Dark Cloud

The story is about a Dark Genie who is released from his prison and then runs amuck in the world, trying to lay waste to it all. Thankfully the Fairy King is on the case and he is able to save all of the world’s cities by encasing them in tiny orbs. He then enlists the help of a young lad named Toan who miraculously escaped the carnage and must now recover all of these orbs, each of which holds a tiny part of a village, until he can rebuild the world and hopefully gain the strength to defeat the genie.

It is a very lighthearted plot, but the way it is presented is quite fun, as it combines the world of fantasy with contemporary frames of thought, behavior, social taboos and whatnot, making everything fell a tad silly. Not silly in a bad way mind you, but silly in a fun, humorous manner.

Running around finding all of these orbs is actually quite fun; no small feat for an RPG with randomly generated dungeons, a style of game that can often be quite redundant. This is so in part because of the speed of the game, which is peppy indeed. Action stays fast and intense, even when using the stronger characters who pack a wallop, but their trade-off is that they lumber about a bit more. On top of this it feels far more like you’re dueling the enemies when in a one-on-one battle as you can’t just march on in, bonk the bad guy on the head and go merrily on your way. You have to pick you moments to strike carefully or risk missing and leaving yourself open for an attack. The enemies are actually quite clever, so you have to work a bit in order to take them out, as they don’t just mindlessly come after you, instead choosing to bide their time. Helping you connect though is a targeting system similar to the Z-Targeting in the N64 Zelda games, allowing players to not have to worry about constantly overshooting their opponents.

The dungeons themselves are theme-based, like all RPGs, but the two major non-combat obstacles that players will face while traversing these regions are that your characters get thirsty and that their weapons wear down and can break if not attended to. Generally this is no big deal because early in the game when you cannot store much water, you’re in the dungeons for so little time that this will not pose a problem. After a few hours of play your characters will have received items allowing them to store more water, thus be able to go longer before getting thirsty. Besides, there are plenty of ponds and whatnot in the levels to restore this as well as water bottles that can be kept in the inventory. Weapon hit points, however, are something to keep a closer eye on so not to accidentally break a particularly powerful one, especially one that you’ve spent five hours on, building it up. Luckily there is "repair powder" in the game to fix up a near-broken weapon, but still it is something that the player must constantly keep an eye on largely because it doesn’t fall steadily. It actually varies in how swiftly the hit points go down depending on what enemy you’re fighting because some may have a particularly high level of armor, causing greater wear on a weapon.

The annoying downside to the dungeons in Dark Cloud is that there is to great an emphasis on the use of keys. While it is important to have some in the game, such as for gaining access to the "Back Floor" of a level, where more powerful treasure is kept, after getting over halfway through the game it feels more like these keys are needed more to extend the length of the game than anything else.

Toan isn’t a one-man-army in this game though, as he will eventually meet up with five more warriors who wish to help him defeat the Dark Genie, making for a total of 3 melee fighters and 3 ranged fighters at your disposal. Unlike many RPGs where these extra players will largely go ignored, in Dark Cloud you must make good use of all of the characters as they each can be key in defeating a boss. So a secondary character with a weak weapon could make for a royal butt kicking at the end of a dungeon.

But not all battles are straight ahead sword swinging.  There are other points where the game plays much like PaRappa the Rappa, Space Ace, or the QTE parts of Shenmue, where button pressing prompts move along the bottom of the screen for players to copy.  They're quite easy, but if you get perfect the Fairy King even gives you a gift.

In the game characters don’t gain levels, instead it is the weapons that gain experience and grow stronger. Building up these weapons is a bit of a double-edged sword (did ya like that really bad pun there?), as it is interesting to see what the newly made sword looks like, but after maxing out two or three weapons it gets very tedious just because of the length of time it takes to accomplish such a task. Of course the last aspect of the gameplay comes in rebuilding the towns. It is by no means as complex as a game like Sim City where one needs to keep track of things like energy use, income, etc. but it is challenging to get the villagers at 100% happiness by fulfilling their requests for how to rebuild their city. It is actually more like a jigsaw puzzle in that regard because making everyone happy is a matter of placing their home or place of business in the area they ask for which requires making everything fir just right. A fun challenge nonetheless.

Aesthetically speaking the game looks pretty sharp. It isn’t as dazzling as some of the other games on the Playstation 2, but the artwork in Dark Cloud doesn’t lend itself to that. Instead the art is very cartoony, reflecting the happy-go-lucky mentality of the game’s story. Character design is fun and, for the most part, fresh, though the game does have some monsters that are strikingly similar. The animation stays smooth with no choppiness or slowdown either. Musically the game has a very laid back feel to it with soft, cheerful music in the villages (often with a Spanish flair to it), and mystical, ethereal sounding tunes in the dungeon, with zestier tracks when locked in battle.

In the end Dark Cloud is a very satisfying experience. It’s lightheartedness is a fresh change from all of the stern, serious RPGs out there, and its mix of familiar role-playing and strategy elements makes it easy to get into. While there are moments of tedium, there are far more fun aspects that outweigh this.

- Mr. Nash

(June 12, 2001)