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ONGOING: Dragon Quest Builders 2
Before I get into this review, I have to warn you all about something: there is a certain spoiler regarding the endgame of the original Dragon Quest 2, also known as Dragon Warrior 2. The nature of said spoiler should be fairly well known at this point. However, just to be excessively safe, I didn't mention it in the write-up from when we beat Dragon Warrior 2. That write-up did not spoil Dragon Quest/Warrior 2's ending. (The poster said write-up links to technically does, if you see what I'm obliquely referring to here and you put two and two together, but I didn't call attention to it in my writing.) This write-up, however, explicitly will. No, it's not much of a twist by today's standards (more on its impact at the time below, though.) Like I said, you probably know it already, anyway. Still, I'm just warning you... like... just in case?
Hargon is not the true end boss of Dragon Quest 2, you see.
He's made out to be. Much like Dragon Quest 1's structure with the Dragonlord, you're presented with a fairly hands-off "that guy in the evil castle over there is evil, please go around the world building levels and then go to his castle and beat him up" broad-strokes guideline of a main quest, in which the evil priest Hargon and his cult of monsters, the Children of Hargon, are out to destroy everything and take over the world. Your entire quest is built around stopping Hargon and his army. However, when you get to his castle and you fight him and vanquish him, he pulls the "With the last of my power, I summon the God of Destruction mwahahaha bleug *dies*" card, a big demon named Malroth appears out of nowhere and a fight window opens without so much as a single word of dialogue, and there's your true end boss.
The Dragon Quest series pioneered a lot of things. Dragon Quest 1 was one of the very first of what we now know as JRPGs. Dragon Quest 2 was one of the very first that had a party, and the US version even had a cutscene, things we tend to take for granted these days but that were major technological advancements at the time. (I also posit that Dragon Quest 4 has the first Sephiroth-style villain, at least in the JRPG scene.) Dragon Quest 2 was also one of the first games to pull the trope where the named story villain is merely the penultimate fight, with some vague ball of Darkness Itself being the surprise final battle. These days, the Giant Space Flea from Nowhere is a largely discredited trope, still present but generally seen as a sign of weak cop-out writing or poor game design when it happens. By today's standards, Hargon should have been the end boss, and Malroth (who, again, has literally zero lines in that game, not even a roar, and not even so much as a field sprite) is the exact kind of out-of-nowhere ass pull that Adventurers! would go on to make fun of. It is important to remember, though, that Dragon Quest 2 practically invented this twist, and that it was obviously far less overdone and more genuinely shocking in its day.
I mention all of this because it sets the stage for Dragon Quest Builders 2, which is the greatest Fix Fic in video game form I have ever played.
See, Dragon Quest Builders is a spinoff series that sets out to answer the age-old question, "What if Dragon Quest were Minecraft and also Breath of the Wild?" It has all the zillion-hour plot-heavy plot of a full-on Dragon Quest game--it is a full-on Dragon Quest game--only the gameplay is more of a Minecraft-like "go around and craft and build things in a world of cubes," complete with at least a few Breath of the Wild-like open-world exploration action RPG elements. Plot-wise, the first Dragon Quest Builders game was a direct spinoff of the first Dragon Quest game, with the same setting and a simple what-if twist: Dragon Quest Builders 1 is set in an AU where the hero of Dragon Quest 1 said "Yes" to the Dragonlord's offer of joining him and ruling the world together, at which point the two of them conquered and destroyed everything, there was a long time skip, and then the Builder comes along.
Dragon Quest Builders 2, meanwhile, is also very obviously set in the Dragon Quest 2 verse, though the exact nature of its connection to the base game is a lot less clear. In the tutorial introduction, you are a [different] young apprentice Builder who wakes up on a monster-run slave ship. Your captors bring you up to speed and everything sounds canon so far: the three Scions of Erdrick defeated Hargon and Malroth, the remaining servants in the Children of Hargon were scattered to the four winds, and this ship is one of the last remaining scattered remnants of an army who was already defeated. They want to strike back, to reestablish themselves and avenge their fallen master, and that apparently includes kidnapping and enslaving Builders, their sworn enemies. Your captivity lasts just long enough to go through some tutorial stuff before a convenient storm wrecks the ship. Then, it plays this opening movie, which is one of the best examples of selling the entire spirit of the game in one trailer I've ever seen, and your adventure well and truly begins!
