Last updated on January 3rd, 2026 at 02:40 am
DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS – Adventure Game Review
DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS is a Adventure/Entertainment/Roleplaying game from SQUARE ENIX Co., Ltd., first launched in 26th May 2022.
It’s rated 9+ and currently has 150+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS Stand Out
Explore a world made of blocks as you gather, craft, and build to defeat the evil Dragonlord! Build everywhere from anywhere in DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS, available now on mobile. Brought to you by SQUARE ENIX!
◆ TRAVEL AND EXPLORE THE VAST WORLD OF DRAGON QUEST!
In this “Block-Building RPG”, YOU are the legendary builder that has the power to build! The realm of Alefgard has been plunged into darkness by the terrible and treacherous Dragonlord, the ruler of all monsters. Venture off on the epic adventure to restore Alefgard!
◆ FACE OFF AGAINST VICIOUS FOES!
You will encounter Slimes, Golems, Dragons, and more. Familiar DRAGON QUEST monsters of all sizes threaten the survival of humankind! Craft weapons, build defenses, and fight the monsters to protect your base. Use your power to build and play smart when fighting against frightening enemies in action packed combat!
◆ GATHER, CRAFT AND BUILD FROM ANYWHERE!
In this world made of blocks, everything you see can be materials used to create! Farm ingredients, craft various items and build your base to unite the people roaming the ruins. From buildings to entire towns, you have the freedom to make your village your very own. The power to build is in the palm of your hands!
◆ BUILD BETTER ON MOBILE WITH SPECIAL FEATURES ADDED!
Place blocks by simply tapping the screen and destroy blocks and items more easily with specialized cursors. A convenient Undo Button function has also been added to allow you to restore your work!
Convert your buildings in to Build Cards to share with friends and scan their buildings to have them show up in your island!
◆ NEW DLC AS IN-APP PURCHASES
New DLC added in “Terra Incognita,” the land where you can freely build and play!
DLC includes:
• “Magic carpet”, “Boss figure pack”, “Celestial pack”, “Dot ring”
• “All in one pack” (A set of the above 4)
*Please be aware of duplicate purchases.
"OS:
iOS 13 or later
iPhone 8 or later (minimum 3GB of RAM)"
*Playing this game on a non-recommended device may result in unexpected errors, such as crashing due to insufficient memory. Please be aware that we may not be able to provide support for non-recommended devices.
This Adventure game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 26th March 2025
Recent improvements include:
Fixed an issue where in-app purchases were not working properly.
Download & Availability
DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Feels like a dragon quest game more than a builder, great job! PLEASE put out all the PARASITE EVE games.
Any chance we can get controller support for this game? Please.
Would love to see backbone support for this game :).
Want to rebuild your favorite Dragon Warrior we towns? Want to laugh hysterically as mobs of monsters run right over your spike traps and turn into loot without your intervention? Want to terraform the wilderness while the oblivious NPCs patiently wait for you to collect five twigs? This is the game for you. The mobile version has no speedrun challenges, so you can take your sweet time while the forces of evil wait for plot checkpoints to arrive. Exploration pays off if you want to get everything out of the chapters, but you can have a pretty good time just smashing blocks for resources and unlocking recipes as the plot progresses too. You may even find yourself getting attached to the NPCs along the way. Difficulty is pretty casual aside from the achievement that amounts to fight the final boss in your underwear. Fun for the creative and for the uncreative alike. Strongly recommended.
We had a great time playing this game on the old systems as well as the mobile device again for the fans and true believers.
Would be amazing if this game had controller support.
Just as fun as the Switch version! Touch controls work well for this.
If the Steam release is just a port of the mobile version then why doesnt the mobile version have controller support.
Great game but the controller support is lacking. Please add this asap. Otherwise this seems to be a faithful port of the original from the Nintendo switch.
Im enjoying this game quite a lot but we just seriously wish there was gamepad support.
We downloaded dragon quest bulder 2 a few months ago on our Xbox and was disappointed they had not released 1! We were surprised and extremely lucky to be able to purchase it here and it is as amazing as we thought it would be! We wish you could implement controller options because the touch screen and combat can get a little tricky but other than that this is a perfect game for mobile!!! We pray and hope you guys release dragon quest builder 2 for iOS somehow although we know it may not be possible anytime soon due to the different engine! And we pray you guys drop a dragon quest builder 3 in the future amazing combination of story and building.
