It’s like Dragon Quest Minecraft. Don’t beat around the bush about it. As much as I hate these surface-level comparisons, most of the thoughts I have about Dragon Quest Builders 2 can be sourced directly from what it does the same or differently from Minecraft. It’s unavoidable.
That being said, Dragon Quest Builders 2 does a lot of things I wish Minecraft would do! Its main focus is on town building, creating a cute connection to the mainline Dragon Quest games as the towns you build serve as being equivalent to the towns and castles you’d ordinarily find in those games. Building is essential throughout the game's runtime, cycling between fighting monsters and collecting materials in service of making more livable and workable spaces for your townspeople. It has a much more goal-oriented style of play, sprinkling new little objectives to occupy your time with so you always have something to do. It makes what you build not just there for the sake of looking nice, but to also serve various functional purposes! Town sizes start small and grow over time, so it’s almost like solving a puzzle trying to find how to neatly fit every building in your town together. It makes for an experience more linear than other Minecraft-likes but still asking a lot of creativity of the player if they so desire.
That is until you get to the blueprints, that is. Multiple points in the game ask you to create an exact version of a structure they planned out for you, turning the creative process of building and fitting your space into a chore where you find all the little blocks you need and arrange them just like the game wants you to. It’s an awful dampener on an otherwise great time, one that’s only made worse when certain blueprints have your townspeople just get all the materials and build the whole damn thing for you. What’s even the point by then? Back on my home island, I wanted to use the desert area to create a large western-style town, with minecart rails connecting the homes from the shops from the pubs. But when I got there, they grabbed my hand and told me I was gonna make a pyramid instead, and every single building I made in that area had to be inside it. What a load of bullshit.
Dragon Quest Builders 2 kept me engaged with its town building gameplay loop and mini-objectives always giving me something to do, but it always seemed a little too interested in what it wanted to see rather than what the player wanted. In a game with so much potential for creative ideas to flow freely, it feels like a massive waste to limit that creativity the way it does.
That being said, Dragon Quest Builders 2 does a lot of things I wish Minecraft would do! Its main focus is on town building, creating a cute connection to the mainline Dragon Quest games as the towns you build serve as being equivalent to the towns and castles you’d ordinarily find in those games. Building is essential throughout the game's runtime, cycling between fighting monsters and collecting materials in service of making more livable and workable spaces for your townspeople. It has a much more goal-oriented style of play, sprinkling new little objectives to occupy your time with so you always have something to do. It makes what you build not just there for the sake of looking nice, but to also serve various functional purposes! Town sizes start small and grow over time, so it’s almost like solving a puzzle trying to find how to neatly fit every building in your town together. It makes for an experience more linear than other Minecraft-likes but still asking a lot of creativity of the player if they so desire.
That is until you get to the blueprints, that is. Multiple points in the game ask you to create an exact version of a structure they planned out for you, turning the creative process of building and fitting your space into a chore where you find all the little blocks you need and arrange them just like the game wants you to. It’s an awful dampener on an otherwise great time, one that’s only made worse when certain blueprints have your townspeople just get all the materials and build the whole damn thing for you. What’s even the point by then? Back on my home island, I wanted to use the desert area to create a large western-style town, with minecart rails connecting the homes from the shops from the pubs. But when I got there, they grabbed my hand and told me I was gonna make a pyramid instead, and every single building I made in that area had to be inside it. What a load of bullshit.
Dragon Quest Builders 2 kept me engaged with its town building gameplay loop and mini-objectives always giving me something to do, but it always seemed a little too interested in what it wanted to see rather than what the player wanted. In a game with so much potential for creative ideas to flow freely, it feels like a massive waste to limit that creativity the way it does.