I'd just skip straight to 2. There's enough QoL improvements that I think it's a much better game. You're not going to be missing much in terms of story skipping the first either. Mind you I think the first is great as well. I just think it drags before it's over. I really loved it, but each time we played it (my son likes it a lot as well), I was ready for it to be over probably about 2/3rds of the way through it. You definitely aren't going to want to play these back to back.
Honestly, although the Builders title is cool, these games are also really:
DRAGON QUEST 1-2
DRAGON QUEST 2-2
In the tradition of Final Fantasy X-2, XIII-2, etc. There's an argument to be made that if an MMO can be a mainline JRPG, why not these games? They are that good.
It really is incredibly good (except for the switch framerate). Exceeded expectations and I've been hyping myself up for it since it was announced 23 MONTHS AGO !
The best part of the Builders games for me is exploring the world. I always wanted to either explore and find more secrets or nitpick my towns by upgrading them slowly. In Builders 1, I sank an entire week into the game and fell in love with the atmosphere. Everything felt great. Same with Builders 2, except the intro. The ship intro is slower than the DQB1 intro.
Agreed. It's wonderful and such a joy to play. I didn't even know that it was already out when I saw it pop up in the Playstation store. I enjoyed the first game so I figured I would enjoy this as well, but I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I have been. Definitely my GOTY so far. Buy it people.
Blueprints system was changed for some reason. But basically, if you press the system button (+ on Switch), go to Builderpedia > Recipes, there is a category with all of the regular room blueprints. You can pick any one you want and press <Minus> to spawn it as an inventory item. From there you can place it as usual. I'm surprised they don't teach you this, but there are a lot of tutorials in the game already...
(Edit: Note that it only shows blueprints you have discovered or earned...)
I can't say I need a dodge move, but I will say the most obvious mistake they made is that the font size is too small. DQB2 has no problem using sub 10pt fonts for localization reasons, and it's an accessibility disaster.There's a reason why the the UX community is pushing for 28px+ on everything, and this game may end up as an example of what happens when you don't.
I'm having far more fun with this than I was expecting to be honest, I thought I would get maybe 10~20 hours out of it and be done with it, it's but I'm only on the second island and I'm well over 20 hours already and still having a blast with it lol.
It's the Sim-like stuff of the townspeople appreciating all that you do for them that seals the deal on this game. I feel so accomplished, not because I made a new structure or checked a list of boxes, but because Britney let me know the dining room is beautiful and the food is delicious. Or, the NPCs chatter among themselves with short speech bubbles and continue in their routines, dropping hearts down along the way as each expectation is met.
It's just SATISFYING to see these characters feel joy. I love being able to provide them joy.
It's phenomenal. Has me even more hooked than the first game did. Lots of little improvements. I don't even like building or management games that much to begin with and yet I love this one.
Ugh I was hyped for this for the longest time because I thought it was coop but then I heard it was very limited co op so I took it off my radar but now I'm hearing all these good impressions ahhh I'm not sure what to do now. I beat the demo. It was definitely neat but didn't seem as amazing as these impressions so I don't know. Got a voucher sitting there that was for this but was gonna save for astral chain or Zelda but now.....
It's the Sim-like stuff of the townspeople appreciating all that you do for them that seals the deal on this game. I feel so accomplished, not because I made a new structure or checked a list of boxes, but because Britney let me know the dining room is beautiful and the food is delicious. Or, the NPCs chatter among themselves with short speech bubbles and continue in their routines, dropping hearts down along the way as each expectation is met.
It's just SATISFYING to see these characters feel joy. I love being able to provide them joy.
Yep, one of my favorite things in JRPGs is helping people, and this game has that in spades. I love how the villagers rush over to you when you fulfill a request, and they're all smiling and clapping and cheering, scattering hearts everywhere, lol. And then your Builder has his/her "eureka" moment and learns new recipes. And then you see the NPCs checking out the new thing you just built, chattering happily. You see how their daily routine changes to incorporate the new amenities you crafted, and you see how those amenities improve their quality of life.
That's something special about this game compared to others: In most JRPGs, you help someone and they tell you that you were helpful, but they just continue to stand where you found them and do what they were always doing. But in this game, you really see how your actions impact their life. And that's just wonderful. :-)
Ugh I was hyped for this for the longest time because I thought it was coop but then I heard it was very limited co op so I took it off my radar but now I'm hearing all these good impressions ahhh I'm not sure what to do now. I beat the demo. It was definitely neat but didn't seem as amazing as these impressions so I don't know. Got a voucher sitting there that was for this but was gonna save for astral chain or Zelda but now.....
