Skip to main content

Dark Cloud: Part 1

It’s no secret at this point that I’m a huge RPG fan.  That said, I have always found action RPGs to be hit or miss.  

I find a lot of them to be very unbalanced, filled with difficulty spikes and generally inconsistent.  So naturally, I wasn’t all that excited when Dark Cloud was released back in 2001.  There were just too many other games out there that were more interesting and it got fairly middling reviews, so it was easy to ignore.  However, it also garnered something of a cult following and it has been one of the longest standing classic games available for download on Sony’s PlayStation store.  I figured now was as good a time as any to try it.

Right off the bat, I noticed a bevy of themes that are prevalent in modern games: randomly generated dungeons, ‘town building and other mini-games and an almost singular focus on item collecting and upgrading.  This stuff existed in games back then, but it wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it is now.  These elements can be fun if they are done right and fortunately, Dark Cloud does far more right than wrong.  It’s a good, solid, surprisingly influential playthrough, though not a classic in any sense.

Image result for dark cloud

I won’t go into too much detail about the graphics, but they just scream “early PS2 game.”  It has lots of great character models, with smooth animation and clean polygons.  It also doesn’t have very much else to look at.  All the areas are wide open and lack any sort of objects to interact with.  Some of the dungeons will have a column here and there, but its so rare you almost get excited when you see one.  Once you do rebuild the towns, the buildings will only load when you get close.  It all a function of the limited capacity of the system and at least its not gamebreaking.

Dark Cloud certainly wasn’t the first game to mix genres or include a town building element.  ActRaiser did it.  So did Azure Dreams.  But it wasn’t quite as detailed or important to the core gameplay as it is here.  You absolutely need to build up the towns in order to advance the story, as townspeople will give you items that are critical in advancing your quest.  I guess its not a big deal, if you were that opposed to it you would just pick up one of the millions of other JRPGs that are out there, but it might be frustrating to some as the game doesn’t really tell you this or give you any direction.

One of the biggest reasons Dark Cloud falls flat is it lacks any sort of meaningful reward for all of your work.  Part of what makes these dungeon crawler/rouguelike RPGs work is the continued drive to get more, stronger, fun loot.  There just isn’t enough here, not enough big ticket weapons to search for our rare items to dig up.  Unlocking the town pieces is fun, but its a one time affair and once its done, there is little reason to go back and explore more. The loot in the last dungeon isn’t much better than the loot in the first.

But at the end of the day, it boils down to one question: Is this game any good?  We will get into that next week.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Terranigma

  As usual, it took way longer than it should have, but I did EVENTUALLY do exactly what I said I was going to. It's a year late, but I've finally made my way through the Quintet trilogy. Playing these three games became a stated goal of mine since I started podcasting last year. One of my earliest episodes covered Soul Blazer, the first title in the pseudo series. The second game, Illusion of Gaia, was also a landmark episode as it was the first one to include the intro song ("A Glass Half Full of Tears" by Aura Blaze, who's music you should check out here ). Both of them received pretty solid scores, though I didn't quite like the latter quite as much as a lot of people seem to. After all these years, I'm still surprised I never played these games when they came out. Both were definitely right up my alley and readily available to buy or even rent at my local video store, but I just never picked them up. It's a little more understandable that I had ne

Lost Odyssey: Part 1

  Before we unpack and review this week's game, we need to talk a little bit about the console it's on and that console's history. But this isn't some lesser known 90's system like the Neo Geo or 3DO. It's a console family that in the last 20 years has become a household name for both gamers and non-gamers alike. Whether you are a fan of the console or not, there's no denying the original XBox caused a seismic shift when it was released in 2001. The big black and green box immediately stood out physically and it wasted little time in establishing itself as one of the most unapologetically western consoles of all time. Born of a marriage between a multi-billionaire's spur-of-the-moment infatuation and excessive 90's edgelord marketing and baptized in Mountain Dew, XBox took Sega's "cool kid" strategy and turned it up to 11. There were no silly plumbers or hedgehogs here. Nintendo and Sony? Those were for anime nerds and little kids. Sega

Lost Odyssey: Part 2

Last week, we started our look at Lost Odyssey, a title that seemed to break unwritten rules of gaming left and right. We have a traditional RPG, which is the brainchild of the creator of Final Fantasy, released for XBox, a console not known for the genre, at a time when said genre was at what felt like the absolute bottom of its popularity. We started with the story, characters and world, all of which I thought were really good to great. That's a great start for an RPG, where those aspects are very important. But all of that can be undone if the gameplay isn't up to par. It's critical in any generation, but this is an essential aspect to call out in 7th gen RPGs. There was a lot of experimentation going on in the genre at the time, a lot of which didn't yield positive results. I guess I get it, the genre wasn't doing well at the time and developers were trying to do anything they could to bring it back to relevance. Sometimes, that meant terrible gimmicks. Other ti