Nayu's Gaming Time #18 Dragon Quest Builders 2 Demo First Impressions!

Seeint this screen was a magical moment!

SQUEEEEE!!!!! 

It felt like such a long wait when the demo downloaded!

The fangirl in me is over the moon (which is a bizarre phrase) with joy at getting my hands on this demo a bit after 3pm yesterday. Bless Japan and their midnight eshop releases! For context please see my early review of DQB's first game in August. It is my favourite game ever and I am so hyped for the sequel, as some of you saw earlier this week in this excited post. 

It is the demo so I don't know how much I will get to play, but oh it is so AMAZING!!!! It is everything I wanted and so much more. There's been a lot of improvement for the entire game, not that the first one was a bad game. There are a ton of new features which I haven't experienced yet, but here is what I loved: 

Oh, if you follow me on Twitter (link in the side bar) you will be inundated with gaming tweets especially for this game. Blame the switch for making it so easy to post screenshots! I apologise for spoilers but I want to promote this game as much as I can! I'd game on Youtube if talking wasn't so tiring for me, hence the frequent game status tweets when I play it. 

New features I love

• Water droplets lasting a second or two after you've been in the water and/or looked around with the camera in the water. 

Water droplets on the screen, plus water blocks are now blocks rather than plain water

• Water blocks. How water is done in this game is way better than the previous game (which was fun, but in the sequel you can actually use water a lot more). 

• Character design: I loved the old one, but the two pony tails/bunches are adorable! 

• The fact that when sleeping my character snores which is exactly how my cat Belle snores!

• Menu layout: I loved the old one, but the new one is cool and it's easier to build multiple items rather than doing them one at a time. 

Menu!

• Companions help me out by chopping up items

Cute starfish in the sea!

• The new range of items: really excited to decorate my houses with starfish and shells for buildings by the beach! 

• The dash mode: being able to run fast for a decent amount of time, and for the recharge to be quick is a blessing. 

Features I'm not fond of/have minor issues with

• Character design: I hate hoop earrings in real life, and I hate having them on my character. Doubt there will be a way to change them - sigh. 
•  

• Companions helping me out: while it may sometimes be useful for them to copy my actions, them chopping up ittems that I wanted to keep whole is not fun! 

• How items are held: I'm fairly certain that in the first game, whatever I held above my head be it a block or an item, it was fairly close to my head. Whenever I do this in the sequel's demo it looks like I've mastered the ability to levitate items. It's amusing, I'm hoping it may be an error that's fixed in the full game, but I'm doubtful about it.  

You can see the dialogue here

 The game is taking me longer than the English version to play, because I'm reading the Japanese, and I'm a slow reader. The fact they are using furigana on the kanji (letters above the words that aren't spelled out using other letters) makes it so much easier to understand what the words mean, saving me looking them up. I don't know them all, but so long as I get the gist of the sentence I'm okay with that. The furigana is a bit small, I've yet to play on the big screen, but them being there at all is a miracle. Whenever I'm not entirely sure of a word I simply make up what I think it could be! I've had a few amusing times thanks to mistranslation: there's one part on the pirate ship where I had to put down some flaming torches. I mistakenly thought I had to put a whole load around a hole in the deck. When nothing happened I looked about and realised thanks to little pointers on screen I was meant to place the torches on specific blocks! Another mistake was where to place some barrels. Ho hum! 

exploration!

I am getting the full game in Japanese, and in truth it will be a long time after the release of the game in English that I'll get that version due to the expense. I suspect I will get the DLC for the JP ver, and possibly get the JP online subscription so I can see what other people do. I'm not great at building, although I enjoy it a lot, so I am starting to watch Youtube guides for ideas on how to create structures. I want to get better at building! 

Spoiler alert 

One thing which you need to be aware of is that the game is a lot sadder than the previous one. Several of the characters you meet on the ship die, including my beloved slime! Seeing it dead in the water was horrifying, more so when it just disappeared, an action commonly seen in anime. I was traumatised by the experience because the slimes are my favourite monster! I suspect that's not the only tragedy I'll witness in the game, unfortunately. To prevent total spoiling I'm not including the images here.

Spoiler end

I can't seem to work out how to do multiple saves: there's an autosave, and a generic save but there's only one slot for it. So I've done a lot of exploring without saving to see what there is, because my hunger meter is present from the very start of the game (unlike the first game which had the hunger meter take time to appear) and because I haven't quite completed the quests I don't have a permanent source of food yet. 

The characters are hilarious, they use a variety of speech patterns which I can recognise in Japanese. I'm in love with the girl Lulu, she is quite a character and I'm hoping nothing bad happens to her. I do wish I could have her pretty dress though. 

That's it for my initial thoughts on this demo: I hope you've enjoyed it and if you want 'live' reactions come follow me on Twitter! The full game is out 20th December on the Japan Eshop. Unlike other games which sometimes use their English form, this is purely in Japanese. Let me know if you're getting the Japenese version or waiting until the English version is released! 

Holo the Wise wolf from Spice and Wolf wishes you a good day!