Yep, one of my favorite things in JRPGs is helping people, and this game has that in spades. I love how the villagers rush over to you when you fulfill a request, and they're all smiling and clapping and cheering, scattering hearts everywhere, lol. And then your Builder has his/her "eureka" moment and learns new recipes. And then you see the NPCs checking out the new thing you just built, chattering happily. You see how their daily routine changes to incorporate the new amenities you crafted, and you see how those amenities improve their quality of life.
That's something special about this game compared to others: In most JRPGs, you help someone and they tell you that you were helpful, but they just continue to stand where you found them and do what they were always doing. But in this game, you really see how your actions impact their life. And that's just wonderful. :-)
The demo literally stops where the game starts to get amazing. :-)
I skipped the demo because people (wrongly) stated that my progress wouldn't carry over, does it let you get into the first real island or does it only cover the Island of Awakening or whatever?
I skipped the demo because people (wrongly) stated that my progress wouldn't carry over, does it let you get into the first real island or does it only cover the Island of Awakening or whatever?
The demo saves after the monster slave boat just as you land on the isle of awakening. The tutorial stuff there can be done in 30mins if you just shoot through, then about 6-12 hours on island 2 learning the ropes of bullding and farming.
We run a tight ship around these parts. Land is valuable, and until I get those 250 plants... you can either wait in line or hit the fields when nature calls.
We run a tight ship around these parts. Land is valuable, and until I get those 250 plants... you can either wait in line or hit the fields when nature calls.
I never went past one pot either. When night came around and the line got big, I knew it was my time to get a good spot next to the door in the room of beds.
The revelation at the end of the first island when
the villagers learn how to build stuff for you, and they start building a new Deitree while some heroic music plays in the background is one of the best moments of the year. I firmly await Giant Bomb to include this moment in their Best Moment category at the end of the year.
I spoke to one of the villagers and he said everyone has been peeing and pooping in the wilderness the whole time. I mean jeez, if they had asked for a toilet, I could've built one hours ago! (I should've known a fiber-rich diet of cabbages would cause this.)
But yeah, when I saw the line for the one outhouse, I immediately built a second one right next to it. I built them on either side of the kitchen, which I placed on top of a sprawling second house — one that I had built to accommodate the farm's ever-growing population.
Note that you can build roofs from simple wooden blocks; you don't need to unlock the actual roofs that require tree bark.
There are ladders leading up to each level, with fencing along the perimeter so people don't fall off, and torches at each corner-post so they can see at night. It's lovely.
And oh, -my- outhouses have roofs, because unlike Unicorn I don't run a pervert village!
...instead I run one with a scatological fetish, since after people poop in the pots, I retrieve the "night soil" for my nefarious purposes!
Man, I love this game. <3 <3
edit: I also recommend making your outhouses well-lit so that those ghost enemies don't ambush your squatting villagers at night.
I wonder if this is how I will end up feeling. This game has me interested in trying DQXI on Switch this September, even though I know the gameplay is nothing alike. But if the writing and world is even half as charming as Builders 2, I'll be in for a treat.
Been playing it a lot this weekend, and while it's great at times, most of the time it doesn't respect the player's time or intelligence at all. Worst of all, this isn't something like Minecraft where an issue I have with the game will probably get fixed later down the road. This isn't gonna get updated, and a lot of the problems I have with the game are just things I'm going to have to deal with.
Island 2 is sexist as hell, and at a point you just have to skip all the dialogue. It's bad.
The point I'm at in the game is awful
Stuck in prison. Basically spent the last 4 hours running around skipping through dialogue. Considering dropping the game. I hear there's a stealth section. I'm not looking forward to it.
The combat's basically pointless and tedious. Some of the unique bosses are alright, but (unless I just haven't unlocked it) the game needs a dodge roll or something, otherwise you're just kind of awkwardly walking away from enemy attacks. Hell, the game gives you a shield but doesn't let you use it. It's just a boost to your defense. At a certain point, you have so much defense that you're basically invulnerable. The only reason I want to block or dodge attacks is because they interrupt you. Also, when hordes show up, it essentially comes down to getting to them as quickly as possible, and aggroing all of them before they start destroying your base, then running laps around them while your allies deal with them. And while some of the bosses are alright, one of the main bosses is literally just dodging something given a 10 second warning, deflecting something also given a 10 second warning, and knowing the difference between red, green, and blue. Including level caps based on story progression also makes most combat post-hitting the level cap pointless. The items the enemies drop are redundant, and beyond that, they feel like a waste of time to fight.
