Dark Cloud (2000)

Sorry for the long title. I've been playing this game for about a month (since thanksgiving week) and we are in mid-January. you would think playing this game for this far means the game is absolutely 10 out 10.

Well... it's a bit more complicated in my opinion.

Starting the game for the first time and enduring the wild intro cutscene where a demon-genie or whatever, swallows a character right in front of you on the screen set the bar somewhat extremely high seeing that the narrative of the game will be very violent and has some politics here and there with fantasy smeared on top.

Well, it has that and a lot of tedious grinding, characters, and gameplay with an annoying system that more or less is used to increase the length of an otherwise 6 hours game, and double that amount.

There are other characters to play as in this game, and many fetishes with women throughout.

The style of the game's world is very relaxing. it has a warm aura and feeling of it that I can't simply describe and can only be felt once you play the game.

Aside from everything else, the game is on the weaker side. it is not good, but not bad either. something in the middle where you truly can withstand and enjoy the game. you need to remember obviously that this is a year 0 PlayStation 2 game. it is a game released a few weeks after the PlayStation 2's launch. so it was bounded by what it had to work with.

I like the idea of dungeon diving and picking up scattered items to rebuild the village, but I do not like the actual "RPG" mechanics. Breakable weapons is one of my least favorite mechanics ever and it's made worse here by the fact weapons are rather scarce but insanely important. There's also a stupid thirst mechanic that is not well thought out. Water in dungeons spawns randomly and for some awful reason I can't replenish thirst in town despite the fact there's a river and a pond next to my house????

If I want to play a resource management game with outdated controls and bad cameras, I'll just boot up RE. At least it doesn't pretend to be an RPG.

Dark Cloud Release - Dec. 2000/ Re- Released on PSN for PS4 (up-rendered) in 2015 Dev: Level-5 Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Action Role-Playing with City Building Elements

Although quite different from each other, it is very difficult not to draw comparisons between Dark Cloud (Level-5’s first game) and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, released only a couple of years earlier: from our green capped pointed eared hero, to the lock-on combat system to the good vs. evil/save the world plot. This is clearly Sony’s (weak?) attempt, via Level-5, to compete with the LoZ universe.

The plot is simple: a Nazi awakens an Evil Genie which destroys the world and imprisons its inhabitants in spheres and its up to us to rebuild the world, free its people and defeat Evil. All this is done via two distinct game mechanics: exploring randomly generated dungeons and c ity building. The latter is itself split in two different parts too: city building from a top down perspective and 3D interaction with buildings and NPCs you’ve rescued.

As the game progresses your party increases and each unlocked character adds new mechanics, unique abilities and weapons to your journey. Your characters never level up, their weapons do, via a fairly straight forward system of crafting, either by fusing two weapons to create a more powerful one or by adding collectibles scattered throughout the dungeons. Once certain criteria are met, unique weapons can be created.

The game hasn’t aged too well and has many flaws, like the lack of knowing enemy stats or elemental weaknesses (among others), all of which, after reading through forums and threads, are apparently fixed in the unrelated sequel (Dark Chronicle) but it’s still a pleasant 30-40h journey, which can be easily carried out in between breaks from other titles as the control system is quite simplistic, hence the game can be started, paused and resumed a month after without losing the feel for it thanks to the simple game mechanics involved.

All in all, if you haven’t played Dark Cloud before, are a Retro Gamer that doesn’t mind PS2 graphics, wait for a PSN offer and get it for your PS4, If you own a PS2 all the better as the game is basically identical, not an HD remaster. In Dark Cloud you will find a pleasant Retro action RPG with a twist.

Personal rating 7/10

Last night I was on a mission to finish Dark Cloud, which is a PS2 game that was released on PS4 as a PS2 Classic. I enjoyed Dark Cloud a fair amount! Its town building + dungeon crawler RPG mix was hitting some buttons for me, particularly because there are so few RPGs out right now. You play Toan, a boy who’s town has been sent to another dimension by an evil genie. You learn that you are able to restore your town by going into dungeons and finding pieces of your town. You have multiple weapons and must pay attention to the health of those weapons or else they will break and you’ll lose them forever. Also, you have a water meter and you can die of thirst inside the dungeon. Once you find the pieces of your town, you’re then able to assemble them any way you’d like, however the residents do have requests as to where and how their homes should be placed. You soon learn that not only your town, but the whole world has disappeared and you travel around restoring towns all over the map and collecting companions along the way as you make your way to ultimately defeating the genie.

The thing is…once I got to the Genie I ended up giving up. It’s my fault for not leveling one of my characters well enough I guess, but I really have no desire to go back and do that now, at least not at the moment. The Genie has 3 phases in the final boss fight. The second phase is where I’m stuck. The Genie has an attack that you cannot defend against. It just happens. The only thing you can do is use a stamina potion to mitigate some of the damage, but it doesn’t always block all of the damage. So I’m trying to chip away at him enough to move on to the next phase and it’s just unblockable attack after unblockable attack. I got a little frustated obviously and after nearly 30 hours of playing this game overall and multiple attempts at fighting this guy I turned it off. A fight for another day, I suppose.