Ricecreammm
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.
2023
stinger flyyyyynnnn dude stinger flynn in the carrrrr
2019
I seriously can't believe this amateur hour idea of what a good soulslike game would be was published by Bandai Namco. This shit is so embarrassing!!
The character customization is fun and the charm of it's sheer unadulterated edginess is there for a while, but I quickly felt this game's wretched level design and utterly boring gameplay falling on me like an illness, or a knife in the back. Code Vein is like a case study on how to miss every single thing that makes a soulslike any good in the first place. A painful game to actually try and play.
The character customization is fun and the charm of it's sheer unadulterated edginess is there for a while, but I quickly felt this game's wretched level design and utterly boring gameplay falling on me like an illness, or a knife in the back. Code Vein is like a case study on how to miss every single thing that makes a soulslike any good in the first place. A painful game to actually try and play.
This review contains spoilers
Completed a full run with every palette, and feel like I mellowed out on this DLC quite a bit. Maybe my rating is a bit unfair, because Side Order is really cool!
Its take on a roguelike is great in concept, and it has a lot of neat ideas of how to meld that sort of progression with the way past singleplayer modes worked as stage clear games. Being able to dangle each reward you’ll get before choosing a stage, while showing exactly what you’d be in for if you went for it, provides a lot of risk and reward. There’s been times where I’ve actively avoided stages that would give me a better palette upgrade because there was a “Danger” warning or because the difficulty was set too high for me to currently handle. The variety of builds you can create with each weapon also really helps reframe the way I would normally play the game, having to work around luck, or solely using my sub for damage, or using a kit I’ve normally never touched before.
I really hope this roguelike mode continues in future Splatoon games as a fun side thing, because my biggest issue with Side Order is how underbaked it feels. There's a good amount there on first blush, but the game ultimately asks you to complete at least 12 full runs when it feels like there’s only enough content for 5-6. After just a couple runs, I was already running into objectives and stages that I had seen more than once before. Runs ultimately felt like they wholly blended together because I kept getting the same objectives, over and over. The builds and weapons you use add a good amount of variety on their own, but after a while it felt like I was tackling the same things the same way each time. The bosses feel limp after the first fight, the objectives start getting annoying rather than interesting, and I came out of my final run feeling pretty bored by the whole affair. It’s a shame, because like I said, the core concept of a Splatoon roguelike is cool!! There’s just simply not enough content and intrigue to keep replaying any more than you need to. Maybe doing some zero hack runs would make it a bit more exciting…
The story is fine. It’s not much, but it gives a nice little wrap-up on the loose ends of Octo Expansion, while also providing a look into Marina’s past and her own feelings after the events of the Deepsea Metro. Acht is a great new character, and it’s cool seeing someone else who was only represented through their music get a larger role. But, of course, at the end of the day, it feels like this whole DLC was made just to have Pearl and Marina’s relationship be as unsubtle as possible, and what else could I really ask for?
Its take on a roguelike is great in concept, and it has a lot of neat ideas of how to meld that sort of progression with the way past singleplayer modes worked as stage clear games. Being able to dangle each reward you’ll get before choosing a stage, while showing exactly what you’d be in for if you went for it, provides a lot of risk and reward. There’s been times where I’ve actively avoided stages that would give me a better palette upgrade because there was a “Danger” warning or because the difficulty was set too high for me to currently handle. The variety of builds you can create with each weapon also really helps reframe the way I would normally play the game, having to work around luck, or solely using my sub for damage, or using a kit I’ve normally never touched before.
I really hope this roguelike mode continues in future Splatoon games as a fun side thing, because my biggest issue with Side Order is how underbaked it feels. There's a good amount there on first blush, but the game ultimately asks you to complete at least 12 full runs when it feels like there’s only enough content for 5-6. After just a couple runs, I was already running into objectives and stages that I had seen more than once before. Runs ultimately felt like they wholly blended together because I kept getting the same objectives, over and over. The builds and weapons you use add a good amount of variety on their own, but after a while it felt like I was tackling the same things the same way each time. The bosses feel limp after the first fight, the objectives start getting annoying rather than interesting, and I came out of my final run feeling pretty bored by the whole affair. It’s a shame, because like I said, the core concept of a Splatoon roguelike is cool!! There’s just simply not enough content and intrigue to keep replaying any more than you need to. Maybe doing some zero hack runs would make it a bit more exciting…
The story is fine. It’s not much, but it gives a nice little wrap-up on the loose ends of Octo Expansion, while also providing a look into Marina’s past and her own feelings after the events of the Deepsea Metro. Acht is a great new character, and it’s cool seeing someone else who was only represented through their music get a larger role. But, of course, at the end of the day, it feels like this whole DLC was made just to have Pearl and Marina’s relationship be as unsubtle as possible, and what else could I really ask for?