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.

Game Ramblings #89 – Cadence of Hyrule: CRYPT OF THE NECRODANCER FEAT. THE LEGEND OF ZELDA

More Info from Brace Yourself Games

  • Genre: Rhythm RPG
  • Platform: Switch

This is definitely one of those games that I assumed would work when it was announced, but you can never really be sure. Outside of the obvious rhythm gameplay of Crypt of the Necrodancer, it’s not that far off of Zelda. It’s still basically an action RPG with a bunch of inventory. It still encourages you to romp through effectively dungeons to progress. It’s god a damn good soundtrack. But still, this is Zelda. Somehow this has come out and feels great, feeling like each of their series at the same time without losing anything in the process.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a screenshot of a standard Zelda 2D title, but that little bar at the bottom is where it starts to separate itself.

The screenshot above does a good job of visually laying out how much things are the same, but totally different. On the surface, this looks like a 2D Zelda-series RPG. There’s some familiar looking enemies, a normal item wheel, hearts, rupees, keys, a slightly angled camera viewpoint. However, that little bar at the bottom and the specifics of the grid are where you start getting the Necrodancer gameplay.

Like Necrodancer, any movement or attack is most effective when done on the beat of the music. At the same time, enemies also move and attack on the beat, so you’ve got a play around keeping on eye on what you’re doing and an eye on the enemies to make sure you aren’t getting trapped. While it’s technically a turn-based game as a result, the practical pace is really close to an action RPG and it ends up straddling the line between familiar and new really well.

Combat is also a bit different than expected for a Zelda game, mostly due to a large unexpected variety in ways to attack. Each character that you control has its own specialty, and you can swap between Link, Zelda, or Necrodancer’s Cadence at any time once you reach them. You’ve still got your Link-style broadsword attacks that hit a wide line in front of the player. However, you can also use spears for extended range straight attacks, flails for L-shaped AoE style attacks, or daggers for real close-range combat. Even on defense you have more variety than just Hylian shields, with characters like Zelda able to activate a projectile-reflecting magic shield if timed correctly. You can even add modifiers to your weapons like health drain or poison to add some additional flexibility to your loadout.

The positive outcome of all of this is that I really spent time modifying my gear loadout and character selection based on what I knew would be most beneficial to me at the time. Early on I went more spear-focused in order to keep enemies at a larger range from me. As I gained some hearts and defensive items, I started moving into broadswords in order to take out more than one enemy at a time, even if it allowed them to get closer at range and occasionally hit me. As a whole it ends up in a battle system that has tremendously good flow due to the rhythm focus, but still has a ton of ways to play to your strengths at any time in a way very reminiscent of high end ARPGs.

It definitely helps that there’s a lot of familiar things in the gameplay though despite all the changes. You’ve still got to save up your rupees to buy things in shops. You’ve still got to visit Kakariko Village to move forward. Hell, you’ve still got to get lost in Lost Woods as part of your quest. However, through it all the focus on rhythm gameplay really feels like a fun fresh take on the Zelda formula.

And oh boy that soundtrack. The Zelda soundtracks on their own are really special, and really familiar to a lot of gamers. Living up to that alone is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. However, the need to really hit a music pace that allows for a good gameplay pace added a level of technical need that the team really nailed. The familiar Zelda themes are morphed into new genres – whether it’s jazzier takes on the main theme or Song of Storms, or more dance-based overworld themes, or even rock-focused takes on the Gerudo Valley theme – that really push a fast gameplay pace while still being fantastic takes on familiar themes. This is the rare game where the soundtrack alone is worth the price of purchase, but you still get a great game on top of it.

It also helps that the bosses are punny as hell.

This is definitely a game out of left field. While Necrodancer on its own is a fantastic game, the fact that Nintendo allowed for the Zelda license to run wild in the Necrodancer universe. What ends up coming out of it is something that just works fantastically well – as long as you’re comfortable in the rhythm style. Is this going to be a replacement for the upcoming Link’s Awakening remake? No not really. Is this better than I could have hoped for as a way to get more Necrodancer content? You better believe it.

Game Ramblings #62.1 – Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country

More Info from Nintendo

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was a fairly enjoyable game overall. It had a great universe, enjoyable story, fun characters, and a ton of depth. However, it wasn’t without its issues. The game, like its predecessors was somewhat grindy. The UI was often in the way of streamlined leveling. Overall, despite its depth, the game often felt like it was pushing for more for the sake of more.

Torna however feels like they really embraced the idea of less is more, and the experience is much better as a result. This is an entirely standalone experience, billed as an expansion. It’s a much shorter experience with a significantly streamlined story, rips outs a whole bunch of extraneous systems to focus the leveling aspect, and narrows you onto two main titans. Some clever changes to the battle system really finish up the tweaks, and the total package ends up being much better than the base game, despite the reduction in bullet point features.

Welcome to Torna. After hearing so much about this land in the original game, it’s nice to finally be able to run around on it.

The most obvious immediate change is that almost all of the blade collecting, and therefore a lot of the metagame leveling is gone. You only get blades that are important to the story, and each party member ends up having two blades of different types. By the end of the expansion, you’ve basically got exactly what you need to finish the game with the full suite of ability types. There’s also no longer any special blades, no multi form blades, any robot blade replacements, and no mercenary guild to level up. This all sounds like a lot of removal, but that also meant that a lot of the tedious grind simply went away. It’s entirely addition by subtraction.

The rest of the leveling setup is maintained. You get XP from kills and quests, weapon points from kills, skill points from kills, and various things can be activated in each blade’s affinity chart. As a core set this ends up playing a nice balance between having a nice range of systems without having too many, and also gives you some specific subgoals to focus on, particularly with respect to the blade affinities.

Combat should feel extremely familiar to XC2 fans, though it has some tweaks.

The battle system has also been tweaked to generally feel more streamlined, as well as a fair bit quicker paced. For the most part, people familiar with XC2 will drop in quickly and feel right at home, and I suspect they will like the changes in place.

The first big change is that blade swapping is used as a way to switch the active passive attacker, and swapping between the blades and the driver activate an attack on swap. This is used to inflict a number of status effects, particularly things like topple or smash, as well as providing a full recharge of the blade artes. In practice, it basically means that you can do a combo as follows:

  • Activate Break on one character while using all of their artes.
  • Swap to another character to inflict Topple and quickly use the full suite of artes.
  • While this is happening, the AI will typically inflict Launch
  • Swap to the third character to inflict Smash, finishing a full chain combo.

This pattern is done way faster than any similar combo would have been done in the original release. In also having the blades be the primary attacker, there’s a much more direct feel to the swap, instead of it simply being the blade out of frame swapping out.

The elemental orb / chain attack setup has also been tweaked a bit to reduce clutter. There are still orbs applied on successful blade artes, elemental orbs can be broken in a final combo attack, etc. However, the elemental chaining no longer is used to seal attacks, so a big UI element that I generally ignored is no longer there, and honestly I didn’t miss it at all.

This is still a spectacularly gorgeous game, especially for an open-world Switch experience.

So in the end, this is both a great expansion on the XC2 universe, as well as a way to generally improve on the overall gameplay at the same time. As a prequel, this covers a bunch of story that was hinted at throughout the original game in a way that only improves the universe. On its own that’s enough for me to recommend it to fans of the original. However, the gameplay improvements definitely clinch it for me. This is a much better experience than XC2, and it’s clear that the dev team is learning some lessons from their past releases. Here’s to hoping whatever comes next continues that improvement.