Some of the missions on the Isle of Awakening are totally optional, but others are required to push the story forward. Your inventory and crafting recipes do still mostly reset when you go to a brand-new island, but afterward, you return to a “home base” called the Isle of Awakening, where you continue building structures and completing missions that let you use all the items and recipes you’ve gathered throughout the game. Instead of chapters, the bulk of Builders 2 takes place on separate islands with separate cities. The only place where you could use every item in the game was a totally separate free-play mode, which had no quests or any narrative connection with the rest of the game. Character progression, inventory, and your structures themselves did not carry over from one chapter to the next in that game, and you couldn't revisit old areas with new items or equipment. It was telling one overarching story, but every chapter made you start over again from essentially ground zero. The original was broken up into four chapters, each of which took place in a totally different town.
If you find the open-ended, do-whatever-you-want feel of Minecraft’s survival mode frustrating, Builders may be more your speed.īuilders 2 does feel a lot larger in scale than the first game, both in terms of its story structure and in terms of the kinds of things you can build and the area you can build them in. It's still a lot like Minecraft, but the mission-based structure gives it a different feel. The new game’s core mechanics are also mostly carried over from the first game: you explore and gather materials to use in your creations take quests from townspeople who ask you to find specific materials, craft specific things, or build specific structures and occasionally fight off waves of monsters intent on destroying what you've made. In both cases, the player’s job is to rebuild society from the ruins, inspiring NPCs (and a few friendly monsters) along the way. Rather than continuing the first game’s story, Builders 2 plays as an alternate ending to Dragon Quest 2, where the followers of that game’s villain establish a cultish religion that forbids building. The first game was presented as an alternate ending to the original Dragon Quest, where the main villain’s victory rendered building things a lost art.
The Builders games both put you in the shoes of a “Builder,” which in the game means having the extraordinary power to put things together and make other things. Game Details Developer: Omega Force, Square Enix
Builders 2 is fun enough, flexible enough, and charismatic enough to be fun even for people with zero knowledge of the source material. It gives you more of what its predecessor did well-both in that it is literally more content in the same style, but also in that the game is slightly larger and more ambitious in scope-while improving the core gameplay and jettisoning stuff that didn’t work. The game did well enough to make Dragon Quest Builders 2 a thing, and it’s a game that does what good sequels do. The games share exploration, crafting, and an intentional retro streak, and those elements formed the foundation of a short, sometimes limited, but ultimately entertaining game. Further Reading Dragon Quest Builders review: Building a break with RPG traditionSo when 2016’s Dragon Quest Builders successfully combined the art, story, and general aesthetic with the open-world Lego-style building of Minecraft (itself seven years old at the time), it was paradoxically fresh.