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Game Ramblings #91 – Dragon Quest Builders 2

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG / Sandbox Builder
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: PS4

Playing this game was all sorts of breaking my usual tendencies. I would typically buy this game on PS4 for better performance, but opted for the Switch for handheld convenience. I don’t really like builders like Minecraft, but the story and goal-focused gameplay really looked interesting to me. I would typically shelve a game after reaching end credits, but I’m already hours past that point and still playing. Really I think all of those things and the quality of the core game itself have helped me to really enjoy this game a lot more than I really expected I would.

This game was a relaxing pleasure. Sometimes there’s combat, sometimes there’s building, and sometimes you just sit there and work on your community.

Where the first Builders was a sequel to Dragon Quest 1, this is a sequel to Dragon Quest 2. It picks up some time after the original game, the player becomes friends with the resurrected final boss of that game, and a buddy copy adventure ensues, with the player being the builder and Malroth being the smasher. It’s all a little bit absurd, and it provides just enough of a grounding to the DQ world to really drive the fact that this game has goals and progress and a reason to march forward.

I’ve never really been a big fan of Minecraft, which makes this game perhaps a weird target for me to play. I just never really dealt well with the open ended nature of the game, and never really felt like putting together my own list of goals to move toward. DQB2 solves a lot of that for me by providing even a small overlay of goals to head towards. I’ll just do a quick walk through of the sort of opening little bit of time in the game where you learn to build basics, learn to gather followers, and learn to farm to provide yourself food. How it works in this game is important to why it clicked more than Minecraft.

Automation through your villagers becomes super important to the improved flow of this game over your typical building-type games. Focus on what’s important next, not what you’ve already done.

Eating to keep away from hunger is important in both games, as is the act of creating farms to sustain this growth. The first part is building farms, and importantly equipment for it. In Minecraft? You’ve got to know some recipe or figure it out, then build out some stuff with an interface that is cool to see a few times, but becomes tedious over time. In DQB2? You learn recipes and automatically batch build them in an easy to use menu. Cool, you’ve got a farm. In Minecraft? Manually grab things every time. In DQB2? Recruit followers to your island who will keep the farm in shape, plant new crops, pick grown crops, and put them in storage for you. Cool, now you’ve got some food, and can eat it raw or cook it. In Minecraft? Get on that yourself. In DQB2? Cook a thing once to learn it, then have a cooking follower do it for you, and grab from storage as needed.

I suppose the high level of all of this is that once you do something once, and it becomes automated. This allows you to focus on what’s next, instead of having an ever growing list of things that you have to do on routine. You learn to farm, setup the basics, then automate it. You later learn to mine, setup the basics, then automate it. Hell, as you start to explore smaller side islands you can gain perks that give you infinite resources of some types, which completely removes the tedious nature of having to find more and more and more of basic resources. The nature of all this is that the repetition is removed, and you’re basically focused on always doing new cool things.

The fact that this ties into a light action RPG layer also helps a lot. In general exploration, there’s simple party-based hack and slash combat. You’ve got some light gearing to provide a nice power curve. You’ve got some tools to provide enhanced exploration as the game goes on. Basically, that progression curve of action RPGs is there enough to provide a push forward. Where this really comes into play is the base defenses that grow more complex as the game goes on.

Base defense becomes really important later in the game, to the point where it becomes the focal point of a large segment of building.

The base defenses are effectively tower defense while mobile. On your side, you’ve got your base defenses and your base followers. Followers can be geared up using the same recipes used to create player gear to make them more effective. Base defenses are the real meat though. This runs the gamut from simple spikes and ballistas to more fun magic traps, whether it’s fire, wind, or ice. These provide a really fun way to meld customizing your base through the heavy builder gameplay with the combat mechanics and more typical ARPG elements. As distractions along the way they also provided periods of strategy and pace changing that broke up the monotony of exploring and digging for resources.

Sometimes the food even comes to you.

I think at the end of it all, I’m surprised how well just a few small changes to the core Minecraft loop got me to play the game in a different disguise. Giving me goals, giving me a story, automating monotony – those are all things that are small in theory but huge in practice. Having played the original Builders, this is also a huge push forward just for this series. The first one felt like a half step in this direction, but the sequel really smoothed out the game. It’s gone from being a neat variant on an idea to being something that I don’t want to put down, and honestly I can’t say that I saw that coming.

