I finally got around to picking up Dragon Quest Builders 2 recently. While initially intending to play it as a side game, over the past month or so, I hit about 100 hours of Dragon Quest Builders 2. Builders 2 is a game that grabs me and holds me firmly put. A session I plan to be a couple of hours lasts five, while a decision to quit takes an hour or two to act on as the just one thing before I do turns into a series of quick 10-15 minute tasks in a real-time equivalent of Civilization's "Just one more turn" phenomenon.
I bounced off of Minecraft quite hard around a decade ago now. It's not that I disliked the game, but the part I enjoyed - Moving from a new world to a semblance of stability (which when I was playing - fairly early beta - basically meant simple tools, a simple hut, and the start of a mine) - took around 3 in-game nights, tops. At which point my brain would, instead of seeing this sandbox to build to my heart's content or go beyond climbing out of the hole the game starts you off in, it would fundamentally shrug and go "...Now what?". Even on those occasions when I had a specific goal going in beyond reaching sustainability, whatever that happened to be, I'd lose interest before obtaining it. There's only a finite amount of times you can start a new world, play it for a couple of hours, tops, and then create another new world before you stop playing altogether.
Meanwhile, Mario Maker and it's sequel Mario Maker 2 is a far more limiting game in what you can make. But it's one that saw me thoroughly enjoying the creation process even if my levels weren't nearly as elaborate as the things some individuals can create in the game's systems. While not as compelling to me as Dragon Quest Builders 2, and I leant more towards playing the creations of others than creating, Mario Maker 2 successfully kept me engaged with the creation process. On some level, the finite scope and natural limits allowed me to enjoy the act of creation in a way that Minecraft didn't.
In Breath of the Wild a single, solitary sidequest exists in which you help to gradually build up a location from a bunch of rocks with a goddess statue in the middle into a small but thriving town. The Tarrey Town questline is one of the most satisfying in the game. Not because of any of the steps within it - they're all mundane, being either resource gathering missions or tasking you with finding specific people in the world - but because the world palpably changes, at least in this one location, in response to your actions. There's no real agency in this process, the buildings are built in a specific order, placed in the places they always go in, and populated by the exact same NPCs - The Tarrey Town that I help to make is the same as the Tarrey Town that you help to build. Your only agency in the process is if you engage with the questline or not. But in this one area, it feels like you're helping to rebuild this ruined world, and that fundamentally feels good.
This isn't the first time a Zelda game has done similar things, of course. Majora's Mask gave just a hint of this. Beating each dungeon's boss fixes whatever large scale problem is faced by one of Termina's regions, opening a few side quests up. A poison swamp might be cleared, a frozen wasteland might thaw, that sort of thing. That is, until you travel back in time, resetting the world and the changes you've made to prevent the moon from crashing into it, destroying everything in the process. This is part of the main narrative and provides some of the game's almost melancholy atmosphere. You make these positive changes, and they feel good. But until the end of the game, anything done is a temporary victory. You take some of the gains with you, but the part that feels nice will be undone. There's also less agency to them than Breath of the Wild's Tarrey Town - They're not even a side quest, you need to make these changes at least once before you can finish the game, and any time you do the exact same changes to the map will be made. But making the change feels like you're making a palpable difference right up until you inevitably reset the game's three-day cycle, undoing what positive change you made tempering the feel good making a positive impact feel with a sense of bittersweetness.
Dragon Quest Builders 2 takes place in a ruined world. The Children of Hargon have taken over this portion of the world, banned building, and you're tasked with rebuilding a town on each island you visit to rebuild and populate the Isle of Awakening, where you first wash up. There's more to the narrative than this, and it goes in some surprising but well-foreshadowed directions, but I don't think the actual narrative matters.
The game is incredibly linear - You and your partner character, Malroth, head off from the isle of awakening to an isolated island, find the remnants of something that once was far greater, and proceed to help rebuild it. In the process of doing this, you spread the joy of building back to this island and defeat the monster in charge of it. Then you travel back to the Isle of Awakening, do some mandatory building tasks there, as many optional side tasks as you like, before going off for the next island and the next chapter. The game's happy to interrupt this cycle when it has a story beat that requires it, but the game doesn't really open up to free play until the post-game, even as it drops you back on the free build area between chapters.
Within the chapters, there are several types of quests, the ones interesting to this discussion being building specific buildings and the overarching missions which connect the quests that happen during them. Usually, you have some agency in how you fulfil these building quests. In most cases, outside of the game's megastructures that serve as the climax to chapters, you're able to pick and choose where you build any blueprints the game gives you, and building non-blueprint rooms are even less restrictive than that. If the game wants you to make a bedroom, it's up to you where it goes, even if the game tells you what that bedroom is going to look like. The missions, meanwhile, tend to be things along the lines of building a small farm. They provide context to the quests you're given, creating a specific goal you're working towards, preventing the quests from feeling entirely arbitrary.
This sense of directed creativity carries back to the Isle of Awakening. Here, instead of quests, you're given tablet targets. The first three are to Build a river, build 10 meadow tiles and 5 forest tiles. The game will walk you through the river (but in a way that leaves a couple of obvious things to improve) and the first five meadow tiles, the rest of where you do those conversions is up to you. That's all you have to do before you can move on with the game, but in so doing you unlock a further 17 optional targets, although some aren't revealed immediately.
This combination of things you've already done and optional targets helps to spawn additional ideas for what to do next on the Isle of Awakening, while also creating a sense of investment and ownership over it. This sort of nudge also exists within the chapter islands. If there aren't enough beds for all the townspeople, you might decide to build more bedrooms even if the game doesn't ask that of you.
Dragon Quest Builders 2 is not a perfect game - Combat feels lacklustre, the questlines are sometimes a bit overly constraining, the boundaries of the bases are awkward to ascertain, and the way rooms combine into larger structures feels finicky. I hope some of these things get improved, should a Dragon Quest Builders 3 get released, but ultimately none of those flaws actually matter. Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a game that perfectly captures something I adore in games, questlines where I can see I'm making a positive impact on a world by having them revolve around building specific things. This also serves to make building games approachable to folk like myself who struggle when given a blank slate despite enjoying the process of making stuff within virtual worlds as a creative outlet.