What Did We Play Yesterday?

Five hours in, my big problem with DQB2 was the hand-holding, which has continued while rebuilding the farm at Furrowfield. I went on Reddit and discovered this is standard and the game doesn't fully open up until the endgame. They've functionally extended the tutorial to cover the entire game, which locks the games actions behind the storyline progression, but I think ultimately the real problem is the overall lack of decision space.

An NPC will ask me to do something, and I'm allowed to do that but often within narrow confines dictated by the developers (a good example is the Blueprint mechanic, where the builder lays down a building blueprint and is required to follow that pattern to the block). Then I report back, and I'm asked to do something else.

I like the wholesome vibes. I like the feel-good conversations with bad guys as they're converted to the building way, and I enjoy some aspects of the community building. There are some delightful WTFs, like building an outhouse so you can "harvest" "nightsoil" for fertilizer (yum!). Unfortunately the game's insistence on forcing me down narrow paths makes actual gameplay feel a lot like going through motions of playing a game rather than actually playing one. (Remember that review about how this is a game for people who like completing lists?) The magic is lost if I feel like I'm systematically going down a list of virtual chores and toggling booleans somewhere. This, combined with control wonkiness and the fiddliness of building, offsets the charm.

Around hour 13 I stopped playing. My task was to build a deitree using 3 blueprints. The developers clearly recognized the tedium of this and had the villagers collect most of the ingredients and build most of the tree for me. I was grateful to be spared these tasks, but this tacit acknowledgement of the inherent tedium of the gameplay kinda killed it for me. I definitely enjoyed my earlier hours with the game, but not enough to plow onward to the endgame.

I have several rotating vibeo game moods, and one is "play a million games just long enough to figure out what's wrong with all of them." There's no way out but to feed the beast. Emulation helps, but I also subscribed to Game Pass again and I have been tearing through that catalog like you wouldn't believe.

Dragon Quest Builders 2 is often described as a mashup between Minecraft and an RPG. My experience with Dragon Quest games is limited to Dragon Warrior (NES), Dragon Warrior III (NES), and Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime (DS), but I can still appreciate the level of DQ nostalgia packed into this game. The character designs are fun and I love how the minimap looks like an old school DQ/DW overworld. I like the sound effects and fanfare. The story straddles a weird line between goofy and interesting, which I understand is on-par with the series at large and takes a little getting used to. It's not kiddy, but it kinda feels kiddy due to the writing style. The player smashes things (with a weapon or hammer) to get materials, which is fun, and building is mostly ok (the crosshair for placement can get a little wonky) and the keyboard mapping is intuitive and good.

Unfortunately, two issues quickly emerge. This game is extraordinarily on-rails in a way I wouldn't expect for an apparently open-world building game. A reviewer remarked this is a good game for people who "like doing things on lists" and I'd agree, the game keeps giving me lists of things to accomplish in order, to the point it feels like the first few hours of the game have been an unnecessarily extended tutorial. Second, there is a LOT of dialogue with no practical way to speed it up, including mid-chapter sections where one or two sentences of exposition has a hard wait of several minutes with no way to click through. This was a common complaint with the first game and the devs elected not do change it, even though other QOL adjustments were made.

I'm slightly torn because this game is charming as hell and the smash-build mechanic is exactly what I need right now. But since I'm not a DQ fan per se, I'm unsure how to process the story tone, I tend to waffle between getting impatient wit the volumes of apparently silly dialogue vs. appreciating the underlying wit and wondering if it will improve when I get out of advanced tutorial mode.

Also, Malroth is hot (?) and while I actually love the BFFs FOREVER HI FIVE BRO! vibe he has with the MC, I have a feeling 30 hours from now I will be writing anonymous erotic DQB2 fanfic and feeling frankly super weird about it since the game has such a wholesome, silly vibe overall.

My Time at Portia is a crafting sim that, to its credit, does try to differentiate from Stardew Valley by focusing on building. There is a bit of a learning curve (I didn't quite grok mining at first) and the game expects you to explore the workbook and menus and sort out an early building strategy, which is fine. Most of the NPCs seem fairly mundane and uninteresting, but I think what kills this one for me is the abundance of crafting timers. I feel like I'm always waiting around to craft the most basic ingredients, only to wait even more after to craft those into something else. If the crux of the game is crafting, early pacing should be determined by ingredient rarity or volume rather than timers.