BUILD your world. INVENT your weapons. CREATE your adventure. Discover a secret binding the past, present and future. A secret where an innocent inventor, a temporal warrior and an ageless evil hold the key. Experience an epic action/RPG adventure that relies on your innovation as much as exploration and fighting reflexes.
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So far it is a really enjoyable game.
The visuals are nice and the game-play is very fun, even if you're trapped in dungeons for a while.
What frustrates me in this game is the difficulty (I am not sure if it changes as you level up). The enemies are too strong at the beginning so you can easily die with 3 blows.
The battle system, although challenging, can be improved with the amount of weapons you have (distributed between characters). You can evolve weapons and change them (synthesizing your weapons isn't as fun though because it could be done in a faster way, instead of taking all those steps).
Characters-wise and plot-wise it is not its forte. It's what you would expect from Japanese games (surely not bad but not amazing either). It's a very simple game in terms of this.
In terms of enjoyment it doesn't disappoint and I can easily recommend this game for people who like playing on the PS2.
The visuals are nice and the game-play is very fun, even if you're trapped in dungeons for a while.
What frustrates me in this game is the difficulty (I am not sure if it changes as you level up). The enemies are too strong at the beginning so you can easily die with 3 blows.
The battle system, although challenging, can be improved with the amount of weapons you have (distributed between characters). You can evolve weapons and change them (synthesizing your weapons isn't as fun though because it could be done in a faster way, instead of taking all those steps).
Characters-wise and plot-wise it is not its forte. It's what you would expect from Japanese games (surely not bad but not amazing either). It's a very simple game in terms of this.
In terms of enjoyment it doesn't disappoint and I can easily recommend this game for people who like playing on the PS2.
This game was our childhood, and despite amnesia we still remember the month before Christmas, reading the back of the box in the car, knowing that the next month of not being able to play it would kill us. But it didn't, and when we finally got it? It stuck with us.
As a child, this game had it all: unique designs, loveable characters, repetitive dungeon grinding gameplay, photography, crafting, and even a town builder system that let you Walk Around It in 3D??? That was always the coolest back then. We forgot a lot of details over the years, but we'll always remember crying at a particular mid-game reveal.
But to access the final boss, we needed information we forgot. And we didn't have internet back then. We never finished it.
Playing it two decades later, I don't think we would have ever succeeded as a kid. Without spoilers, the end bosses are Brutal, and if we hadn't ground the whole game for very good weapons it may have been abandoned a third time.
But we did it. And it feels like a weight off our chest, something off the bucket list. It was slower than we remembered, but a child's view of the world is so much more magnificent. Despite that, it was a wonderfully charming game that we would highly recommend to anyone who loves a good retro rpg.
4 stars for the actual game, 1 for how much it impacted our life. ✨
Favourites
Character It's somewhere between Flotsam, Elena, & Mayor Need, but I love them all. 🥹 Bonus shout-out to our childhood love for Monica.
Moment - The motherly discovery. Also Paznos, but that was a lot cooler as a child; as an adult you can't help but realise how clunky the cutscenes are.
Music - Kazarov Stonehenge hits different, and to this day we feel such strong emotions listening to it.
As a child, this game had it all: unique designs, loveable characters, repetitive dungeon grinding gameplay, photography, crafting, and even a town builder system that let you Walk Around It in 3D??? That was always the coolest back then. We forgot a lot of details over the years, but we'll always remember crying at a particular mid-game reveal.
But to access the final boss, we needed information we forgot. And we didn't have internet back then. We never finished it.
Playing it two decades later, I don't think we would have ever succeeded as a kid. Without spoilers, the end bosses are Brutal, and if we hadn't ground the whole game for very good weapons it may have been abandoned a third time.
But we did it. And it feels like a weight off our chest, something off the bucket list. It was slower than we remembered, but a child's view of the world is so much more magnificent. Despite that, it was a wonderfully charming game that we would highly recommend to anyone who loves a good retro rpg.
4 stars for the actual game, 1 for how much it impacted our life. ✨
Favourites
Character It's somewhere between Flotsam, Elena, & Mayor Need, but I love them all. 🥹 Bonus shout-out to our childhood love for Monica.
Moment - The motherly discovery. Also Paznos, but that was a lot cooler as a child; as an adult you can't help but realise how clunky the cutscenes are.
Music - Kazarov Stonehenge hits different, and to this day we feel such strong emotions listening to it.
No me mola el género pero tenia pinta de estar guapo
Mi juego favorito de ps2
Deeply flawed yet eminently enjoyable.
Dark Cloud 2 is a game I've had an affinity for for quite a long time, and just recently I played it for the first time in 15 years. The amount of flaws in the game was staggering so I wanted to take moment to briefly recount them.