You're given tons of quests throughout the game, and there's no quest log, meaning you have to run back to the NPC that gave you the quest and talk to them to get the quest info again. This means you also have to memorize every single object they want you to place in the room they want you to build in order to meet their requirements. I've started screenshotting NPC dialogue just so I wouldn't have to run back to them later.
This also means that if you're given a quest on one island that you need to complete on another island, you have to deal with the awful boat travel mechanic, where you can travel to any island from the main island, but you can't do the same from any island. So at one point I picked up a quest that required story progression, got to the point where I could do that quest several hours later, forgot the objective, went back to the main island, went to the secondary island that had the quest info, memorized the quest info, traveled back to the main island, then back to the island where I could complete the quest, completed the quest, traveled back to the main island, traveled back to the secondary island with the quest info, and finally turned the quest in. That's dumb as hell.
As far as I know, resources like ore can only be obtained from one island, so in order to get those resources which you'll need on your main island, you need to travel back to the island with ore. You also spend several hours fixing up a mining town, and over time they bring you ore every night. The whole goal of the island was to get the mining town thriving, but at the end of it, they stop giving you ore, which doesn't make any sense, because if you go into the mine, they're still mining. Seems like a weird oversight considering at the end they show you that the mine has more ore in it due to what you've done.
One of the satisfying things about mining in Minecraft is the way in which the world is generated. There's resources everywhere. In Dragon Quest Builders 2, if I go off the beaten path while in the mine, there's not going to be anything there.
Cooking stations and forges waste your time, and the way time passes in the game doesn't make any sense. Cooking stations and forges should also work similarly, but they don't. Although both take time to produce something, at a forge I can select what I want to craft, and queue up as many of that item as I want. I should be capable of doing this at a cooking station rather than needing to have both items in my inventory, and only being capable of queuing up 1 at a time. It would make sense if cooking didn't work like this because it was implemented like Breath of the Wild's which encourages experimentation, but it literally tells you what items can be combined and what items can't. It just doesn't tell you what those two items turn into until they're already cooking. Spending 15 seconds for a single loaf of bread at a time is ridiculous, considering how annoying the stamina system is.
Also, random weird bits with narration that turns 5 seconds of text into 5 minutes of text. It's not even covering a loading screen or anything. I don't know why these exist.
It's probably the most hand-holdy game I've ever played. I'm still getting basic tutorials like 30+ hours in. It's incredible how linear it is, and that pretty much all the optional content just gets you weird little cosmetics you'll probably never use.
One of the coolest parts so far was what I thought would be a proper dungeon near the end of the 2nd island, but all the puzzles were incredibly simple, and the boss sucked. The dungeon looked neat though.
The lava section a little bit after that also started off neat, but then you dive into how awful the water mechanics are, and I thought that section would melt my Switch.
A lot of the game's basic mechanics also aren't explained at all, and it's hard to find online resources for this game, because apparently nobody's played it. Things like town boundaries aren't explained. There's no map indicator, so you have to rely on the weird little differences between being in town and outside of town (music, followers, etc...). Sometimes villagers will just completely ignore a crop, and you have to mess with the location of the scarecrow and fence posts until they show up (why can't the player plow???). I came back to one of my villages, and my villagers had been completely ignoring half of my crops. I don't know if I need a chest closer to those crops or what. I also don't understand why villagers would be encouraged to dump off raw materials in any chest but the kitchen chest. The game tries to automate a bunch of stuff, but who's bringing items from the crop chest to the kitchen chest?
The camera is also terrible, and so is first-person mode. Also arbitrarily locking features behind first-person mode is dumb.
Such a weird complaint about the cooking etc. it's automated. You set it up, put ingredients in the chest and they do it all automatically. Just pop back in - once they've gone through the day cycle and pick them up. If you've put up crockery etc on dining tables - those will also have food. Farming is automated, so is cooking. All you gotta do is make sure there's ingredients and seeds in the chest
I want to like this game so bad but just can't. I just can't get past the main character's design to really get into it. I wish there was a character creator or something at least. I also can't stand the chibi (think that's what that's called) style to all the characters in general.
Ugh I was hyped for this for the longest time because I thought it was coop but then I heard it was very limited co op so I took it off my radar but now I'm hearing all these good impressions ahhh I'm not sure what to do now. I beat the demo. It was definitely neat but didn't seem as amazing as these impressions so I don't know. Got a voucher sitting there that was for this but was gonna save for astral chain or Zelda but now.....
