 What? I've seen you in days, oh god. Oh my god. Look at me. It's like crap. You have food on your face. I know. But when's the last time you showered? I know. What? It's the game, man. Yes, that's enough of that. We're gonna, yeah. You need to fix whatever is happening here. Like what? My life is meaningless without DQB. Wow, thanks. Okay. Like this. Don't you have like videos to do? I mean, I put out that Mario Maker video. That was, that was, that was okay. Nobody cares about Mario Maker anymore. Yeah, that's true. Okay, fine. I'll make the freaking video. Can you at least pass me my pants? You're wearing pants? No pants. I gotta tell you, it feels great to be addicted to another Switch game. A game so great, I went ahead and bought it twice. Eventually once Kim's. And she hasn't even opened it yet. So hopefully I convince you guys to buy this game better than I convinced her apparently to even open it. Okay, I realize at this point I've made quite a few videos about games that I'm addicted to. I kind of spun it into a series when I realized that it was apparently clickbait that worked. And while every time I've made one of those videos, I truly did love those games and I couldn't stop playing them at the time. But the very first time I made one of those videos, I had no idea that title was gonna do as well as it did. The only reason I named that video I was addicted to this game was because I truly was very addicted to that game. And that was the point I wanted to make. So needless to say, the sequel had a lot to live up to. Every single shot of every promotional material I saw of the game featured something new. Something different that I hadn't seen before. And I guess the biggest one I was most excited about, you know, other than building mine cart tracks around my houses, what's the online game to play this game with friends? Because the one thing that's better than building an entire woodtopia for me to enjoy is for other people to come in and see the things that I have created. I haven't stopped the game released on July 12th and you might have realized I have not made a new video since then. It's been like six, seven days at this point. I gotta tell you, I have never seen that low battery symbol appear on my Switch more than I have in the last week. It's about to die right now. I literally just charged it a tiny bit so that it could at least be on for a little part of this video. And I'm not even kidding, the last few nights I have been dreaming about the game. So, I mean, again, I know I make a lot of these videos about addictions. This one's real. And I could just generally gush about how generally great the game is. I'm not actually talking about any specifics and just say, hey, go buy it. Or I could shut up and just talk about the things I actually like about the game and what makes it so good. So I'm gonna do that and pretty much start the video now. I do have to have a small disclaimer here. I kind of screwed up my preparation for this video in a way. So here's the thing. Here's what my plan was this entire time. Been playing the game up at night in my bed on my tablet mode and I haven't recorded any of it because my plan this entire time was to beat the freaking story mode and then spend a day recording footage on my island creating things for you to see. But apparently the story in this game never freaking ends. And from a gamer standpoint, that's great. I'm loving it. It just keeps on going and it keeps getting better and better. But from a content creator standpoint that had this plan in mind from the start, it's been kind of frustrating. I'm not gonna lie. Every night I am up for hours slugging away at this story, trying to knock it out so that I can actually film what I needed to film for this video. Now it's been like a week. So this is my way of saying none of the footage in this video is actually gonna be mine. Sucks that I don't have any. I really screwed the pooch on this one. I do prefer playing in handheld mode though. So I mean, what can you do? Okay, so this game is literally insane. It's one of the biggest games I've personally ever dived into and really wanted to flesh out. And the more I play, the more I keep discovering. It's overwhelming and exhilarating. But before we get to the meat and potatoes of the game, which is the entire mechanic that is the game's namesake, building, I want to leave the building aside for now and come back to it. And I first want to talk about the story campaign and its missions. For two reasons. One, it's freaking fantastic. It not only serves as a way to teach you about all the different elements in the game, like how to mine, farm, craft and build, but the story is filled with extremely likable characters, incredible writing and a huge variety of missions to complete. And the other reason I want to talk about it first, ties into that reason too. Because I think many people who don't typically enjoy crafting games might be putting off trying this one just based on the fact that I don't really like games like Minecraft mindset. And now I'm not comparing these two games because everyone has their preferences of course, but I think what a lot of people don't realize is that builders does have a fully structured campaign. And I mean, when you think about it, it's kind of obvious. I mean, that's the Dragon Quest part of Dragon Quest Builders, right? The traditional Dragon Quest games are fantastic JRPGs and Builders takes exactly that format and presents it in a very similar way that