On the surface, Dragon Quest Builders presents a similar fantasy to other games of it's ilk; that the world is yours to shape as you see fit. But it's approach is far more rigidly structured, tasking you with NPCs to support, setting a boundry for your city, and essentially starting you from ground zero at the end of each chapter, as the Goddess whisks you away to a new land. It put a lot of people off, but through these limits Dragon Quest constructs a thesis on what the New World should look like, and it's vision is far more radical than it's peers' colonialist tendancies would lead you to think.
Dragon Quest Builders is set in the post-apocalyptic remains of a world sacrificed to the Dragonlord by the hero of the first Dragon Quest game. When your character is resurected by the Goddess, all cities have been razed and the people are scattered. And most importantly, their ability to build has been taken from them. This element of whimsey adds an air of alegory to DQ Builders' story; after all, even if you accept that such a thing is possible with magic, the ramifications of being "unable to build" are a bit too out there to be taken 100% literally. It supposedly extends to beyond just bricklaying and the like, but everyone's wearing rags, so who made those? Is writing not a form of building? What about childbirth? Or even taking a dump? The exact workings of this plot device aren't meant to be picked apart, which puts the focus on the abstracted messages of the story and mechanics.
Between the 4 distinctly themed chapters and the very clear cut restrictions placed on your character, there's a lot to read into in DQB. But I think it boils down to 3 very clear and pointed lessons:
Lesson 1: Build Tall
32x32. That's the space you have for building your city. You can build outside of this boundry, marked by a glow and a change of music, but your citizens won't go to any rooms built outside the city limits, and you don't get points towards leveling up the city. So naturally, you have to Build Tall. A phrase heard mostly amongst fans of City Builders and 4X Strategy Games, Building Tall means to focus on improving and maintaining a smaller number of territories, rather than expansion. By setting this limit, Dragon Quest Builders is making a statement about what cities should be like in this new world: They should not take up space.
So what does that choice mean, exactly? Well, a lot, in a historical and environmentalist sense. The idea that cities should expand to take up more and more space is a core tennet of the colonist mentality, which continues to cause lasting harm to indiginous communities and the environment the world over. You must grow, and to grow you must consume and destroy the environment. So putting a hard cap on that growth also puts a cap on the damage you can do to the world around your little hamlet.
You can even see what happens when you take that limiter off firsthand, in the game's "free build" mode. It's not quite a creative mode, you still have to gather resources, but a vast majority of the materials you'll be needing for your projects will be off on other islands. And because the limits are removed for this mode, there exists an option to reset these other islands, because otherwise you'd end up strip-mining them of all their resources and leaving them looking like picked-clean fishbones. And you'll hit the point where this is nececery pretty quickly once you start getting even a bit fancy with your creations.
Lesson 2: Build For The Community
There's no currency in Dragon Quest Builders. That fact alone is a bold statement, but it's only part of a wider idea of community in this game. Nobody has a set "job", every workplace from the bakery, to the bar, to the alchemy lab, is there for anyone to use. It's an abstraction of course, saving you from another layer of busywork, but it paints a compelling picture nonetheless. People have been envisioning a world without capitalism for as long as capitalism has been around, and DQ Builders has enough confidence in that idea that it never even considers bringing it back.
There's a great deal of communal living options too, but living space is also the only part of city-building that lets you assign people to places too. Everything may be for everyone, but you are still entitled to your own privacy. And public services like bath-houses and clinics are open too of course, because it wouldn't be a radical new world without public healthcare. It is one of the lowest bars to clear, after all. *cough*
Lesson 3: Great Power Cannot Be Permenant
The finale of Dragon Quest Builders has the most direct message of all. As you wrap up with all your big tasks, rebuilding the castle and assembling the legendary armor, sword and shield of the Hero, the Goddess spells out your reality: She brought you back to life because you retained your ability to build, but her power over death only goes so far. She commands, with the autharity of the Divine, that you save your energy and live as long a life as possible. A Hero will come at some point, she promises, so you should just relax and enjoy your position of authority. After all, you built this new world, why shouldn't you get to luxuriate in it?
You reject this. You grab the legendary gear and march your way up to the Dragonlord's Keep. The Goddess makes it very clear that this is going to kill you. But you do it anyway. Echoing the way you cast aside your progress at the end of the last 3 chapters, you take the fight to the Dragonlord, win, and your life comes to an end. Your final moments are spent getting one up on the Goddess, the symbol of the old Order, rejecting not just the world made by the Dragonlord, but hers too.
It's a powerful moment, for a game that leans towards the light-hearted and the silly, and also sends a clear message: Great power can be needed in order to force great change, but it cannot persist indefinitely. Let it exist to serve it's function, then let it die. Tear it apart if you have to. But do not let it stagnate. It opens up a reading on the very premise of the game, the Hero's decision to side with the Dragonlord could be read as a sign of the Rot that comes with that power.
So between these readings, it's not hard to see Dragon Quest Builders as an Anarchist game. Not Anarchist in the way that term has been co-opted by bad actors over centuries, but the actual ideology. I'm no expert on Anarchy in this sense, but what I understand to be the fundimentals are here, representing a society built around the community and without any all-encompassing government. But regardless of weather it fits into any pre-existing value structures, DQ Builders presents a compelling vision of a new world, and I'm excited to see what it's hugely expanded sequel has to offer on this front.
