DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS™ 2

Dragon Quest Builders is one of the series of all time, the fact that other games like Pokopia spawned from this amazing concept is also pretty slick. Genuinely worth checking out, no memes or w/e.

Take Dragon Quest/Warrior and mix it with Minecraft part 2. A very good improvment on the first game. They kept a similar gameplay, start over each chapter on a new island from scratch, but this time you can bring everything back to your own island. Which I think was the biggest weakness of the first game now fixed. In the original game you would unlock a sandbox only at the end. This time your island act as hub you return to build on between chapters with a lot of liberty while they still have a true sandbox post game. The combat is a bit more fun, still very simple but with a few additions like an actual party where NPCs can join you outside of base defense. You are rarely totally alone. Neither game are hard but that make the game even easier, enemies sometimes struggling to hit anything, switching their aggro between you and NPCs. The only time I actually died was from an explosion. The real fun of the game is building, creating rooms and whole town with the vast list of different blocks and items you can unlock. You can recruit many NPCs for your own island so it also feels very lively if you're not the kind to build simply for building. In the story they also help you a lot, even building sometimes, while the rest of the time it's some minor help in specific rooms depending on their class. It's not perfect. Even if they give you your own island you are quite limited early on, you can't do much until the middle of the game and you'll have a easier time if you wait post game. The CO-OP is also very specific, it take a couple hours to unlock and only one person progress, so the others players are pretty much like NPCs helpers. The story is also quite slow sometimes. They do a lot of "Go find something while we build" over and over instead of asking you to get everything at once. So you'll be running back and forth often. At least the quick travel is generous. I would have liked a bit more focus on your own island. The majority of it is optional and probably expected to be post game while I wish I could have done more here and there between the story but you lacked the tools or resources to do so before the end. Overall it's a much better game than the first beside maybe the story. It feels slow to start but more fun to play and the Toriyama style characters and monsters are still fun to interact with.