You wake up on a deserted island in a world where the Children of Hargon have completely taken over, and their control is unquestioned and absolute. What happened while you were out in that shipwreck, exactly? Was there a timeskip wherein the remnants were able to succeed with their great comeback plan? Did you wake up in some kind of AU like DQB1's? Did the Scions of Erdrick defeat the Children of Hargon? The game leaves it all as an open-ended mystery at first, to be teased and hinted at and eventually revealed throughout the course of the story. What is known is that the Children preach that Destruction is good and Creation is evil, and Building is the ultimate sin. It's up to you and your quickly-befriended fellow castaway, an amnesiac kind-of-edgy-but-with-a-heart-of-gold youth named Malroth (!?) to adventure around building up your home base island, freeing the neighboring islands from the Children's control, and spreading the joys and wonders of Building throughout the land.
I called this game a Fix Fic for DQ2 because the writing really feels like an impassioned defense of Malroth as an important part of the Dragon Quest 2 mythos, someone who deserves a place in that conversation, and not just some wordless afterthought because your party needed one more monster to fight. Surprise final battles aren't shocking or cool anymore? You people want character development and plot relevance now? Oh, you asked for it. Honestly, DQB2 does such a good job validating Malroth's entire existence that even his original presence in DQ2 retroactively feels like a bigger deal. It's brilliant writing, and I applaud it.
Anyone who talks to us on IM or even has us added as a Nintendo Switch friend has seen how much this game has utterly claimed my life in the past few months. I've easily sunk a good 140 hours into it so far and I show no signs of even slowing down, let alone stopping. People, I'm an anxiety-ridden adult living in late-stage capitalism. I don't do 100+ hour romps like I'm eleven anymore. The original Dragon Warrior 2 was probably 15-20 hours, and in terms of how many actual calendar months I spent picking at it, I'm pretty sure I completed the main story of DQB2 in less time than I did DW2. That doesn't happen. But it did.
DQB2 is the perfect combination of everything I wanted or needed in a game right now. It has all the virtual Legos, customize-your-island, "let me show you this big mansion I spent 50 hours building" energy of Animal Crossing and Minecraft. It has all the emotional, impactful story-driven story of a hundred-hour Square Enix game. It has a nearly infinite number of things to do, even well into the post-game, without Animal Crossing's time-based shoot I forgot to do the Halloween event yesterday stresses. Every time I start the game, I look around and... let's see, what still needs doing? There are those rather ugly primitive rooms I made in the first settlement before a lot of the fancier materials were unlocked that could really stand to be remade at some point. There are tablet targets (basically in-game miniature Achievement-like objectives, things like "create X different kinds of food recipes," "tame and recruit Y different species of monsters," etc.) that I still need to complete. Oh, I never did finish a bedroom for the big castle in the third settlement before the plot kicked into high gear and I had to go run off and save the world; I should go back and do that so they have a place to sleep. The people in the third settlement are cooking egg dishes like stuffed omelettes faster than I can keep them supplied with eggs; perhaps I should go back to that one procedurally generated resource-gathering side island and tame and recruit some more chickens. I still want to turn the hollowed out space between the inner and outer walls of the second settlement's pyramid into a giant aquarium. Oh, there's an entire post-game epilogue story chapter that I'm told is amazing, so there's even more story stuff to do, though unlocking that has a whole bunch of prerequisites including finishing all the tablet targets. My ultimate goal is to take Kurt's castle--which we've seen a pretty clear image of in our guided imagery meditation sessions and spiritual visualizations, vivid enough to include a finely detailed floor plan--and bring it to life in this game. Kurt has such a big and beautiful castle. I wish you all could see it. You all will be able to see it. Eventually.