just so happens to also be focused all around the building. So if you think you're going to miss out on a great Dragon Quest story in this title, you would be wrong. Oh, and if you're worried about the length of the game, don't be. The story itself will not be beaten in a day or two as I said, I've been playing it nonstop since the game released pretty much purely just the story mode and I'm still nowhere close. Not to mention the game itself doesn't really ever end. Even once you completed the main goals, you then still have the rest of the game to yourself to build, explore and create and even destroy whatever you want. And now with whoever you want, thanks to the online but I'm getting slightly ahead of myself. Let me pull it back a bit. So the story has you start on a ship with a bunch of bad guys keeping you hostage. Well, I say bad guys, they're actually, they're weirdly nice, but they're keeping you hostage because you're a builder and building in this universe is against the rules. At least according to the weird cult religion that this world has. You do a bunch of errands for these bad guys to help set up the world and teach you the basics and then of course, as you would probably expect, the ship crashes into an island. You wake up on this island and essentially everyone is passed away other than yourself, a character named Malroth who you get to know very well as he follows you by your side throughout the entire game and the third still alive person on this island is Lulu. So your character is a builder and you have some very basic building skills just enough to stay alive on this island you're now marooned on. You meet a couple other really interesting characters, one of them's this weird ghost guy with a mallet who gives you a giant hammer and then this dude with a boat rocks up and now you can start traveling to other islands and the main islands in this game are where the bulk of the story will take place. But around all of that, there's a ton of other wacky side things going on and then the actual story itself is way more fleshed out. All the individual characters have such bright personalities and something I really appreciate in this game. Every character's dialogue is written so well and in such different ways that it just brings every character to life even though you can't actually hear a voice. And despite the amount of things you have to craft and build, every new mission feels really fresh and just kept the game moving along. I loved when my character would come up with these hugely elaborate blueprint designs and then I had to go to work finding the materials for them and try and build this crazy bar with a neon sign and a giant pole in the middle of it. And I don't want to ruin too much of it so I guess I'll keep it short but it's a really fun campaign that'll have you traversing all kinds of different landscapes even going into caves and completing dungeons, trials and challenges and puzzles, all the while learning new recipes and building new creations. And through all the combat, the leveling up, the great game design, so often during the story, you forget you're even playing a building crafting game and it just feels like you're playing a great JRPG. Because of how enjoyable it is and just the pacing of it, it is addicting in itself. You just want to keep completing the next task and then as soon as you get that next task, you're like, eh, I could finish that before bed. And you just keep on going and going and going until your switch tells you your battery is dying and you realize it's 4 in the morning and you should probably go to bed. And yeah, I wanted to stress the story beyond the endless fun that is building and crafting. You're wrong, because it does have an entire huge massive story tied to it as well. And the amount of stuff they created for this story mode, let alone the sheer length of it, it's just so impressive. I don't know how, it's just so much care and detail went into this game. And I appreciate it so much. Okay, at this point, probably goes without saying, but even in regards to the building, this game is so much bigger than the last with countless quality of life improvements that make the entire building experience so much more enjoyable. There is such a huge focus now on terraforming. The first game was very much about building the rooms and the items and the objects within the game. Which, of course, in the sequel, all of that is bigger and better too. But now, you can also create entire landscapes. Massive rivers, lakes and oasis forests, you name it. You have an entire huge island to run wild on and they give you all the tools possible to make everything as easy as it can be. Like for making water, you have an endless pot that you can fill with any kind of liquid. Since in this game, you're going to want to be building everything bigger and better than the last one, tools like these are just, they help so much. And there are so many new materials and items to craft. I don't even know where to begin with this one. It feels like there's close to a hundred, if not more, different kinds of terrain and just basic building blocks. From the ones you find in the world, sand all the way through clay and earth. And then the ones you create, like the golden steel blocks. It's one of the many things that make this game feel massive. It's just the amount of different land. On top of that, you have a lot more plant and animal life, loads of new crops to grow, more objects to craft, town management