This Version of Dragon Quest builders has faster running, faster building, and gameplay features that the other game versions dont.
The game would be purge y if it had controller support.
We love this game so much but it would so much better if it had controller support.
Great that cloud saves are finally available but how is it that a game built for consoles still doesn't have mfi controller support. Got a backbone controller that we love and works great on tons of games. Got this game in hopes to use it, maybe expectations were too high despite this being a AAA title.
We own DQ Builders on almost all platforms, this version is completely ruined with no controller support. We hope they update it, but we know they wont.
We desperately want to give this 5 stars because its one of our favorite games of all time! We were so excited to see it coming to iOS only to have our dreams crushed because we cant use a controller on our big screen iPad. We think its amazing what youve done with the virtual controls. We can tell you put a lot of work and thought into it. But why leave out the option for a controller? This game was originally designed to work with PS4 and XBOX so why not just include that option? Doesnt make sense. Please add and we will gladly update to 5 stars.
We really enjoyed this game on console but there is zero support for controllers on here and if we could get a refund we would. Dont waste your money on this game, if you want controller support then you gotta get it modded into the game. Clearly the creators dont care or read these reviews. Last update was 7 months ago from this post.
The game looks like a lot of fun but unfortunately its unplayable on iPad Pro 12.9 because of the controls. The touch controls are too high on the screen and its impossible to control comfortably. There is no way to modify the UI so it fits the iPad screen properly. Our hand was in pain after 5 minutes trying to move the character around. This would have been fixed with controller support but it doesnt have that either. A shame because it looks like this could be the best version of this game if they fix those issues. Ended up refunding our purchase.
We like this game many yearscan play with ios everywhere and everytimeits great.
Great port of a fantastic game, with some performance related issues. A recent update allows you to cut the graphics rendering speed which will save you a truck load of battery, however, even on our iPhone 13, using anything above low graphics absolutely blazes through battery life. Im sure this could be optimized for even better battery life. Still a blast to play, even with the lower graphics settings enabled. Thanks for continued updates! We hope to see the second game get the same treatment some day. And while we are at it, we could really use a port for Dragon Quest VII :D.
Would give 5 stars if this game had controller support! Mobile gamer using the backbone.
Moving our character is clunky and difficult. Other than that we love the game, but the bad controls make it almost unplayable.
This is such an awesome title! Played on the switch a while back. Although its a bit odd that controller support isnt added considering the original was built for consoles. Strangely enough a Bluetooth controller will only work with the the joystick. No other buttons will work. Aside from that its a decent crafting title. Just wish we could get proper controller support in 2022.
Almost $30 for a game that you cant use a controller with? No, no, and no. Refund us please.
We bought this game because we had good experience with Square Enix games. As always, the quality is high, we enjoy the controls you guys chose for this game; it is very intuitive. We especially like the virtual joystick button for this game. Keep up the great work Square Enix.
Loved the pc version, glad to see it come to mobile lookingforward to whet you guys make of this.
Think theres an issue with the divine draught quest Ive made it several times, but we cant give the item to Elle to complete the quest so..please fix this issue soon. Thank you.