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Game Ramblings #88.2 – Revisiting Kingdom Hearts – Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance HD

Read Part 2 here.

More Info from Square Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: 3DS

Dream Drop Distance is one of those classic games where I started it, played a whole bunch of it, then just…..stopped. I didn’t stop for any reason other than getting distracted. What I’d played I’d enjoyed, but it just never really gave me a reason to get back to it. In playing it again on the big screen, I’ve come around to this one more than I think I would have trying to replay this on the 3DS, and in doing so at the very least checked another game off on the way to playing KH3.

Summons have been replaced by a Pokemon-style collection system. I didn’t really use this a whole hell of a lot, but they’re pretty dang adorable.

Playing Dream Drop Distance after II definitely makes this game feel worse to some extent, but in the grand scheme of things this still played well. Like other KH games, it’s got a few tweaks to combat – some that worked well, some that didn’t – and a completely bat shit character split that does more harm than good in gameplay, but provides a pretty good grounding to the story. Realistically, the Kingdom Hearts series as a whole has always been a some things work, some things don’t and DDD isn’t any different.

Combat changes are really the key here, and the changes really fall into three main categories – reduction in chains, much greater use of the environment in combat, and changes to mana (again). The first feels purely like a change made for the limitations for the portable experience, and after KH2 it feels really unfortunate. Combos may last three or four hits on their own. On face value it feels sloppy but in practice it really encourages and forces the use of other new combat mechanics. Mana also sees some changes in this game, in so much as it no longer exists. In place of the recharging mana bar from KH2 are individually recharigng abilities that can be stacked into a scrolling list. This list grows as the player levels, giving a nice mix of flexibility in building out the active spec and some of the nice gains from the recharging bar of KH2.

Flowmotion and Reality Shift make the world a lot more of an interactive experience in combat, and it’s pretty key to being effective at avoiding damage in larger fights.

The real meat of the combat changes are around the Flowmotion system. The tl;dr here is that dodge rolling into pretty much any environment section (walls, poles, etc) or large enemies will put the player into a quick combo action. For walls, this is a linear flight move into a large attack. For poles, the player will circle around the poll and jump off into a tornado-like move. Different flowmotion attacks do different things and most of these moves provide some amount of immunity frames so this becomes the sort of default way to fight.

Unfortunately this is kind of a mixed bag. The moves are definitely super flashy and they’re entirely effective. However, it trivializes a lot of combat situations in really negative ways. On the other side though, the lack of combo attacks and boss fight patterns really makes it feel like there’s no other effective way to fight that doesn’t involve grinding and overpowering. It’s definitely a bit of good and bad, and it can get really repetitive during boss fights, but it’s at least still fun to watch.

The other mixed bag is the way the meta progression occurs in the game. The minimal spoiler version is that this game takes place around Sora and Riku trying to become key blade masters. In doing so, the two get split up in alternate dimension versions of the same world, with each needing to complete their version of the world to meet up at the end of the game. In practice, the switch between characters happens in a time-based forced switch. Realistically, this just feels shitty. There’s things you can do to slow down the countdown and give the other person boosts during their story segment, but even with that it kind of just feels like it always forces a switch at the worst time. I really like the story aspect for having this system too, but I’d so much rather it just switch characters at the end of the world, or let players switch as they want and simply introduce blocking points at a couple sections along the way. The worst part of all of this is that they HAVE those blocking points at a few spots along the way, so you have both the countdown AND progress blocking at the same time and the user never really has good control of their wanted flow.

If nothing else, this game still has sick costumes. I’ll take musketeer Mickey on my team any day.

Dream Drop Distance continued the pattern that we’ve been seeing. Kingdom Hearts will attempt some new things. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t. At its release, this game proved that portable KH in Birth by Sleep was perhaps not a fluke in being a really deep experience, but on the TV it felt both more easily playable but also less forgiving in how its gameplay loop really worked out. Overall this is still a pretty entertaining game, and if nothing else this was at least a better sidetrack on the path to KH3 than when I went off track to Chain of Memories.

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Game Ramblings #90 – Super Neptunia RPG

More Info from Idea Factory

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Steam

I’ve played a bunch of the Neptunia games, and they’re always a nice breather from my typical run of titles. They tend to take a known genre, craft a story around it that makes fun of the genre, and still manage to make a game that more often than not is shallow, but fun. Unsurprisingly, Super Neptunia RPG is more of that style. In this case, they take the 2D overworld movement of something like Muramasa, give it a battle system like any normal 2D JRPG, and manage to spit out a game that works, even with some grinding flaws. In this case, the Neptunia gang get transported to a place in which 3D games are banned, and the entire world is now 2D – and that’s about as serious as this series is ever going to be.