To start, the inventory system of the game is possibly one of the worst I've ever seen. The player collects so, so many items throughout the adventure in a variety of types. There's quest items, weapons, battle items, healing items, status items, crafting materials, upgrade materials, fishing materials, fish, etc. etc. All of these things co-mingle in the same inventory with no auto-arrangement options. Over the course of the game the inventory balloons to an unusable girth, and manually organizing things becomes a chore.
Crafting is such a fundamental mechanic of the game that a cumbersome inventory system is not only unforgivable (Spoiler alert: I end up forgiving this flaw) but mind-boggling in how the inventory made it out the door looking the way it does.
A second issue with the game is the implementation of the literal world-building mechanic relative to the first game. The Georamas were never too intricate in Dark Cloud 1 (DCX for the PlayStation fans) but they did go a bit further in the various requests of the citizens that the player had to keep in mind when arranging the cities of land. There was also that delightful totem pole puzzle in the desert area.
The city building in Dark Cloud 2, however, is pretty mindless. There's a reason for this: the amount of structures the player can build is largely uncapped. Let's look at an example:
In the volcanic area of the game there are a few buildings that need to be built a certain way. One needs to be elevated a few blocks in height, which entails committing materials to building those elevator blocks and then placing the house on top of it. So I did this, and when it came time to move a particular NPC into the village, I found that he needed a special house with a fence built around it.
In Dark Cloud 1, I'd have a conundrum here. I would need to construct more blocks around the house to allow room for the fence to also be built up a few stories high. However, in Dark Cloud 2, I can just build an entirely separate house on ground level, easily build a fence around it, and move the NPC into it with nobody occupying the higher-up structure.
By removing the cap on structures players can dedicate one house to each "building requirement", where before the very slight difficulty of the building sections came from balancing all of the requirements within the limited number of structures.
There are precisely two attempts to do something interesting with the building: One is a city that has to be built on four plateaus that rise and sink depending on the number of houses on them (???) and thus the player has to equally build on all to create a perfectly flat ground. The other is the final building section of the game that tasks the player with rebuilding a garden to the exact specifications laid out in a few portraits they can find in the nearby dungeon.
While these approach the more thoughtful usage of the building mechanics in the first game, neither is that mentally demanding nor engaging.
One is left thinking why they brought this mechanic back at all. Did Dark Cloud have that much star power that they needed to brand this as a sequel with ham-fisted legacy mechanics instead of just making a new game unburdened by what kids in Blockbuster perceived as "discount Zelda"?
Almost everything to do with the story of Dark Cloud 2 is another misfire. The voice acting ranges from mid to awful, and the awkward load times of the PlayStation 2 ensure that cutscenes never run smoothly. There are frequently awkward pauses as the next line of dialogue loads that produce unintended comedy as characters just stand around in otherwise dire situations.
A significant element of the story is time travel, and Dark Cloud 2 has some of the least thought-out time travel mechanics seen yet in games. There is no attempt to logically think through what time travel would mean in-world insofar as causality and logic. I'm fine engaging a game on its own level when it comes to these things rather than missing the point by nitpicking, but the way time travel is handled in this game is just so illogical that it can be difficult to accept at times for anyone who has engaged with the idea before in any other form.
The rest of the writing, too, is off. It's incredibly juvenile, which is of course fine were the game to be good for kids, but I the mechanics of Dark Cloud 2 are just one step above what most children would find approachable or even possible to engage with. The mismatch of the mechanical depth and the maturity of the writing produces some amount of cognitive dissonance.
And man are there just so many mechanics! At the base level there's world-building and weapon crafting, both fundamental to the completion of the game. But there is also photography, invention, monster recruitment, fishing, fish breeding, fish racing, golf (???), and robot customization. All of these exist in varying degrees of completion of depth, and none of them are particularly engaging. The dominant strategy of completing this game seems to lie in choosing just one of these, whichever you find the most fun, and forgetting all of the others exist.
And yet the core gameplay loop of this game is just so satisfying to me. Running through samey floors of dungeons, wiping out enemies, building up your weapons until they evolve (???) into another weapon, saving the nearby city until all of its inhabitants are happy, it's something I could do for hours. Despite all of the flaws listed above, I was incredibly disappointed when the game concluded after only 35 hours.
The Dark Cloud series will never win any awards nor be put on any best-of lists, but it is one whose gameplay resonates so completely with me as an individual. I love these games; I love playing them despite all of their warts. It may take a special kind of autism, but if you enjoy rote dungeon crawling, I recommend this game with my entire being.
Dark Cloud 2 is a game I've had an affinity for for quite a long time, and just recently I played it for the first time in 15 years. The amount of flaws in the game was staggering so I wanted to take moment to briefly recount them.