I highly recommend this one. Now that I've fallen into this pit, I'd love for you to join us. The free Jumbo Demo includes everything up to the final battle of the first entire story region of the game--a good 20-30 hours of content right there. If you get into it, maybe we can trade friend codes and you can tour our island.
As for us? Well, this game is complete in the sense that I have conquered the main story, defeated the end boss, saved the world, and seen the credits. However, this is clearly an ONGOING entry because a Builder's work is never truly over.
Hargon is not the true end boss of Dragon Quest 2, you see.
He's made out to be. Much like Dragon Quest 1's structure with the Dragonlord, you're presented with a fairly hands-off "that guy in the evil castle over there is evil, please go around the world building levels and then go to his castle and beat him up" broad-strokes guideline of a main quest, in which the evil priest Hargon and his cult of monsters, the Children of Hargon, are out to destroy everything and take over the world. Your entire quest is built around stopping Hargon and his army. However, when you get to his castle and you fight him and vanquish him, he pulls the "With the last of my power, I summon the God of Destruction mwahahaha bleug *dies*" card, a big demon named Malroth appears out of nowhere and a fight window opens without so much as a single word of dialogue, and there's your true end boss.
The Dragon Quest series pioneered a lot of things. Dragon Quest 1 was one of the very first of what we now know as JRPGs. Dragon Quest 2 was one of the very first that had a party, and the US version even had a cutscene, things we tend to take for granted these days but that were major technological advancements at the time. (I also posit that Dragon Quest 4 has the first Sephiroth-style villain, at least in the JRPG scene.) Dragon Quest 2 was also one of the first games to pull the trope where the named story villain is merely the penultimate fight, with some vague ball of Darkness Itself being the surprise final battle. These days, the Giant Space Flea from Nowhere is a largely discredited trope, still present but generally seen as a sign of weak cop-out writing or poor game design when it happens. By today's standards, Hargon should have been the end boss, and Malroth (who, again, has literally zero lines in that game, not even a roar, and not even so much as a field sprite) is the exact kind of out-of-nowhere ass pull that Adventurers! would go on to make fun of. It is important to remember, though, that Dragon Quest 2 practically invented this twist, and that it was obviously far less overdone and more genuinely shocking in its day.
I mention all of this because it sets the stage for Dragon Quest Builders 2, which is the greatest Fix Fic in video game form I have ever played.
See, Dragon Quest Builders is a spinoff series that sets out to answer the age-old question, "What if Dragon Quest were Minecraft and also Breath of the Wild?" It has all the zillion-hour plot-heavy plot of a full-on Dragon Quest game--it is a full-on Dragon Quest game--only the gameplay is more of a Minecraft-like "go around and craft and build things in a world of cubes," complete with at least a few Breath of the Wild-like open-world exploration action RPG elements. Plot-wise, the first Dragon Quest Builders game was a direct spinoff of the first Dragon Quest game, with the same setting and a simple what-if twist: Dragon Quest Builders 1 is set in an AU where the hero of Dragon Quest 1 said "Yes" to the Dragonlord's offer of joining him and ruling the world together, at which point the two of them conquered and destroyed everything, there was a long time skip, and then the Builder comes along.
Dragon Quest Builders 2, meanwhile, is also very obviously set in the Dragon Quest 2 verse, though the exact nature of its connection to the base game is a lot less clear. In the tutorial introduction, you are a [different] young apprentice Builder who wakes up on a monster-run slave ship. Your captors bring you up to speed and everything sounds canon so far: the three Scions of Erdrick defeated Hargon and Malroth, the remaining servants in the Children of Hargon were scattered to the four winds, and this ship is one of the last remaining scattered remnants of an army who was already defeated. They want to strike back, to reestablish themselves and avenge their fallen master, and that apparently includes kidnapping and enslaving Builders, their sworn enemies. Your captivity lasts just long enough to go through some tutorial stuff before a convenient storm wrecks the ship. Then, it plays this opening movie, which is one of the best examples of selling the entire spirit of the game in one trailer I've ever seen, and your adventure well and truly begins!