This screen will become your friend throughout the entire game. It gives you everything you need to quickly clear enemies.

Combat is the real focus here, and the entire flow of the game is built around the combat system. The closest description I can come up with is basically this: take the ATB system from SNES Final Fantasies, apply that to your entire party so they share the pool, and have the weakness exploiting of Shin Megami Tensei recharge your ATB pool if you land a weak hit. That combination of mechanics basically has the game working in vastly different ways depending on whether you’re in a trash or boss fight.

For trash fights, the name of the game is completing the battle as quickly as possible by exploiting as many weaknesses as possible. Hit the weakness, keep your ATB, and immediately spam the next attack. By doing this, you can generally complete any weakness-focused battle in seconds. However, this does have a significant problem in the late game.

Ratasteam? Ratasnow? Rataspell? Definitely not Rattata.

Near the end of the game, a lot of the enemies simply stopped having weak points. Any trash fight without weak points plain and simply sucked. Your attack numbers were never really high enough to do large chunking damage on their own, and the ATB meter charging isn’t super fast. Because the meter is shared amongst the entire party, you’re never in a situation in these kinds of fights where you can attack with multiple people. The enemies themselves were generally never dangerous enough to make a risk/reward interesting in whether or not to save ATB charges, so the fights simply dragged out. My tendency ended up being to run from fights without weaknesses, avoid entire regions of battle, and then go to areas with known weaknesses to grind if needed. It just dragged the pace of the last 3-4 hours so much that I wish they’d have balanced the weakness system better to have it be used always at a cost of not being as powerful.

On the other hand, bosses generally had no weaknesses, but were often dangerous, so the risk/reward of saving ATB charges really came into play here. More often than not, I was saving nearly a full meter within a boss fight, then activating either a full attack combo, or some mix of buffs, heals, and spot attacks. This slowed the pace of the fights way down, but also brought them into a place where the strategy more typical of a JRPG was really combing into focus. I wouldn’t say the bosses were ever all that hard, but they were definitely the more interesting of the fights even without exploiting the weakness setup.

Mix Dragon Quest Slimes with Goombas and avoid getting sued? Sure why not.

Luckily, non-battle gameplay was also fairly entertaining. The traversal mechanics and level setup are basically a straight rip of the Vanillaware-style 2D game. Visually, the game has the same sort of hand-drawn-ish, but still very smooth Flash animated characters. The backgrounds are all super colorful with a bunch of parallax layers to fill out the scene. Movement is fast, and with the right amount of exploration you’ll find hidden items or entire hidden areas. As you play through the game, you end up earning more traversal abilities, so going back and revisiting areas has added benefits. If the combat had been in real-time, this would easily have fit in against Odin Sphere or Muramasa, even if it wouldn’t be anywhere on the level of seriousness of those games.

There’s also a bunch of added depth simply in gearing your squad. This game takes the modern Tales of approach of adding acquireable skills to gear, and once earned the skills can be permanently equipped. Their weapons are unique equips, but accessory gear is often shared between party members. In this way I was always playing a balance between finding skills that fit the character’s strengths, while also trying to rush skills that I knew would be beneficial to the entire party. As an example, by end game I’d earned a permanent HP refresh (1% heal per ATB bar generated) across my entire party, so rather than having to have a dedicated full time healer, I was able to craft my party into a mixed physical/magical damage rush party with only weak heals to fill out during burst damage times.

All that being said, there’s really not a whole lot of depth to the rest of the experience. The gameplay is all solid, but the game is less than 20 hours long. There’s definitely a lot of side quests, but they’re all of the gather x thing / kill y enemy variety. You could probably entirely ignore them and get by just fine. Even in combat, you could squeak by without paying any attention at all to the weakness system, although it would probably take a significantly longer amount of time to finish. However, as a breather between serious games this one really hit a good mark. It’s enough of a game to still be fun to play, strong enough mechanically to be interesting enough, and have a stupid enough story to let me just enjoy the comedy for what it is. Is this going to win any game of the years? Unlikely. However, it does exactly what it needed to do – be fun.