To start, the inventory system of the game is possibly one of the worst I've ever seen. The player collects so, so many items throughout the adventure in a variety of types. There's quest items, weapons, battle items, healing items, status items, crafting materials, upgrade materials, fishing materials, fish, etc. etc. All of these things co-mingle in the same inventory with no auto-arrangement options. Over the course of the game the inventory balloons to an unusable girth, and manually organizing things becomes a chore.
Crafting is such a fundamental mechanic of the game that a cumbersome inventory system is not only unforgivable (Spoiler alert: I end up forgiving this flaw) but mind-boggling in how the inventory made it out the door looking the way it does.
A second issue with the game is the implementation of the literal world-building mechanic relative to the first game. The Georamas were never too intricate in Dark Cloud 1 (DCX for the PlayStation fans) but they did go a bit further in the various requests of the citizens that the player had to keep in mind when arranging the cities of land. There was also that delightful totem pole puzzle in the desert area.
The city building in Dark Cloud 2, however, is pretty mindless. There's a reason for this: the amount of structures the player can build is largely uncapped. Let's look at an example:
In the volcanic area of the game there are a few buildings that need to be built a certain way. One needs to be elevated a few blocks in height, which entails committing materials to building those elevator blocks and then placing the house on top of it. So I did this, and when it came time to move a particular NPC into the village, I found that he needed a special house with a fence built around it.
In Dark Cloud 1, I'd have a conundrum here. I would need to construct more blocks around the house to allow room for the fence to also be built up a few stories high. However, in Dark Cloud 2, I can just build an entirely separate house on ground level, easily build a fence around it, and move the NPC into it with nobody occupying the higher-up structure.
By removing the cap on structures players can dedicate one house to each "building requirement", where before the very slight difficulty of the building sections came from balancing all of the requirements within the limited number of structures.
There are precisely two attempts to do something interesting with the building: One is a city that has to be built on four plateaus that rise and sink depending on the number of houses on them (???) and thus the player has to equally build on all to create a perfectly flat ground. The other is the final building section of the game that tasks the player with rebuilding a garden to the exact specifications laid out in a few portraits they can find in the nearby dungeon.
While these approach the more thoughtful usage of the building mechanics in the first game, neither is that mentally demanding nor engaging.
One is left thinking why they brought this mechanic back at all. Did Dark Cloud have that much star power that they needed to brand this as a sequel with ham-fisted legacy mechanics instead of just making a new game unburdened by what kids in Blockbuster perceived as "discount Zelda"?
Almost everything to do with the story of Dark Cloud 2 is another misfire. The voice acting ranges from mid to awful, and the awkward load times of the PlayStation 2 ensure that cutscenes never run smoothly. There are frequently awkward pauses as the next line of dialogue loads that produce unintended comedy as characters just stand around in otherwise dire situations.
A significant element of the story is time travel, and Dark Cloud 2 has some of the least thought-out time travel mechanics seen yet in games. There is no attempt to logically think through what time travel would mean in-world insofar as causality and logic. I'm fine engaging a game on its own level when it comes to these things rather than missing the point by nitpicking, but the way time travel is handled in this game is just so illogical that it can be difficult to accept at times for anyone who has engaged with the idea before in any other form.
The rest of the writing, too, is off. It's incredibly juvenile, which is of course fine were the game to be good for kids, but I the mechanics of Dark Cloud 2 are just one step above what most children would find approachable or even possible to engage with. The mismatch of the mechanical depth and the maturity of the writing produces some amount of cognitive dissonance.
And man are there just so many mechanics! At the base level there's world-building and weapon crafting, both fundamental to the completion of the game. But there is also photography, invention, monster recruitment, fishing, fish breeding, fish racing, golf (???), and robot customization. All of these exist in varying degrees of completion of depth, and none of them are particularly engaging. The dominant strategy of completing this game seems to lie in choosing just one of these, whichever you find the most fun, and forgetting all of the others exist.
And yet the core gameplay loop of this game is just so satisfying to me. Running through samey floors of dungeons, wiping out enemies, building up your weapons until they evolve (???) into another weapon, saving the nearby city until all of its inhabitants are happy, it's something I could do for hours. Despite all of the flaws listed above, I was incredibly disappointed when the game concluded after only 35 hours.
The Dark Cloud series will never win any awards nor be put on any best-of lists, but it is one whose gameplay resonates so completely with me as an individual. I love these games; I love playing them despite all of their warts. It may take a special kind of autism, but if you enjoy rote dungeon crawling, I recommend this game with my entire being.
All I remember is that I really enjoyed what I played of this. I think another game came out that I wanted to play more or something but I never went back to finish this one.