.: Meri :.
party!!
It's rare for me to start and finish a game in so short a span of time, but holiday break + extremely good game led me to put 70+ hours into Dragon Quest Builders. Apparently Dragon Quest's take on Minecraft-esque sandblox style gameplay with an added tower defense game element is right up my alley! The main game is broken up into four standalone chapters, each with exclusive items and gameplay elements. They switch up the formula each time, so the game never became stale for me, and I never found myself repeating the exact same steps I took in previous chapters.
I will say that the final bosses of the first two chapters felt more tedious than anything to me—the Cantlin Golem has a weird hitbox where the bombs are concerned, and in Chapter 2 for the love of god don't be like me and build your ballista tower way off-center because I could not hit the Hades Condor to save my life. :') I had to reload and build the whole thing all over again, this time over the central banner, and had zero trouble with the ballistae after that askdjsdlf
But I had a lot more fun with the bosses of the last two chapters, and overall I felt like this game was nicely challenging!
My only wish (and may even be something that changes in Builders 2, which I haven't played yet) is that after completing a chapter the town border would be removed/random monster raids would stop occurring. I never felt like I had enough room in town for everything I wanted to do (not everybody got the luxury of having their own room ), and building solely for myself/random generic NPCs in Terra Incognita just isn't scratching that itch for me. I would've liked to continue expanding on Cantlin, Rimuldar, etc. beyond the initial border zone and really max out the NPCs' quality of life.
But all in all, great game, very much worth the hours I put into it. I might come back to play Terra Incognita mode more in the future, but I don't think I'm quite in the mood for it at the moment.
I will say that the final bosses of the first two chapters felt more tedious than anything to me—the Cantlin Golem has a weird hitbox where the bombs are concerned, and in Chapter 2 for the love of god don't be like me and build your ballista tower way off-center because I could not hit the Hades Condor to save my life. :') I had to reload and build the whole thing all over again, this time over the central banner, and had zero trouble with the ballistae after that askdjsdlf
But I had a lot more fun with the bosses of the last two chapters, and overall I felt like this game was nicely challenging!
My only wish (and may even be something that changes in Builders 2, which I haven't played yet) is that after completing a chapter the town border would be removed/random monster raids would stop occurring. I never felt like I had enough room in town for everything I wanted to do (not everybody got the luxury of having their own room ), and building solely for myself/random generic NPCs in Terra Incognita just isn't scratching that itch for me. I would've liked to continue expanding on Cantlin, Rimuldar, etc. beyond the initial border zone and really max out the NPCs' quality of life.
But all in all, great game, very much worth the hours I put into it. I might come back to play Terra Incognita mode more in the future, but I don't think I'm quite in the mood for it at the moment.