elements, it just never seems to end. There's not enough time in the day, in the week, in the month, to do everything in this game, especially not all at once or at the same time. Which is why, for a lot of it, NPCs will help you out. Like, if you stick a scarecrow down in the ground where you want to build a farm, and they'll come along and prep the land for you, so all you have to do is throw the seeds in, they'll even water them and take care of them for you. You can just tell them what you want to grow there and then leave the seeds in a chest nearby and they'll even plant it for you. There's a lot of things, I mean, I could talk about it all day. Again, in the vein of just making things easier for you. In this sequel, you don't always have to be chasing down basic elements, like wood or grass, if you want to make a door there are ways you can actually get unlimited resources of certain materials. You go to islands and you play, like, wildlife bingo, running around and looking at certain things and crossing them off a checklist. At first, I thought it might take something away from the experience, you know, having an unlimited resource that I don't have to farm, especially since I unlocked it pretty early on in the game. But again, there is just so much to do. Constantly in two minds about what to do in any given moment with so many plans and goals that you want to complete running around like a headless chicken. It was actually nice to not have to keep running to the trees to get wood on top of everything else that was going on. I know I keep going on about how much bigger and better this game is because it really is my main takeaway from the game and what I'm most excited to talk about, so to kind of just give you a better understanding of it and just put it to rest here. If you played the first game, even if you didn't, you know how you had, like, a set amount of inventory spots and you saw them on the screen right here, you had, like, 10 or 12, something like that. And as you played, as you were out in the world collecting things, it would fill up pretty quickly. You'd have to run back home and then throw them in the chest for safekeeping and then go out again and collect some more. That would not be the case in this game. If you only had these slots, you would be running back every two seconds because, again, the insane amount of different individual items you could find, make, craft, all of that, that's just not enough slots. You would be constantly having a bounce between chests and just trying to manage it all. It would be frustrating and it wouldn't be fun. So in this game, they've given you a huge sack that just contains an unreasonable, unrealistic amount of stuff, but it's it's just so necessary. You could throw anything into this sack and then when your inventory spaces fill up, it just automatically gets thrown into the sack. Look how many extra slots this is. That seems like at first, like, overkill. Like, look how many more I've got. Then you find out there's actually seven pages of this in the bag. You have seven of these. It's like times a hundred the storage space to carry on your person, just to contain this world. Oh man, I've been filming this for like an hour and a half now and I'm really getting to the point where I'm trying to pick and choose the things I talk about because there's just so much which just even confirms my follow-up video on this game. But I guess the last thing I want to talk about is actually a pretty big change to the game. So in this one, you have, as I said, Malroth, that NPC who's pretty much glued to your hip and will follow you around the entire game. At first, and by at first I mean like the first like 10 minutes, I didn't know how I felt about that. I was like, I don't know, I kind of like just going out there enjoying my own thing and feeling like this is my adventure. But instantly, I loved having this guy with me and it's not because I really enjoy his character, which I do, like the camaraderie he has with my character. They high five every time they get a level up. It's adorable. But that's not why I fell in love with having him around. So the combat in this game, it's kind of a means to an end. It's not bad. I have no complaints with it. But I mean, you know, it kind of is just you mash the attack button and that's about it. They added a couple things in it, like you and Malroth can do special finishes now, but it doesn't really, it doesn't change that much. I mean, the most fun in the combat for me is actually just crafting your weapons and your armor. But Malroth, even self proclaimed, is your bodyguard, essentially. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't make hard fights any less challenging. But at least for the going around and exploring, if you see like a bunch of enemies and you want to fight with them, Malroth will start fighting them too. And when he kills an enemy, he'll also pick up whatever it is that enemy drops and you get it in your inventory. That goes the same for anything you want to mine or destroy around the world to get the item from it. He knows what it is that I'm looking for in that moment. Whatever it is I'm attacking, he'll automatically go around and find those things too and pick their items up. And I just can't stress enough how much more there is to do in this game. And anything that can help you along the way is a bonus. It's just made so many of the base things easier for you. And you still have to do them in most cases. You just have other