Dragon Quest Builders Demo (Nintendo Switch)

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As a long-time fan of the Dragon Quest series, I am always excited to see a new title pop up. I’ve had my eye on “Dragon Quest Builders” for quite some time, but I had never jumped the gun and bought the game. Much to my surprise, a demo was recently released for it on the Switch and I jumped at the chance to play it. I was pleasantly surprised with the results.
As expected from the screenshots and game cover, the game itself has a concept much like Minecraft. You are expected to mine for materials and use said materials to create structures, weapons, food, and other items. In addition, there is a storyline that is Dragon Quest-esque, and tons of callbacks to past titles in the series.

Storyline

To be frank, I ended up breezing through a lot of the storyline. It wasn’t super-compelling and the intro was a little longer than I would have liked for a demo. Essentially, you are tasked with rebuilding Alefgard via areas on different islands in order to rebuild that which was destroyed. Overall, I found that you can easily play the game while paying little attention to what is going on in the story.

Gameplay

The gameplay was a mixture of fun and slight frustration. I enjoyed the tasks and quests that were set before me. They were simple yet challenging. For example, one of the quests required your character to go hunt down an enemy in order to farm an item from them. The enemy at hand was challenging for my character’s level. Also, there were several others that ended up ambushing me. Despite dying, I still thoroughly enjoyed the challenge.

The world that you are allowed to roam through in the demo is a little small, but still provided at least an hour and a half of gameplay. Even after the demo was through, I was able to continue to farm for items and fight enemies as much as I wanted. However, with no real quests to complete, it grew boring quite quickly.

The gameplay mechanics were the most frustrating aspect of the demo. I would like for there to have been button mapping, especially for menus and the action button. You can really only customize which button you use to look up or down while placing items. The Joy-Cons worked well for me both free and attached to the grip accessory. I do not recall motion controls being a significant part of any action at all. That said, there really wasn’t much room for it anyway since the buttons function perfectly well as-is.

Graphics and Art Style

Considering this title utilizes a block-style art and is also on the Switch, I wasn’t expecting anything over the top. It delivers in some aspects, in that the graphics are pleasing to the eye, but they do not deliver in others – insert several latency issues. Just as in Zelda: Breath of the Wild and in Mario Odyssey, the levels don’t always load everything within view, such as items or enemies. I did not find it to be a big issue, but I always find such issues slightly annoying.

The art style was definitely that of Dragon Quest. The human characters were all done in the same style as past titles, and the enemies looked no different than other previous installments in the series. My favorite aspect of the art style occurs upon mining and defeating enemies. Once an item is ready to collect, the art style changes to a more defined, colorful looking item. It reminds me a lot of Dragon Quest VIII.

Overall Opinion

Altogether the demo was a ton of fun. It was long enough to give me a great idea of what the game will be like to play, but it was short enough to leave me wanting more. I loved seeing all of my favorite enemies and familiar weapons and art-style. However, I firmly believe that buying the title for the Switch over other consoles would be merely for building your library rather than for any differences in gameplay mechanics or graphics. Regardless, I will definitely be buying the full version.