Dragon Quest Builders 2
PS4, Switch
Everyone needs a pat on the back now and again – an acknowledgement of one’s efforts. In Dragon Quest Builders 2, however, gratitude literally pours out of the people you’re helping in the form of small, collectable hearts. You then have the joy of running around to gather them up – or, perhaps, striking the town bell and watching them all zoom towards you in one go. If there’s a better visual indicator in videogames of the satisfaction of a job well done, we can’t name it.
Indeed, almost everything in this sandbox is designed to please. The way its JRPG structure guides and encourages gentle creativity is a holdover from the first game: as much as this might look like Minecraft with a little Square Enix magic sprinkled on top, this is really a Dragon Quest game with crafting and building attached. As such, it’s almost painfully linear, and, like its many siblings, has trouble knowing when to shut up.
Fortunately, the story and its characters are ineffably charming from the get-go, which makes it easy to forgive. Captured aboard a boat by followers of the creation-hating, destruction-loving Children Of Hargon cult, you’re soon wrecked and washed ashore the Isle Of Awakening, a large island that becomes your base of operations and home to the materials and people you collect as you explore the nearby landmasses. ‘Explore’ is perhaps a slightly generous word: progression is straightforward, with each island unlocked one after the other. Objective markers on your minimap lead you by the nose – our early attempts to discover new areas by ourselves are thwarted by conveniently sleeping NPCs.
But once you accept this and go with the flow, there’s a hypnotic quality to how simple yet rewarding Dragon Quest Builders 2 becomes. The main cycle goes thusly: chat to an NPC in need, who will then ask you for a favour in one of several brilliantly localised cants; head off to gather materials, levelling up by smacking monsters along the way with weapons you’ve crafted; create the needed item and use it where instructed, or build the requested structure according to a vague set of instructions or a block-by-block blueprint.
It sounds formulaic, but feels anything but: the variety of the tasks and sparkling (if often overlong) writing keep each assignment fun. We find ourselves digging out all sorts of vegetable patches in Furrowfield, for instance – cabbages and wheat are simply planted in tilled soil, but tomato fields and sugar-cane plantations are more complex – and one early mission that has us building a toilet for a faintly distraught villager is as hilarious as it is heartwarming. As soon as we finish the humble structure, the entire population of the town rushes over to form an orderly queue, pumping their fists, jumping for joy and fairly spewing hearts. We have honestly never felt more accidentally heroic in our lives.
We’re more empowered than in the first game, too. A host of small but significant improvements help ensure
that – despite an inflated runtime – our play sessions are largely irritation-free, and tend to creep into the wee hours. A sprinting function (balanced by a stamina meter) allows us to dash across the larger islands, and the ability to fast-travel to various unlocked points instead of having to rely on a craftable, consumable item to get home is a godsend. Our weapons, armour and building hammer don’t wear down with use, and combat is slightly more fluid (although still very basic, with no combo system and not even a dodge to its name) as well as being shared among your party of AI characters.
It’s hardly engaging to batter at a Badboon with no strategy other than an upgraded weapon, but combat as a means of grinding XP fits better into Builders 2’ s core loop. Each time you level up, you receive new crafting recipes; earning more gratitude hearts from villagers, meanwhile, unlocks new room recipes, which you use at the Isle Of Awakening to create increasingly fancy structures that, in turn, produce more gratitude.
Ultimately, it’s the blend of neatly interlocking systems and winning personality that makes Dragon Quest Builders 2 feel reactive, and makes it so easy to sink hours into its enthusiastic little checklists. Even mundane tasks are greeted with infectious fanfare – and thanks to an element of automation, optimising each town so that farming, mining and building happen in the background becomes another delight. Townspeople take over the busywork, while we’re preoccupied with completing tasks on the randomly generated Explorer’s Shores in order to win a lifetime supply of certain materials. When you’re in the groove, Builders 2 is symphonic, its pieces working together to form one of the most congenial feedback loops in games – and propelling you through a thoughtful story about the human need for community and creation.
It doesn’t half drag its feet, though. This might be a classic sequel – bigger, longer, more stuff to do – but the pacing issues mean some missions start to feel repetitive, as we trudge through them waiting to get back to the Isle Of Awakening with all our new toys. It’s worse when the occasional mission is actively hostile: all the comedy accents can’t save a leering plotline about a bar dancer and a bunny suit from falling on the wrong side of the cheeky/gross divide, while an extended prison escape sequence which robs us of all our abilities nearly puts us off returning entirely.
In these moments, Builders 2 briefly loses sight of what usually makes it such a joy: its willingness to make your life easier, and its happiness at being able to do so. Dragon Quest Builders 2 is the essence of the classic JRPG distilled into an unlikely form. It’s a game that trades on the pleasure of helping people out, and a spirited sequel that practises what it preaches. To Square Enix and Omega Force, then, a pat on the back from us. Job well done.
When you’re in the groove, all of its pieces work together to form one of the most congenial feedback loops in videogames