Seven Years Later, This Square Enix Riff On Minecraft Is Coming To PC

Today, Square Enix announced that after seven years, Dragon Quest Builders is, for some reason, arriving on PC in early February.

Released in 2016, Dragon Quest Builders, is an open-world survival game that combines Minecraft’s blocks with Dragon Quest’s lore. It’s a delightful game that lets you build bases while playing through pre-written storylines and quests. It launched on PS3 and PS4 in 2016. DQB came to Switch in 2018 and after that, it was released on phones, too. But the popular blocky survival RPG never saw a release on PC. However, that’s about to change next month.

Seemingly out of nowhere, on January 29, Square Enix announced that the original Dragon Quest Builders would hit PC on February 13. After the better part of a decade, it seems Square Enix remembered people might want to play this game on their personal computers.

What’s very odd about this is that the game’s sequel, Dragon Quest Builders 2, launched on consoles and PC in the United States back in 2019. Square Enix is even selling a bundle on Steam that combines both games in one package. While I’m glad to see a game that was previously trapped on consoles get an official PC port—letting it be preserved easier by fans for years to come—I’m still a bit confused as to why now.

I also have to wonder: Will Xbox players get access to Dragon Quest Builders later this year, too? DQB2 landed on Xbox in 2021, a few years after its release on PS4 and PC. But the first game never shipped on Xbox. I’m not sure how many people in 2024 are chomping at the bit to play DQB on an Xbox, but at this point, with this random PC port hitting soon, who knows? Maybe Square Enix will surprise Xbox players with their very own and very belated DQB port, too. Stranger things have happened.

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