people helping you do it too. I guess I'll leave it here. But there is one more thing I want to add to it. If you're still not convinced to try this game out for yourself and I, oh man, there's a demo on the eShop of both of these games. But I guess the last thing I'll say to try and sell it to people, I guess, that maybe are still, just still aren't sure on the crafting side of it. This game reminds me so much of Zelda. And actually, a lot of Breath of the Wild. And I know I said this in my first video, but I mean it even more now. I think in my first video, I compared this game to a mix of like Minecraft meets Dragon Quest meets Zelda. I think that's the three, the trio I compared. Someone left to go back and tell me what I said. And it still very much is that combination. But I feel like they borrowed a lot more from Zelda and Breath of the Wild in general. I don't know where to start with the comparisons. This game has a much heavier push to exploration. In the previous game, it was kind of just enemies and then mission stuff. But in this game, there's actually a lot of hidden secrets and challenges. First thing that reminds me of Zelda, they almost essentially added the shrines, the challenge shrines. You don't actually go into anything. They're just kind of scattered across the world. Mostly a building puzzle you'll have to solve. You have to put a block in a certain place or remove blocks or kind of like color match stuff. It's also much more elaborate ones. It's more focused on the platforming. You have to get to a certain place. And then when you solve the shrine challenge thing, you get a medallion and when you take that medallion to a guy, he'll give you an upgrade. It just feels very much like the shrines. And then when you're trying to find these shrines or just explore the world in general, they give you a glider. They give you a windbreaker. It essentially works exactly like in Breath of the Wild except it doesn't take your stamina, which I really like that. And it's just so much fun. And obviously traversing the huge environments just makes it so much easier. Ah, there's dungeons. And I know there's no dungeons in Breath of the Wild, but these dungeons remind me a lot of the traditional Zelda dungeons. One in particular was the Underground Caverns Lava dungeon that had you solving a bunch of puzzles, opening chests to get keys, and then beating bosses. It just felt very ocarina of time. I was almost getting like weird nostalgia playing it. I loved it. I said this in my first video, but the base combat itself feels very much like Link to the Past combat where you just sorta swing your sword. And then the boss battles just feel very inspired by Zelda bosses. It has very similar charm and mechanics. Oh and the last one, it might be kind of a stretch. I'm not sure how similar to Zelda you would classify this, but there's a friggin' ocarina in the game, so I mean, you use this ocarina to find hidden pockets of like gold and diamonds and stuff like that. The sound bounces off of the metal. So it's not really used in a Zelda-ish way. I just thought it was funny because up until this point in the game I've been feeling like this. Like it's so much like Zelda. I like this. This is fun. And then when I unlocked the ocarina I was playing this little tune that sounded a lot like, well I mean probably just how an ocarina sounds, but of course sounded a lot like a lot of the Zelda songs I grew up with and it just didn't help but bring that entire feeling together of ah, this feels very Zelda. I mean, if Nintendo ever did take Zelda the franchise and make a crafting builder game out of it this is honestly exactly what I would imagine that to look like, except with a Zelda skin rather than a Dragon Quest skin. In fact, that could very easily happen. I mean Nintendo's been lending their franchises and Zeldas to anyone worthy enough. So I could definitely see Square giving builders a Zelda skin and you being able to build your own Hyrule and your own Hyrule Castle. I'm actually thinking about this now for the first time but it it works. It really works. Anyway, I think I've realized what it is that has drawn me to love these games so much. Other than the games themselves and how great they are and everything I've said and the fact that I do get addicted to them. I've been playing games since I was a kid and I obviously have a load of favorites. Most of them are my favorites from my childhood and it's hard to recreate that magic now as an adult. It's not as common now that I find a game that I emotionally react to as much as I did when I discovered gaming for the first time. But I think it's a perfect combination of the fact that these games are so great in the first place and the fact that I completely excluded myself from any kind of crafting or building game before because I didn't think I would enjoy it. It's just a perfect storm I guess which made the Dragon Course Builders series weirdly one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time. I guess it's not that weird. It's weird if you know me. Super smash it with a like, have flip all over that subscribe button, leave some kind of comment down below. Like, are you enjoying the game? What do you think of the game? Are you intrigued by the game? Might you pick the game up now you watch this video or do you hate the game? Do you loathe the game? Do you want to stay even further away from the game after this video? That would be kind of mean. I did my best. I got a build! A brick. House.