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.

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.