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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ranking the Final Fantasy Commanders - Magic: The Gathering Set Preview Part 1

 Now here's something I never thought would ever happen.  I have been a fan of Magic: The Gathering for a long time. I've been a fan of Final Fantasy for just as long. Yet I never thought I would ever see a full-on MTG set based on Final Fantasy. When it was first announced, I thought this set was a joke. Honestly, it sounded like something I dreamed up when I was a kid, not an actual product that Wizards of the Coast was actually going to release. But here we are, two weeks away from the release of MTG - Final Fantasy. So now, it's time to rank some of the cards. I've talked a little bit about MTG before, but I think now is as good a time to talk about it again. Hey, I did a ranking for the Street Fighter cards, why not Final Fantasy? Well, I am going to do the same exercise once again. I am going to keep it to my most played format, commander/EDH, and rank all the new legendary creatures/potential commanders. The difference is this time, instead of eight new commander...
Post a Comment
Read more

Metal Max Returns

In recent weeks, I've been doing a lot of research into RPGs that never left Japan. I haven't covered a game that never came to the U.S. in quite a while, so I figured now is as good a time as any. There are always going to be games that get stuck in Japan or only get ported to PAL regions, whether its for financial, cultural or other reasons. But during the 5th generation, it was extremely common for games to stay on the mothership, especially when it came to RPGs. Simply put, the genre just wasn't as popular in the west and it was often not worth the time and effort to localize them. I talked a little bit about this with Sweet Home (though that stood zero chance of ever being released here) and Terranigma (which was not released in North America for more business related weirdness), but it still amazes me how many games never made their way to the West and how many of them I had never heard of until much later. When I started GOTBP, I kind of made it a point to not focus ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Alex Kidd in Miracle World

I've been skirting around it for a few years now, but its finally time to add yet another console to the list. A few years ago, I reviewed Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, a Genesis platformer that I didn't really enjoy all that much. I talked a little bit about how Alex Kidd was Sega's mascot before Sonic became a thing and how hyped up I was to give AKITEC a try, having heard so much about the series. That was part of the reason the game fell flat for me, though poor level design and awful boss fights were more than likely the bigger culprits. What I didn't realize at the time was that much of the positive sentiment I had heard about the series had nothing to do with its lone Genesis entry. Instead, much of the positivity was focused on the various entries on Sega's third generation console, a machine that I have been looking for an excuse to play for a long time. For most North American gamers, the Genesis was the first time we interacted with Sega. Many peop...
Post a Comment
Read more