels bad.

The quests in DQBuilders 2 prompt you to build structures that meet certain criteria, which uses a flexible system and lets you express yourself fairly well, within some constraints. It unfortunately extremely limits the area in which it will accept some buildings without telling you, which is frustrating.
There are also some large scale structures you have to build, which are laid out in a blueprint that you must follow exactly. This is more of a meditative experience, similar to building a model, which is a simple way to mix up the gameplay somewhat.

Dragon Quest Builders 2 isn't super compelling to me, but I could see myself dropping into it for a couple of hours on occasion.

I love this > I like this > I hate this > I kill this > I like this

That's how it went. A weird beast for sure. In regards to the first game which was great but very much felt like they were finding their feet, this one does little to change that feeling. For every step forward, it often took two back. Systems which were once instantaneous now have a timer attached. Moments of unskippable text on screen that stay there for easily 30 seconds as if you can't read a sentence. Enemy attacks on towns feel much more frequent, and trying to get anything done during this is exhausting.

While streaming the game, the word I kept coming out with was "Relentless". It feels relentless. Like it doesn't want you to breathe. Always be moving and building and cooking and smelting and crafting and defending your base. It can be overwhelming, and The Power of Friendship can only assuage that so much.

Despite all this, I can't say I hated it. Streaming likely helped, as the game must be a good double the length it needed to be. Having live chat there kept the patter flowing, and everybody leaning into the dogshit segments made it all more comedic than actually annoying. Getting waylaid several times during big moments because chat demanded I build another pub was always a good laugh.

We built that bitch. Bigger than before.

The game oozes with charm from every block-shaped orifice and is simply a joy to play. The goofy dialogue, lively characters, great music, and Toriyama artstyle all come together in a soulful hotpot of adventure. The long length of time you spend on every major island in the game helps a lot in endearing you to the characters and world and I really felt like I was making a difference in every section. The story, while pretty simple, still manages to be compelling thanks to the likability of the characters and the elements connecting it to DQ2 are very well-implemented. The connection between my character and Malroth in particular was very endearing and I'm glad they didn't stick you with some unlikable stick in the mud for the whole game. The gameplay is fun and comfy. I have a hard time getting into Minecraft since all the enjoyment relies on my own creativity, so I much prefer Builders' process of giving you blueprints to build and missions to complete instead. My favorite moments were the ends of each chapter where the people you've been helping for hours finally get the inspiration to help you build and you get to see them come together and quickly produce huge structures that would've taken ages alone. As for my few issues with the game: the number one would be how mind-numbingly slow the master of destruction's dialogue is. Every time he pitched in I would alt tab and browse the internet for several minutes while he spelled out his dialogue at a blinding one word per hour. I also feel the game tends to hold your hand too much and there's a tad too much dialogue at the beginning. If the devs are going to give me the ability to move the camera, I would like them to also trust me to look around and find the items of note that they want me to interact with.

So this fixes a lot of issues with the original Dragon Quest Builders both mechanically and story wise.

It feels like the story in the first game had very vague reasons for going from one place to another, where the framework built into this one makes it seems more reasonable why you'd go to different islands. And the fact that you're not loosing progress on your main island (and can go back to the islands that you've been to before) is great.

There's a restriction on how much stuff you can carry, but it's so large now that it basically doesn't exist. And maybe it's because I've played through DQB1 before but it never seems to leave you hanging, while still not nagging you as much as DBQ1.

It's often easy to get ahead of the game. It generally handles it well. Like an NPC will have a quest of "oh I need 5 mushrooms" and in getting the quest if you already have 5 mushrooms they'll say "oh you've already got them. Can I have them?"

But sometimes you miss the fact that an NPC is standing next to a wall with a quest, because you've already broken down the wall and moved on, but the game won't throw the next quest at you until you go talk to them (thought the game had glitched out, but no just had to go back and talk to them).

The whole game is effectively a tutorial, with each island teaching you a different focus of the game. And then you take what's new (both items and knowledge) to your main island to make it better.

It's fairly obvious where the story is going to end, though there are still surprises.

The worst thing is how slow the disembodied voices are. You can't press a button to skip through them and they just hang on the screen for far too long. I got the 7 year old to read them and even she had excessive time to do so.

But it's really good. And it's amazing how good some of the stuff other people make is.

this was actually a lot of fun! ... i put more hours in it than i planned...

however, one big complaint. Some of the quests or objectives are funky..

Example: I have an objective i need to complete where i need to make "pools" or "oasises" and the game isn't registering every oasis i make, making completion of the quest pretty impossible. Unlike most of the things you need to build, there's blueprints for them, and the game can register each time you build a certain building or something.

oasises dont have blueprints, so even though im creating bodies of water with grass surrounding it, the game only registers a portion of the blocks as part of an oasis. I'm following the requirements to make oasises, but it's frustrating the game had a different "recongition system" when it came to the bodies of water. i dropped the game because i couldnt advance forward. Im a little sad about it, but it could also be a user error and im just bad at building oasises. other than that, this was pretty fun.

open to continuing, but it may mean starting COMPLETELY over from the beginning, and i feel like i was in the 2nd half.

This game was a pleasant surprise at first, combining a lot of what I enjoy about both Minecraft and Animal Crossing into a single game, but with a more focused experience. Very charming with a lot of personality. I really appreciated building up each island's town from scratch and growing them into a bustling community of villagers. That said, it's also a game that vastly overstays its welcome, as the main campaign drags on a lot longer than it should. Be prepared to lug yourself over the finish line as you slog through the end of more than 50 hours of this game before you finally get the ability to freely build what you want.