The demo is nothing like the meat and potatoes of the game proper. Island 2 also plus completely different from island 1 in terms of what they have you do and I was like "ohhhhhh"
I wonder if this is how I will end up feeling. This game has me interested in trying DQXI on Switch this September, even though I know the gameplay is nothing alike. But if the writing and world is even half as charming as Builders 2, I'll be in for a treat.
I have never played through a mainline DQ game. I played maybe 10 hours of DQ3 on gameboy, but didn't really enjoy it.
The side games are another story though. I've put thousands of hours into Dragon Warrior Monsters (holy shit was it better than Pokemon Blue/Red!), DWM2, the remakes with fan translations on 3DS (modded a 3DS JUST for this purpose), and now Builders (loved the first demo, but knew I wanted to wait for 2 to release).
I have never played through a mainline DQ game. I played maybe 10 hours of DQ3 on gameboy, but didn't really enjoy it.
The side games are another story though. I've put thousands of hours into Dragon Warrior Monsters (holy shit was it better than Pokemon Blue/Red!), DWM2, the remakes with fan translations on 3DS (modded a 3DS JUST for this purpose), and now Builders (loved the first demo, but knew I wanted to wait for 2 to release).
Yeah, I'll have to see with DQXI. I watched the Easy Allies review and it was quite positive. It sounds like a well-paced and smartly designed game that respects your time, giving you plenty to find, but never extraneously so. They found the characters endearing too.
Either way, Builders 2 is one DQ-branded game that I absolutely adore. It actually has me excited about Hero and the series' representation in Smash Bros. Maybe in publishing these two games, Nintendo will turn around the series' prospects with Nintendo gamers in the West.
I never went past one pot either. When night came around and the line got big, I knew it was my time to get a good spot next to the door in the room of beds.
Such a weird complaint about the cooking etc. it's automated. You set it up, put ingredients in the chest and they do it all automatically. Just pop back in - once they've gone through the day cycle and pick them up. If you've put up crockery etc on dining tables - those will also have food. Farming is automated, so is cooking. All you gotta do is make sure there's ingredients and seeds in the chest
I don't see how my complaint is weird. Have you got to the second island?
As I said, cooking should give you a list of possible items, just like all the other crafting stations, and let you pick what to create from those based on what mats you have, and pick a quantity.
It shouldn't take 10 seconds to make a single item. And it shouldn't require that the mats for that item be in my hotbar.
The NPCs also shouldn't be entirely reliant on whatever the nearest chest is. Because the result of that is that there's now a chest out in a field containing all the crops the NPCs have farmed, and nobody knows to check that chest when cooking food in the kitchen.
It is mind boggling how good it's balanced. I didn't expected it to be such a fantastic and kinda perfect game. To be honest, I didn't even understood the appeal of it, at all, before the release and then I just bought and played it and found out it's everything I ever wanted.
As a survival genre, Harvest Moon and Minecraft fan I can't process how freaking perfect it satisfies every expectation and beyond.
It's so detailed in all its mechanics and very often you don't expect it to be that detailed when it comes to rooms and how they work, NPC mechanics or just single items where you think "man, they thought about that? Feels more like a fan would have the idea and mod that in, but no, it's standard in the main game, holy shit".
And when it comes to the story part, holy shit, the first island alone could be the whole game and I would have been happy with it. It's so charming how you build up this village and learns how the game works and then how it ends with everyone working together on something, that was such a great moment.
But the game continues and continues to Blow your mind with new mechanics and ideas, first how it wants you to create nature on your own island before you even start to build there and right before you go to the second big story island, you think "How can it not repeat itself now and just do what the first island did?" And then, it freaking don't, it introduces completely new mechanics and ideas again and feels completely different in what you do from here on.
It's making me speechless.
I never expected it to be this fantastic, innovative and fulfilling, but it is, out of nowhere, with so much love and passion and just thought through on every little corner and I didn't knew games like these still exist in 2019 and I'm just smiling like a little kid in my 30s while playing this incredible gem. :)
Honestly, although the Builders title is cool, these games are also really:
DRAGON QUEST 1-2
DRAGON QUEST 2-2
In the tradition of Final Fantasy X-2, XIII-2, etc. There's an argument to be made that if an MMO can be a mainline JRPG, why not these games? They are that good.
I was gonna do the same and then forgot about it. Went to EBgames (New Zealand) 4 hours after opening and all copies were gone :-( Drove to 3 different cities and no luck :-(
I'll probably pick up the Deluxe Edition after I'm finished with Mark of the Ninja, but reading some of the less-than-stellar comments made me hesitate. But I really want to play something (ANYTHING!) that somewhat reminds me of Dark Cloud 2, and this seems to fit that spot.