TLDR: The game itself is excellent, 5/5. DQB2 is even better but its not on iOS yet, fingers crossed. The controls for this game are perfect in our opinion. However, the optimization and graphics settings are bad, forcing essentially everyone to play on low settings where circles become square. The iPad app doesnt run on macOS which would likely be the only way to use the high settings. There is no cloud save on this rather long game, so once you pick a device, youre essentially stuck playing only on that device. Finally, some of the quest progress and map markers could be more clear. Pros: we love this game. Its just a combination of a Minecraft-like game and the standard Dragon Quest RPG. The game itself is absolutely worthy of 5/5 stars. The controls are great. Some people have said that theyre too difficult, but even on our phone we never have problems. When we do make a mistake, the undo button is there. The zoomed in mode with the crosshairs makes building long walls very easy and fast. Finally, in zoomed out mode, you can build a house without even moving your actual character. Cons There is no cloud save. So we have to have two different saves on our iPhone and iPad. This game is much too long to just restart on a separate device. Therefore, youre pretty much forced to pick a device and not change it unless youre willing to spend dozens of hours to beat the game on a second device, which very few people will do. Its an iPad app that wont run on our Mac. Newer iPad apps can fairly easy be enabled to run on the new macs, even though theyre not actually mac applications. Why not enable this? The game would clearly benefit from the better hardware, as our next point addresses. The optimization is off. We have an iPhone 13 Pro Max, currently the most powerful iPhone. We have to play with low settings otherwise the frame rate is unplayable in our opinion, and we favor fidelity over frame rate. It stutters too much even at medium settings so you have to restart the app and play at low settings. At low settings, circular objects become square unless youre right beside them, so barrels, chairs, etc, look pretty bad. We dont mind playing at low settings on our phone, but when we tested the settings on our iPad Pro (3rd gen) the frame rate was still bad at medium settings. It looked constantly jumpy just walking around a field. How is it that we have to play at low settings even on the iPad Pro? Sure its not the newest iPad Pro, but it seems then that only the newest model iPad Pro would plausibly be able to play at medium settings, every other device is stuck at low. If thats the case, why even have high settings? No one can use them. If you enabled the iPad version to run on macOS then it would make sense, but right now it doesnt. Maybe redefine low, medium, and high settings on these devices or take some time to optimize further. We have one critique about the game itself, as opposed to the application (e.g. Cloud save, settings, controls). In the game, we found ourselves in chapter two having no idea that we hadnt found one of the sick people, and there was no map marker leading to them, so we thought that our game was bugged and that we would have to restart. Turned out that we just needed to wander around some more until we bumped into the character, but it would be better if there was a map marker leading to them. In general, this game could benefit from better clarity in the quest objectives and map markers. For example, why can we see markers from islands (the areas through the portals) when Im not even on that island? It clutters the map with icons and it took us a while to understand that we cant get to all of those markers without going through the portal.
The controls are definitely wonky on Mobile and its too much work to do basic things with how clunky controls are. It also has a few performance issues even on low settings. We would change to 5 star if these 2 things are fixed.
Controller support would be great.
Worst port of the game is obviously mobile (as usual with Square Enix). No controller support, and game stutters like a Essentially, our ultimate classic Square Enix game review (we could promise you Ive written this review more times than we can count (square always does the same)): Amazing game. Terrible port.
Iphone 13 pro max and the highest setting stutters. We have to play on the lowest setting with blurry visuals in order to play at an acceptable refresh rate. Also not being able to resize or move the on screen buttons ourselves is pretty unfortunate. For the price we're kind of upset.
We were so excited to see builders getting a mobile port. We have around 60 hours of playtime for DQB2 and Ive been wanting to play the first one. Im a tablet player for games like this, and it was so ergonomically difficult to run and complete the basic tutorial tasks. Theres also no way to play it on your phone and tablet so you have to dedicate it all on one device. Ended up asking for a refund since $21.99 is ridiculously overpriced for a port that doesnt have these basic functions. It runs perfectly fine, but needs some updates and price cuts.
This is an excellent port of the original PS4/PS Vita RPG/simulation game. However it desperately needs iCloud save sync and also need better optimization especially for the iPad pro (we're guessing the stuttering has to do with the high refresh rate display). That said, this is a wonderful game and a very pleasant surprise release from Square Enix.
Please as controller support. You already have them ready from the console launches. Please add.
Only the left stick seems to be active on XBox controller. Button presses are ignored, except the hamburger which seems to be mapped to jump. No way to move the camera or perform any other actions. For $25 (when the sale ends) on a pretty old game, we expect better.
Why is THERE NO CONTROLLER SUPPORT?! Artdink, what are you doing? Come on man, why are you dumbing out on such basic standards. All this time, we await for this gem to appear on iOS and you FAIL to provide basic controller support.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.3.0
- Size: 638.60 MB
- iOS: 13.0 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE, IT, JA, KO, PT, ES, ZH
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: SQUARE ENIX Co., Ltd.
Last updated: 26th March 2025 | Genre: Adventure, Entertainment | Developer: SQUARE ENIX Co., Ltd.