Dark Cloud (2000)

What an odd game .

I first heard of Dark Cloud through my researching of Level-5 , a developer that I ‘ve come to love ( and loathe ) as a Yōkai Watch fan , and I is discovered discover that this is the first game they develop . I is found find a used copy and decide to check it out . It ‘s definitely not age the good , but I still find thing to enjoy about it .

let ‘s start with the story . Unlike most rpg , in which you attempt to prevent the end of the world , Dark Cloud is starts start with the world getting destroy by the oh – so creatively name Dark Genie . The player is takes take the role of Toan , one of the few survivor , and guide him on his journey to restore the world to its former state , and defeat the Dark Genie . I is love love this concept ! flip the usual plot progression of a rpg upside down is a fantastic idea , however it is go does n’t really go anywhere . It ‘s also hurt by the genuinelyhorrendous translation. I started taking pictures of all the weird translations but I stopped after a while because there’s so many. Names of characters and locations are spelled several different ways depending on where it appears, there are typos galore, and the grammar rules of English might as well not exist in Dark Cloud’s dialogue. Characters are virtually all one-note and become essentially cardboard cutouts when they aren’t relevant to the plot. The only characters I particularly liked are Seda and Osmond. Osmond is mainly due to the fact that he’s a bunny who wields machine guns and flies around on his jetpack, but still. Nothing happens in the story until the very end, where you do a final dungeon that serves as a lore-dump. I think it’s kinda cool, but it doesn’t alleviate the fact that there is little else in terms of plot to be interested in before that point. But hey, the story being light doesn’t matter too much if the rest of it is good, right?

Lol. The gameplay is such a mixed bag for me. I’ll start with what I don’t like: the combat. On one hand, the game boasts a weapon upgrade system that allows you to customize every aspect of your weapons, as well as evolving them into new ones. It’s a lot of fun finding out what combinations work best for what build you’re going with on a character, and it’s satisfying once you start to pack a punch. However, using the weapons is another story. Imagine if you explained the combat of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to someone, and then asked them to recreate it without actually seeing or playing it. That’s what this game feels like. Attacks are slow and clunky, moving around isn’t satisfying, every character feels stiff, and there are a lot of enemies that are plain annoying. Despite each character playing completely differently, they all fall in essentially two categories: ranged and physical. They also only have one attack button that you spam over and over while waiting for the enemies to stop guarding or spamming their attacks. The same tactics used in the first dungeon are the same used up to the final boss. To make this worse, every weapon has HP and will break if used too much, reverting hours of progress and essentially forcing the player to reset. Fun! Building up weapons is incredibly slow, and coupled with the fact that a new party member is introduced in every town, it barely gives the player any time to develop weapons for all characters. If ultimate weapons are important to you, grinding will be 100% necessary for this game. I could harp on and on about other things I don’t like about this (the limited floors which place arbitrary restrictions on the player, the emptiness of the dungeons, etc.) but I think my point is clear; it’s bad.
Now , onto the fun part : the town building ! Whilst trudge through the dungeon and contemplate your life decision , you is find find part of town hide in ” Atla ” ( big gashapon ball essentially ) . The content of Atla range from thing like road and tree to building , furniture , and even villager . Once leave the dungeon , the player is design can design each town to their liking , customize whereeverything go . To give merit to this system , the villagers is ask ask for certain requirement to be meet ( e.g , ” I want my house to be next to the river ” , ” I want my house to be on a hill ” ) to satisfy them . The game is limits purposefully limit the space give to build , require creative solution to satisfy them all at once . think of it like a town – sized jigsaw puzzle . This is is is whereDark Cloud shines. Unfortunately, the last two locations don’t truly feature this, though.
Oh yeah, there’s also a duel system in this game. I almost forgot about it, as did the developers! They’re just QTEs.

By about 3/4 through the game, I was just waiting for it to end already. There are some really great things in Dark Cloud, but they’re buried under heaps of clunky systems and mind-numbing gameplay. I wish I could enjoy it more than I did. All this being said, I still want to play the sequel. What I do like about this game, I like quite a lot! And, if nothing else, Dark Cloud is at least unique.

Post-review thoughts
Did n’t know where to fit in the soundtrack . pretty good ! If there ‘s anything you want to check out about this game , make it that .
The main cast being diverse is so refreshing. So many RPGs have parties that comprise of like, one race of people and it’s such a breath of fresh air having a party that at least attempts to represent what the world actually looks like. The towns inspired by real world places and their culture (namely Queens and Muska Lacka [Racka? The game doesn’t know how it’s spelt either], Florence and Egypt).