Previously: 2016 2017
* indicates a repeat
1. Tyranny (PC)
2. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (PC)
3. SUPERHOT (PC)
4. Hotline Miami (PC)*
5. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (PC)
6. Mario X Rabbids Kingdom Battle (Switch)
7. Nine Parchments (Switch)
8. X-com: UFO Defense (PC)
9. Chocobo Racing (PS1)
10. Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak (GBA)
11. Dragon Quest Builders (PS4)
Bogus has been talking in the Slack chat for a good couple weeks about how much fun he's been having with this game. I've had it for a while, and he finally convinced me to give it a go, and I'm very glad I did! It's certainly an odd gameplay mechanic and genre combo given the series, but just as with Mario X Rabbids Kingdom Battle, just because it looks odd at first doesn't mean it isn't a great game underneath. The game took me about 50 some odd hours to beat, and that was exploring every land and trying to find all the hidden stuff and side objectives in each of the four chapters.
The overall premise is basically the plot and setting of Dragon Quest 1 with the mechanics of Minecraft. A quite strange premise to be sure, but damn if it doesn't work well. Minecraft with a plot really doesn't sound engaging, but it is. The gameplay revolves around building up and guarding a town and doing quests for the villagers inside it. These quests often revolve around either collecting some resource for them or building a very specific building via a blueprint they provide. Gathering resources and building are intimately tied to fighting monsters, who play a dual role of both routinely attacking your town (and sometimes destroying large bits of it, if you aren't careful) and being the guardians/sources of required materials. The building, questing, and combat all support and complement one another, and the exploration that facilitates all of it really gives the game great flow where the player is free to set their own pace. You can spend ages making your town as perfectly defensible and/or beautiful as you want, or you can just do the bare minimum of practicality and get onto more exploration and monster-bashing.
The combat is fairly simple, with two types of weapons (hammers with overhead swings and swords with sideways swings) that you can swing ever so fast to do damage to what's in front of you. Weapons have a kind of cadence to their swings, as do monsters to how quickly they can actually take damage, so just mashing the button isn't actually the best way to max out your DPS. The monster damage input only really becomes a problem when you're fighting with your villagers (who will help defend the village and sometimes can be brought out exploring with you as very tough helpers), and the inputs of so many bits of damage can just stop registering when you have three villagers AND you all trying to wail on some bigg'un.
The maps, for the most part, are set in a kind of stone, but are slightly randomly generated. There are certain rare item locations that can be randomized as far as which cave they'll be in, but the world always has the same general look to it as far as where certain geographical and NPC monuments are (mountains, castles, etc). The islands themselves are actually quite faithful recreations of the land masses from Dragon Quest 1, with some obvious exceptions on how some continents are broken up into pieces now (which the game does comment on, but chalks it up to some foul magic of the Dragonlord that we couldn't hope to understand
). The story is, in traditional Dragon Quest fashion, is quite tropey in its Western fantasy setting, but very clever in how it tells its story and has great character writing. The characters are colorful, entertaining, and memorable, and this story proves time and again that just because a character talks/acts silly doesn't mean they can't have a meaningful story behind them. The comedy is also well done, and there were more than a few lines that gave me a big chuckle. There are also quite a few jokes and references (particularly in the last chapter) to other Dragon Quest games or popular JRPG tropes that I couldn't help but take screenshots of
The only real negative slightly odd controls. The controls are really strange. For a game largely about adding and removing features, the place/use hotbar item button is square, while the attack/remove button is triangle. The X button is how you initiate most misc actions (activating crafting stations, opening doors, talking to people, etc) but also how you open up your game menu. Given how often you need to mash a button to break up blocks or break open heads, having triangle as that button while the far easily mashable X button is the seldom used menu button is an extremely strange design choice to me.
Another slight negative is the mission/quest design. Often, you can accomplish several tasks all at once by going to a location. You aren't the fastest runner, so going places can take a little while, and some quest lines ultimately add up to going to the same distant location two to three times consecutively. There's only one or two times in the game this happens that I can remember (out of dozens of quests), but it was still something that I noticed.
The game runs fine and controls fine otherwise. You will get some slight FPS drops if there are a good few monsters on screen in an area with rain effects, but they were very seldom for me and I doubt you would ever encounter it on a PS4 Pro.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you have ever enjoyed Minecraft at all for any length of time, you will likely enjoy this game. I'm sick to death of Minecraft, and I still fell in love with this hard enough to binge through it over the course of like four and a half days. It's a great ARPG and I can't wait for the second one later this year that will add a multiplayer feature <3