Take it from a Brit though: you should really do something about that Royal Family.
Dragon Quest Builders is set in the post-apocalyptic remains of a world sacrificed to the Dragonlord by the hero of the first Dragon Quest game. When your character is resurected by the Goddess, all cities have been razed and the people are scattered. And most importantly, their ability to build has been taken from them. This element of whimsey adds an air of alegory to DQ Builders' story; after all, even if you accept that such a thing is possible with magic, the ramifications of being "unable to build" are a bit too out there to be taken 100% literally. It supposedly extends to beyond just bricklaying and the like, but everyone's wearing rags, so who made those? Is writing not a form of building? What about childbirth? Or even taking a dump? The exact workings of this plot device aren't meant to be picked apart, which puts the focus on the abstracted messages of the story and mechanics.
Between the 4 distinctly themed chapters and the very clear cut restrictions placed on your character, there's a lot to read into in DQB. But I think it boils down to 3 very clear and pointed lessons:
Lesson 1: Build Tall
32x32. That's the space you have for building your city. You can build outside of this boundry, marked by a glow and a change of music, but your citizens won't go to any rooms built outside the city limits, and you don't get points towards leveling up the city. So naturally, you have to Build Tall. A phrase heard mostly amongst fans of City Builders and 4X Strategy Games, Building Tall means to focus on improving and maintaining a smaller number of territories, rather than expansion. By setting this limit, Dragon Quest Builders is making a statement about what cities should be like in this new world: They should not take up space.
So what does that choice mean, exactly? Well, a lot, in a historical and environmentalist sense. The idea that cities should expand to take up more and more space is a core tennet of the colonist mentality, which continues to cause lasting harm to indiginous communities and the environment the world over. You must grow, and to grow you must consume and destroy the environment. So putting a hard cap on that growth also puts a cap on the damage you can do to the world around your little hamlet.
You can even see what happens when you take that limiter off firsthand, in the game's "free build" mode. It's not quite a creative mode, you still have to gather resources, but a vast majority of the materials you'll be needing for your projects will be off on other islands. And because the limits are removed for this mode, there exists an option to reset these other islands, because otherwise you'd end up strip-mining them of all their resources and leaving them looking like picked-clean fishbones. And you'll hit the point where this is nececery pretty quickly once you start getting even a bit fancy with your creations.
Lesson 2: Build For The Community
There's no currency in Dragon Quest Builders. That fact alone is a bold statement, but it's only part of a wider idea of community in this game. Nobody has a set "job", every workplace from the bakery, to the bar, to the alchemy lab, is there for anyone to use. It's an abstraction of course, saving you from another layer of busywork, but it paints a compelling picture nonetheless. People have been envisioning a world without capitalism for as long as capitalism has been around, and DQ Builders has enough confidence in that idea that it never even considers bringing it back.
There's a great deal of communal living options too, but living space is also the only part of city-building that lets you assign people to places too. Everything may be for everyone, but you are still entitled to your own privacy. And public services like bath-houses and clinics are open too of course, because it wouldn't be a radical new world without public healthcare. It is one of the lowest bars to clear, after all. *cough*
Lesson 3: Great Power Cannot Be Permenant
The finale of Dragon Quest Builders has the most direct message of all. As you wrap up with all your big tasks, rebuilding the castle and assembling the legendary armor, sword and shield of the Hero, the Goddess spells out your reality: She brought you back to life because you retained your ability to build, but her power over death only goes so far. She commands, with the autharity of the Divine, that you save your energy and live as long a life as possible. A Hero will come at some point, she promises, so you should just relax and enjoy your position of authority. After all, you built this new world, why shouldn't you get to luxuriate in it?
You reject this. You grab the legendary gear and march your way up to the Dragonlord's Keep. The Goddess makes it very clear that this is going to kill you. But you do it anyway. Echoing the way you cast aside your progress at the end of the last 3 chapters, you take the fight to the Dragonlord, win, and your life comes to an end. Your final moments are spent getting one up on the Goddess, the symbol of the old Order, rejecting not just the world made by the Dragonlord, but hers too.
It's a powerful moment, for a game that leans towards the light-hearted and the silly, and also sends a clear message: Great power can be needed in order to force great change, but it cannot persist indefinitely. Let it exist to serve it's function, then let it die. Tear it apart if you have to. But do not let it stagnate. It opens up a reading on the very premise of the game, the Hero's decision to side with the Dragonlord could be read as a sign of the Rot that comes with that power.
So between these readings, it's not hard to see Dragon Quest Builders as an Anarchist game. Not Anarchist in the way that term has been co-opted by bad actors over centuries, but the actual ideology. I'm no expert on Anarchy in this sense, but what I understand to be the fundimentals are here, representing a society built around the community and without any all-encompassing government. But regardless of weather it fits into any pre-existing value structures, DQ Builders presents a compelling vision of a new world, and I'm excited to see what it's hugely expanded sequel has to offer on this front.
Take it from a Brit though: you should really do something about that Royal Family.
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