YMMV / Dragon Quest Builders 2

• Captain Obvious Reveal: Even if you've never played Dragon Quest II before, paying close attention to the opening cutscene spoils the fact that Malroth is the name of the Master of Destruction, so it's no shock to the player when they learn who Malroth really is. Of course, there's a much bigger twist being hidden.
• Even Better Sequel: Between the addition of multiplayer, the larger worlds, and various Anti Frustration Features, not to mention a substantially more ambitious story which does wonders to expand and build on what were previously some of the shallowest characters in the franchise, the general consensus for the game among critics and players is that it does almost everything the first game does even better.
• Faux Symbolism: Like the last game, the final level leans heavily on references to The Bible. In the last level the Builder has to build an Ark to escape the destruction of the world at the hands of a god, One the monsters that helps is even called N04H.
• Game-Breaker:
  • An update to the game prior to the English release allowed you to ride friendly golems (ala riding Goldirox during the Khrumbul-Dun story chapter), and it's every bit as awesome as it sounds. Their punches are basically an infinite-use wrecking ball, making material gathering and terraforming a piece of cake, and turning combat into a bit of a joke (although you can't take a recruited golem into the third or fourth story chapters). Just be careful that you don't go swinging that fist around your own structures...
  • Completing the scavenger hunts on the Explorer's Shores grants an infinite amount of several common materials when using them at a workbench. Such usage isn't limited to the Isle of Awakening and makes gathering those same materials on islands in the main story unnecessary despite the Builder being unable to bring acquired items to the story islands at first. This gets a bit silly during Skelketraz, where you're supposed to be cut off from any outside help whatsoever.
  • The gold brick and floor blocks can easily skyrocket the fanciness of a room. Same with the silver blocks, to a lesser extent.
• Goddamned Bats: Scorpions and and army ants on the Isle of Awakening spawn constantly, attack anything they see, and don't give any good drops or experience points.
  • As mentioned on the first game's page, Ghosts and Specters that only spawn at night return and are just as irritating, as they take forever to kill even with endgame equipment and deal decent chunks of damage early on. Fortunately, they can be warded off from your bases with torches and other basic light sources, and you can sleep in a bed until morning to prevent them from spawning, but having to go out of your way to find a bed to rest in can break up the pace of whatever you're working on, and if you're on an Explorer's Shores island, you either have to bring a bed with you and take up an inventory slot, hope you find a Builderdom's Best creation with a bed inside or risk dealing with them every now and then.
  • The mooks that spawn during the Moonbrooke chapter. While all mob invasions are annoying to some degree, during this chapter they harass you almost constantly and are very good at getting in the way while you're trying to repair a castle and build more complex room types. Thankfully, early on, you can simply wait for them to leave by hiding inside your base, which they cannot breach. You lose this luxury later on, however, once the game spawns much larger and tankier enemy types who will gleefully plow through structures you spent precious time building, and, if not in a 'base defense' mission, you'll have to repair these yourself after the fact. Even if you progress far enough in the chapter to build more base defense mechanisms, the monster waves just keep getting hardier and hardier, with some being able to fly over your traps entirely or walk through them almost unfazed.
• Good Bad Bugs: As mentioned in the main page, the only way to obtain extra seeds is by digging them up in the wild. However once you recruit a Hunter Mech or a Killing Machine they will only use up one seed to plant 9 spaces in your fields. As of this writing, there's nothing stopping you from digging up the 9 seeds yourself after the machines have planted them, so a single seed can be multiplied indefinitely.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Despite everything else getting a vast upgrade in this game compared to the first, the one thing that remained almost exactly the same, and a common negative among reviews, is the combat: just mashing the attack button over and over until the enemy dies.
• Les Yay: Like in the last game, each level has at least one female character that has some chemistry with the Builder regardless of the Builder's gender. The last level even has a female wrecktor monster named Hellen who seems to be interested in the Builder.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The sound that's heard (and seeing the subsequent reaction) when a monster attempts to destroy one of your buildings only to find out that they can't put a scratch in the material used!
    "What?! It's as hard as bone!"
  • The Builder and Malroth's high five. It only happens when you level up or when you win a tough battle, so needless to say it's awesome in every instance. The game even knows this, and saves the best high five in the entire game for part of the main quest's endgame sequence.
• Porting Disaster: Not a disaster per se as the game is definitely playable, but the Nintendo Switch version has a lot more technical issues than the PS4 version; with the fans blasting full time and the worst battery consumption since The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild due to the game not being optimized to the Switch's hardware limitations, which leads to drastic frame rate drops and longer load times than the PS4 version (up to 50% longer when booting up the game).
• Player Punch: A few:
  • The death of Pastor Al right after he turns a new leaf.
  • When the Builder is tricked into helping imprison Malroth and the subsequent fallout.
  • NO4H asking you to destroy his remains after he dies.
• The Scrappy: Lulu is quite unpopular with a large portion of the fanbase who see her It's All About Me personality as incredibly annoying. This seems to be a case of Americans Hate Tingle, as her take charge personality is not considered as abrasive by the Japanese players, and she nevertheless drops this behavior in the postgame.
  • Also, everyone in Moonbrooke, for essentially tricking the Builder into locking Malroth in a cell and causing a rift between them. Many in the fanbase will not forgive them for this, though the majority of them were tricked into it by Warwick in the first place (who was the one who pushed for the cell and imprisonment in the first place) and regret it, with them also ignoring Malroth, in control or not, did himself no favors during the Moonbrooke section either. Some even move the residents that join the Isle of Awakening back home as soon as the game allows it, and players that go back to the story islands to renovate the towns for fun will often avoid giving the same treatment to Moonbrooke.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The one thing about the game that fans are complaining about is the unskippable text from whenever Hargon speaks during the main story. Each segment appears on the screen for almost 30 seconds. And he likes to talk a lot.
