Deliberately obtuse headline: Check.

Okay, clearly Minecraft Dungeons 2 is an ARPG associated with Minecraft, but I would like to present two distinct statements:

“Minecraft ARPG“

“ARPG set in the world of Minecraft“

On the surface the difference seems superficial, but playing Minecraft Dungeons (and now Minecraft Dungeons 2) has sent me on a spiral of questioning what makes an IP an IP, what makes a game part of a franchise other than just slapping the name on it…and how maybe that is all that makes a game a valid part of that IPs identity.

Let’s contextualise my ramblings, a little, and I hope you’ll understand where I’m coming from (as this line of thinking has actually been very apparent in my experiences of many games, including Darkest Dungeon 2 and Toem 2).

Minecraft Dungeons 2 adapts no Minecraft mechanics

First of all there’s some credence to my ravings that Minecraft Dungeons is more of a Minecraft skin than a full Minecraft ARPG. Even just looking at the title: Minecraft. In Minecraft Dungeons 2 (as in 1) you neither mine nor craft. You can farm emeralds from mobs and buy equipment from the blacksmith, but you can’t actually mine materials (or currency) and can’t actually craft gear.

Rather than taking the semi-open-world design of the sequel as a chance to have hotspots across the world for copper, iron, gold and the coveted Minecraft diamonds, Minecraft Dungeons 2 just stops there. Every core mechanic in Minecraft Dungeons 2 could exist in any other ARPG. You’d have to scrub off the villager branding and signature Hrmmmmm sound effects, but there’s nothing so core to the experience that anything of the parent franchise would be recogniseable.

Would it have hurt to make a crafting table interface of some description? To have trees get destroyed while you’re gallivanting across fields of mobs and then drop wood? Hell, would it have hurt to have town building!? The game doesn’t do anything wrong, but that’s in part because it doesn’t do anything. Don’t get me wrong I’ll still play hours and hours, it’s got surprisingly fun combat and builds, but this isn’t a review. This is a recognition that Minecraft Dungeons shouldn’t be seen as a Minecraft ARPG, just an ARPG with a Minecraft skin.

A new challenger: Runescape Dragonwilds

To prove I haven’t actually gone nuts, here’s a counter-example.

Here comes Runescape with a steel chair.

Runescape Dragonwilds is a recently released survival game. Unlike Minecraft Dungeons I’d feel comfortable calling it a Runescape survival game, rather than just a survival game with a runescape skin. I’ll tell you as to why…

The core mechanics of skilling to 100, and the exact nature of those skills, all match Runescape. When you cast spells in Dragonwilds you’re not just activating an ability on an ability bar or using a scroll, you’re using the Runescape rune magic system, from Runescape. No matter what you called the runes or what they looked like, the entire architecture of the game from skills to magic is, inherently, Runescape.

This is why Minecraft Dungeons doesn’t feel like part of it’s own franchise, the developers didn’t look at Minecraft’s wealth of mechanics and ask “What would this look like in an ARPG?”, they made an ARPG and asked “How do we convince people this is a Minecraft game?”. Runescape Dragonwilds is, to use what might be the exact term I’m after, authentic to its brand.

Skilling and Rune magic are preserved in Runescape Dragonwilds in a way that Mining and Crafting are not in Minecraft Dungeons.

How close does a game need to be to it’s franchise identity?

With the examples laid out and (hopefully) your faith in my sanity restored, the most important question becomes: Does any of this matter? It certainly matters to me, as I will actively be disappointed at missed opportunities to express, celebrate and experiment in a franchise.

I was overjoyed when Control let me borrow mechanics from Alan Wake (in it’s own Control-esque way) and was equally impressed while seeing the authenticity Runescape Dragonwilds had. Conversely, it actively detracts from the experience knowing that with a little more creative vision and effort, Minecraft Dungeons 2 could have made itself just that bit more interesting.

But, I’m not the arbiter of the IP, am I? If someone wants to completely overhaul all the core mechanics for a sequel (Ahem, Darkest Dungeon 2) but still number it as a sequel (AHEM, DARKEST DUNGEON 2), then it’s the developer and IP creator who decides that. Hell, just look at the SteamWorld franchise that has 3 games and all of them are different genres!

It all comes down to expectation. Being an entry, even a spin-off, in a long-standing and well-known franchise puts certain expectational restrictions on you. People will expect certain things, and it seems Minecraft Dungeons only thought we’d care about seeing Minecraft represented in the ARPG spin-off, rather than care about playing with Minecraft-esque mechanics in an ARPG setting. I can’t really fault the result for its level of fun, it’s a surprisingly good ARPG (if a little short), but I think there’ll always be a part of me that niggles in my mind asking “But, is it really a Minecraft game though…?”

The endgame: Final Fantasy 16

I adore both Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy Origin: Stranger of Paradise. This might seem like it goes against everything I said here, and that interests me…so let’s see why I think that.

For one, the identity of Final Fantasy has never been one set of characters or one specific mechanic. Final Fantasy is best when it embraces anthology, having differing stories and set-ups in the same core structure (Crystals, warriors of light, chaos).

So, while 16 and SoP being real-time action games seems like exactly the sort of thing I’d hate according to my Minecraft Dungeons logic, the Final Fantasy series itself has already set the expectation that core mechanics aren’t what make Final Fantasy Final Fantasy.

To me, they’re 2 of the best Final Fantasy games out there…

What makes “Minecraft”?

So, have I simply misjudged what makes Minecraft Minecraft? In the same way that its anthology and variance makes FF what it is, maybe what makes a game an authentic part of the Minecraft franchise isn’t mechanics being cleverly adapted, maybe it’s just…

Hrmmmmmmm

Maybe that’s all it ever needed to include to be as authentic and as “Minecraft” as the original, and while it would be nice to have seen Dungeons include more specific “Minecraft but ARPG” ideas that doesn’t mean it should be entirely excluded from the family. After all the villagers do go Hrmmmmmmm…