You wake up on a deserted island in a world where the Children of Hargon have completely taken over, and their control is unquestioned and absolute. What happened while you were out in that shipwreck, exactly? Was there a timeskip wherein the remnants were able to succeed with their great comeback plan? Did you wake up in some kind of AU like DQB1's? Did the Scions of Erdrick defeat the Children of Hargon? The game leaves it all as an open-ended mystery at first, to be teased and hinted at and eventually revealed throughout the course of the story. What is known is that the Children preach that Destruction is good and Creation is evil, and Building is the ultimate sin. It's up to you and your quickly-befriended fellow castaway, an amnesiac kind-of-edgy-but-with-a-heart-of-gold youth named Malroth (!?) to adventure around building up your home base island, freeing the neighboring islands from the Children's control, and spreading the joys and wonders of Building throughout the land.
I called this game a Fix Fic for DQ2 because the writing really feels like an impassioned defense of Malroth as an important part of the Dragon Quest 2 mythos, someone who deserves a place in that conversation, and not just some wordless afterthought because your party needed one more monster to fight. Surprise final battles aren't shocking or cool anymore? You people want character development and plot relevance now? Oh, you asked for it. Honestly, DQB2 does such a good job validating Malroth's entire existence that even his original presence in DQ2 retroactively feels like a bigger deal. It's brilliant writing, and I applaud it.
Anyone who talks to us on IM or even has us added as a Nintendo Switch friend has seen how much this game has utterly claimed my life in the past few months. I've easily sunk a good 140 hours into it so far and I show no signs of even slowing down, let alone stopping. People, I'm an anxiety-ridden adult living in late-stage capitalism. I don't do 100+ hour romps like I'm eleven anymore. The original Dragon Warrior 2 was probably 15-20 hours, and in terms of how many actual calendar months I spent picking at it, I'm pretty sure I completed the main story of DQB2 in less time than I did DW2. That doesn't happen. But it did.
DQB2 is the perfect combination of everything I wanted or needed in a game right now. It has all the virtual Legos, customize-your-island, "let me show you this big mansion I spent 50 hours building" energy of Animal Crossing and Minecraft. It has all the emotional, impactful story-driven story of a hundred-hour Square Enix game. It has a nearly infinite number of things to do, even well into the post-game, without Animal Crossing's time-based shoot I forgot to do the Halloween event yesterday stresses. Every time I start the game, I look around and... let's see, what still needs doing? There are those rather ugly primitive rooms I made in the first settlement before a lot of the fancier materials were unlocked that could really stand to be remade at some point. There are tablet targets (basically in-game miniature Achievement-like objectives, things like "create X different kinds of food recipes," "tame and recruit Y different species of monsters," etc.) that I still need to complete. Oh, I never did finish a bedroom for the big castle in the third settlement before the plot kicked into high gear and I had to go run off and save the world; I should go back and do that so they have a place to sleep. The people in the third settlement are cooking egg dishes like stuffed omelettes faster than I can keep them supplied with eggs; perhaps I should go back to that one procedurally generated resource-gathering side island and tame and recruit some more chickens. I still want to turn the hollowed out space between the inner and outer walls of the second settlement's pyramid into a giant aquarium. Oh, there's an entire post-game epilogue story chapter that I'm told is amazing, so there's even more story stuff to do, though unlocking that has a whole bunch of prerequisites including finishing all the tablet targets. My ultimate goal is to take Kurt's castle--which we've seen a pretty clear image of in our guided imagery meditation sessions and spiritual visualizations, vivid enough to include a finely detailed floor plan--and bring it to life in this game. Kurt has such a big and beautiful castle. I wish you all could see it. You all will be able to see it. Eventually.
I highly recommend this one. Now that I've fallen into this pit, I'd love for you to join us. The free Jumbo Demo includes everything up to the final battle of the first entire story region of the game--a good 20-30 hours of content right there. If you get into it, maybe we can trade friend codes and you can tour our island.
As for us? Well, this game is complete in the sense that I have conquered the main story, defeated the end boss, saved the world, and seen the credits. However, this is clearly an ONGOING entry because a Builder's work is never truly over.