  • Trying to make a room aesthetically pleasing but also with a flamboyant ambiance can be annoying, since the flamboyant room blocks are the Hargon citadel and spaceship ones, both of which have relatively low base fanciness.
  • Trying to build the perfect bedroom for a character that is the exact size, ambiance, and fanciness they want can be frustrating for anyone who wants to be creative with their rooms, since balancing all three often severely limits what can be built.
• That One Achievement: Raising the rarest type of pet in the PS4 version of the game. Already a Guide Dang It! process, it's one of the few trophies not tied to any Tablet quest and, given the time involved, the player will most likely have everything else in the game finished long beforehand, even if getting started as soon as pet breeding becomes available since pets only grow while the player is on the Isle of Awakening.
• That One Level:
  • Skelketraz. You're forced to drop everything in the middle of landscaping the Scarlet Sands, your friends all stay behind to Hold the Line while you flee to safety and you don't learn until after this episode if they survived or if their sacrifice to help you escape was in vain since you got caught anyway. You're then stripped of all your tools, inventory, even clothes, and are forced to do mind numbing activities for several in-game days^note Doing this segment as fast as possible takes just over an hour's worth of real-time gameplay on average with only Malroth's company to avoid the tedium. This segment does have a point in the story and foreshadows some later elements, but it really breaks up the pacing of building your own island up in a way many find uncomfortable.
  • Iridescent Island, an Explorers' Land you unlock shortly thereafter to find a shopkeeper, is magma ridden and full of spires that have rare materials at the top of them. Due to the magma, you're stuck climbing up every spire since you can't glide over most of the island. Worst of all, the top of those spires is the only place to get green dye. (This place is also, inexplicably, where wild cows are recruited.) Luckily, you can recruit a chimera here, who can help you scale those spires, but if you're unlucky you may have to defeat a bunch of them before one agrees to come with you.
• That One Puzzle: Two puzzles on Moonbrooke require you to build a pattern in the ceiling of a building, then wait for snow to accumulate on the floor in the shape of that pattern. Doing so requires not only waiting for it to snow, but also spending several minutes waiting for snow to accumulate. And Rubiss help you if it decides to stop snowing while you're waiting for it to accumulate... or if one of your party members steps on the snow, making you wait even longer.
• That One Sidequest: Completing some of the Tablet Targets on the Isle of Awakening can be irritating for players attempting to get the final upgrades from the Hairy Hermit, especially so because some of the Tablet Targets can only be completed within their respective biomes (which the game does not tell you about):
  • Any tablet target that requires you to build two rooms next to one another to make a marked building, since, as mentioned on the main page as a Guide Dang It! example, you're not expressly told what items constitute most of these rooms. Some are fairly simple to figure out, such as the restaurant which just needs a Simple Kitchen and a Dining Room next to one another - others are a bit more finicky, such as a petting zoo^note an Animal House and a Playful Park next to one another - the former isn't too hard to figure out, but the latter explicitly requires you to use at least two plank pathways and no other pathway types and/or require unlockable furniture, such as the spa resort^note you need to build a Music Hall adjacent to a Steamy Spa - the former requires three musical instruments, which are only unlocked by completing other Tablet Targets, and you also need to place two curtains for it to register properly; the latter needs three Bathing Stools, no other stool types, and three Washtubs in addition to the Spa set, which requires a large enough body of Hot Water with Floating Flower Petals placed in them
  • Selling items. This one has a ton of hidden variables to get it to work right that the game never bothers to explain properly, turning a seemingly-simple task into a tedious slog. You need to find and recruit a Merchant NPC to your island, who are only found on Explorer's Shores islands randomly. You then have to make an Item Shop^{Needed items} At least 1 table, at least 1 Price Tag, a hanging Shop Sign and two crates, have the Merchant live in the biome the Item Shop is located, stock the items yourself on the price tags and wait for the Merchant NPC to sell them off. Worse still, certain villagers have hidden preferences as to what they will and won't buy, the game is very particular about what items can and cannot be stocked^note you can't stock basic Medicinal Herbs, the Dragon Quest series' version of a standard health potion, nor most farming crops, but you can stock Gungerbread treats, which alleviate status ailments and aren't particularly straightforward to make, the shop floor needs plenty of space for the other NPCs to walk around and observe the items for sale, and even when all these conditions are met it still takes forever because you have to wait on the whims of the Merchant and other NPCs to interact. And there are two Tablet Targets dedicated to this side activity, making it take twice as long.
  • Making lots of different tile types on your map. You need 26 different tile types to show up on the map screen of the Isle of Awakening. There are just barely that many tile types in total in the game, many tile types overlap between several different block types, some already appear on the island by default, some require you to scoop up different liquid types with the Bottomless Pot (some liquid types, like lava, you need another Hairy Hermit upgrade for) and some are very easy to miss and overlook, such as Dragon Scales and Plasma found on the last couple Explorer's Shores islands unlocked in the postgame.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In the post game the Builders learns that the monsters who escaped aboard the ark got trapped in the Void Between the Worlds and had to escape from an Eldritch Abomination. Sounds like the set up for an even scarier threat that builds upon the alternate and manufactured universe established in the series and could have ramifications for the entire Dragon Quest franchise. Sadly nothing comes from it, unless it's a Sequel Hook.
• Values Dissonance: For some Westerners, the miners', admiration of Babs can come off as something far less noble than love. Among the villagers, this is most pronounced the miners who lust after her despite having known her as a child. Goldirox gets this worst, given how he talks about wanting to marry Babs, despite having not known her too long.

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