izigame.me

Like many others, I played this already on the Switch (I don't do mobile games) and played through so many times that I remember basically everything.
By the way, if you didn't play 1 because you skipped the Switch and you're a grown adult like myself who refuses to game on mobile, it's okay. The summary of the game: it's a "what if" of what happened in Dragon Quest 1. And if you never played that game - first of all, shame on you, but...
Dragon Warrior (Quest) 1 was one of the very first games where a choice mattered. You were given this choice by the last boss himself, and making the wrong choice basically gave you Game Over/bad ending. Oh, and did I mention that back then, you couldn't just save before the boss like you whippersnappers can nowadays...so if you decided to take that choice, you were footing it alllllllllll the way back to that island, alllllll the way back to that castle, and allllllll the way back to the boss.
Dragon Quest Builders is basically the playout of that bad ending and you get to experience what happened to the world as a result of that choice, hundreds of years later. It's not required to play Dragon Quest 1, but it definitely helps. Because otherwise the things that happen won't have any impact on you if you're an RPG player at heart. If you do decide to play DQ1 first, it's a very short game; I figure you can complete it in less than 10 hours all told if I recall correctly (there's some grinding in there of course).
What's Good
✅ Graphics are good (part 2 obviously has better graphics because it's part 2, but the detail here is very good)
✅ Framerate is fairly consistent. 60fps is dirt simple, 120fps might be depending on your hardware. In my case it doesn't hold 120fps firm, but it never drops below 70fps and never stays down for more than a few seconds. You might think that's pretty severe, but that's with everything maxed completely out. Draw distance and foliage (possibly due to shadows) seem to be the big hitters, and the game is smooth enough at 60fps that anything more is icing on the cake, frankly. It ran at a fairly consistent 30fps on the Switch, so for me this is an improvement regardless.
✅ QoL improvements are both good and questionable. Let me explain the "good" here and the "not so good" later. Everything feels less tedious overall, and I'm not sure what to chalk that specifically up to. Movement is certainly more fluid, HP has been bumped up (which was needed) and the Big Bash with the mallet makes gathering fixed materials way less dull and dry (because there are so many useful materials everywhere). Also I don't remember being able to run in the Switch version, but I might just be imagining things.
✅ Load times are very brief. The Switch didn't have significant load times either, but these feel even shorter. Quite a feat given how large the game world actually is especially Terra Incognita.
✅ I can't tell if it's just me remembering the Switch version so clearly or that the overall game has been made less challenging, but it certainly feels like things are much easier. Used to be that you wouldn't even be able to get materials for things until the game felt like letting you advance that far; here, I'm never feeling like I'm behind on anything and in fact, have built things in advance because I knew they would be needed later. Obviously things like room types are straight out of memory, but other than that, it's hard to explain why it just feels much more low-key and smooth than it used to.
✅ I might be imagining things, but Kol and Rimuldar feel much more accessible starting out. In the Switch version (and this was kind of the point) you started out with less around to make food, so you would frequently go hungry until you finally found something to cook. The increase in enemies as well as various plants seems to help this a bit. Tantegel is still a bit rough, but it's understandable given what's happened to the world there.
✅ The final weapon in Kol now controls MUCH better. Let me repeat that - MUCH. FRICKIN. BETTER.
✅ Magic carpet - although it's a bit clunky to control, so I ended up not using it much.
✅ Certainly feels like the number of enemies wandering is a lot more than I'm used to.
✅ Terra Incognita. It was always decent good, but a lot's been added that makes it much more entertaining and less of a chore, like the Building Cards (if you've played 2, it's where you can "sketch" a design) that let you share and reuse designs that you find.
✅ NO. MORE. MOTHER. FATHERING. WEAPON/ARMOR. BREAKING!!! You can't imagine how annoying this was. Trust.

What Ain't Good
❌ So I talked about those QoL improvements. One of them is (allegedly) the menu structure and control scheme. I hate it. It makes sense on a mobile; it doesn't make sense with a controller, in my opinion. I wasn't the biggest fan of the Switch controls but even they were more intuitive to me. For example, the "Clean Up" didn't seem to be combining the same item consistently. I don't know why, because there's a Combine option, yet Clean Up should do it and it didn't except the one time. "Accept" and "Cancel" buttons are transposed (basically, think Switch, not Xbox/PS5).
❌ The reason I didn't think the Switch version had run, is because (unless I'm misremembering and I do plan to check at some point) the camera zoom was one of the bumpers and one of the sticks. Now, it's this wonky double stick business that just makes no sense to me (because the bumper is how you run).
❌ You're still forced to collect Chimaera Feathers to make Wings so you can warp back to the base (part 2 doesn't have this requirement). Also (and I plan to confirm this too because maybe I got it wrong), I could have sworn you only needed 3, not 5. That might just be my age playing tricks on the memory though.
❌ They didn't fix the drop rates - so you're forced to farm for stupid things like the scorpion horn that don't want to drop hardly at all.
❌ I can't stand the new inventory management. I can't really explain it - but it feels like the "Recent" should just have been a swap to the Colossal Coffer. You can always press Up on the D-pad to access it, but then you're forced to do cleanup and there's no "send all to coffer" or something to expedite.
❌ Equipping accessories is also a bit annoying, because equipping a new one always replaces the top one. It'd be more intuitive to round-robin between them instead.

Notice that my negatives are just things that I think could and should have been addressed. This is still (to me) the better of the two if you like RPGs. Because 1 is an RPG with builder elements while 2 is a builder game with RPG elements. 1 is more my speed and tells its story much better (in my opinion).
Bottom line is this.
IF YOU JUST WANT A BUILDER GAME and don't care about the RPG stuff, I strongly recommend skipping it. It's not that you won't get that experience, but again, it's an RPG with builder elements. Part 2 does a better job of catering to the builder crowd, in my opinion.
However, Terra Incognia (Part 1) is a vastly superior playground than what you get in Part 2. Which is why I would recommend learning to appreciate the RPG elements for what they are. Then enjoy both games, because they're both fantastic.