A LACK OF CHARACTER.
Rather than building on its promising debut, Episode 2 of Minecraft: Story Mode stumbles. Called Assembly Required, it still has all of Episode 1’s flaws, while introducing a few new ones of its own. Most of the humor and heart that balanced out the premiere’s weaker elements and kept it enjoyable are sadly also absent. Combine all this with a distressingly short running time and the end result is a brief, forgettable adventure that feels of little consequence.
At the end of Episode 1, the stakes are made clear and the stage has been set. Jesse and his friends must reunite the legendary (or are they?) heroes The Order of the Stone to save the world from destruction. The episode ends with a trademark Telltale choice that had me scratching my chin in consideration: should I travel with one friend to recruit the brainy Order engineer Ellegaard, or go with another to find the Order’s “griefer,” Magnus?
In a bold move, this choice proves real in Assembly Required. Your decision determines which land you visit, complete with separate dialogue, sets, and characters. The two story paths don’t rejoin one another until 30 minutes in – a forking path much larger than is typically seen in an episodic game.
Unfortunately, this design comes at a cost. I cleared all of Assembly Required in just a scant 65 minutes, and that was with me taking my time to explore and talk whenever I had the option. If you count the large branching path, this episode probably has around as much total play time as most Telltale episodes, but a large portion of it can only be experienced in a second playthrough. Depending on how you like to play your stories (and if you consider your first experience “canon”) that’s either a strength in its replayabilty or a weakness of its available content.
In part due to its brief duration, Assembly Required does little to clear up the confusion I feel about this world and its rules. At one point a character falls down a pit and is trapped. Why can’t they build their way out? Everyone is shown building huge structures in Episode 1’s opening. On a larger scale, a crux of Story Mode’s plot is using a special amulet and map to find the missing Order members. But one of them is found running a seemingly normal town, with normal citizens. Why couldn’t our party have just walked there? I’m not sure.
Missed Episode 1? Catch up on our review above.
Assembly Required does feature more of the same whimsical fun with elaborate Minecraft contraptions found in Episode 1 - the chicken-torturing device found there is trumped by a new cow launcher, and a giant automated mech. It’s fun to see Story Mode bring these Minecraft contraptions to life, but most of the humor found in the writing around them falls flat.
Likewise, most of Assembly Required’s drama also feels muted, relegated to tension between the reunited Order members. This makes Story Mode feel a little odd - it’s a game set in the present that often devotes its screen time to characters arguing about the past. It’s too far removed from Jesse, your decisions, and solving the world-ending dilemma at hand. Although you are given some one-on-one screen time with your badass adventuring friend Petra, giving her a bit more depth, Jesse’s relationship with his other friends is barely advanced, which feels like a missed opportunity.
Thankfully, the authentic, detailed, and massive sets remain a highlight of Story Mode. Wandering through Ellegaard’s automated Redstone techno-lair, and later through a massive underground fortress, does as much to help with the characterization of their fictional creators as their actual dialogue in many cases, and left me wondering how Telltale actually created them. Yet there is once again disappointingly little to do in them, and almost no freedom to truly wander.
THE VERDICT:
Minecraft: Story Mode Episode 2: Assembly Required is disappointingly short, and adds to Episode 1’s problems with establishing its world and its characters rather than reducing them. Telltale should be commended for creating a real diverging path that sends us to different, impressively designed places based on our choices, but doing so has illustrated why this kind of forked storytelling is rarely done: your journey seems half as long as what the developers actually created, and there’s not enough to do along the way.
