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It seems like years and years ago I made some sort of vague promise to myself that I would get around to Dragon Quest. After all, as things go it’s a long running interesting series. Having inspired an entire genre, spinoffs, homages my dumb ass has missed, it’s surprising I haven’t. There’s just so little time to play every big piece, every odd little piece of software.
Recently, someone I looked up to years ago stepped down from an important creative position. It wasn’t the usual case – no one was harmed in the making of their Content. In that farewell though, they said something that cut me open. It was about feeling like they had spent too long writing about experiences and not enough time living them. That’s the anxiety.
The fear.
Somewhere or something will cause the voice to run out. We will look down into the well and find it empty. Maybe a crack in the bottom, maybe we were too generous with how much we drank. This all sounds like insufferable artist shit. Forgive me, I’ve been editing college kids homework.
That’s a lie.
I’ve been writing essays for college kids that are too busy. I haven’t edited anything.
DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS 2 is the highly (this is not a joke!) anticipated sequel to, well, DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS. It is, besides another spinoff – the only Dragon Quest game I have ever gone out of my way to actually sit down and play. I made it through the entire first area.
I built:
1. A simulated rice paddy area.
2. An underground hovel that feels like an area in a PS1 Dungeon Crawler.
3. A river.
This is all what anyone else could make. Dragon Quest Builders is brilliant by recontextualizing the path of an RPG through freeform creation.
You are given a world that has been decimated by monsters. The people look to you, and hope springs eternal (and hopefully so does your imagination). Everything Minecraft didn’t do until other people bought the company and tried to turn it into a videogame, with rules and goals.
Dragon Quest Builders 2 works better.
Twenty hours into transforming a desert into a verdant paradise. Scrolling through pages and pages of incredible constructions all made by people around the world, I got nervous.
Anxious. The well was suddenly full, but only of guilt. The kind of guilt that pulls you in and chokes your throat, freezes your muscles. Was this going to be it?
The twenty hours I’d spent mining, fighting. Jumping to the highest mountain and sailing off of it over the blocky landscape below. All of it was for nothing. More of a waste than the desert I started building in hours ago.
Was I being selfish? It’s true that I’ve squandered creative time in my life. Not a year goes by that I don’t flagellate myself for wasting time. Hiding out in bedrooms and dive bars, shows. Growing old in rooms full of kids with unruly haircuts; that is what a song I really enjoy would say. No one really gets through life and gets to make everything they want.
Bad teachers tell kids to know their audience, that they never really can. Dreams are important, but more important is a roof over your head. Here I am, thinking I’ve been poisoned by all of the roofs over my head. But the spontaneous act of pointless creation. Of drifting away in systems designed by other people to raise castles and villages out of nothing, it hurts.
DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS 2 know how to get the player. It’s quirky and charming. It appeals just as well to bumblers as it does to the grinders among us. New recipes are revealed by a silly animation and a musical chime. These charms and animations replace a spontaneous sense of discovery. Dragon Quest Builders is about giving you tools. Every little chime means something new, every reached goal a cornucopia of new bricks.
Gamification of creativity is something that will never go away. If anything, I have a deep set fear that the geniuses and surely bleary eyed staff at Square Enix may perfect it. It all hurts though, it all takes so much fucking time. Why build a castle for an audience of no one when we may be better served building experiences we can share?
Do I need to be distracted this much? Or is all of the distraction finally bulding up to some sort of breaking point. All of the Terraria’s and Minecrafts molding together until none of them matter.
What I mean is…all of Dragon Quest Builders 2 feels good. As a videogame. None of Dragon Quest Builders 2 feels good as a Toy. It’s so wrapped up in being a good game that it never let me cool off once – always telling me to go here or build this or do this. This isn’t creation as an act of joy.
At least not when I want to be out there, experiencing something new, and coming home to make something worth sharing about it besides the kinds of castles that will only ever be haunted by me.
DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS 2 is 0/5 OF IMAGINATION
AND FOR SOMEONE OUT THERE, A 5/5 VIDEOGAME.