I remember seeing
Dark Cloud at E3. It was
just about to come out--this was the E3 immediately after the PS2's
release--and Sony was hyping
Dark Cloud as the next Zelda or
somesuch. I played a few minutes of it, but what can you get out of
a game at E3 other than "pretty graphics" and "need more time to
get a feel for it?" (Answer: Not much.)
When the game came out, I wrote a review for it at the site. Of
course, I didn't have time to put thirty-plus hours into the game,
and so my review was based on experiences up to the second or third
dungeon. Nonetheless, looking back at that review now, I think that
what I saw at the beginning of the game holds true throughout--it
requires too much micromanagement, weapons break too easily, and
the game tends to frustrate because of issues like that.
It's a damn shame my score didn't reflect my feelings.
I can understand why people thought
Dark Cloud was a good
game. The graphics are solid, the controls are easy to get used to,
and the battle system is deep enough to keep it interesting
throughout most of the game. On the surface, the game seems to get
a lot right. It satisfies the obsessive gamer by allowing them to
build up insanely powerful weapons; it satisfies the casual gamer
by allowing them to find lots of weapons strewn throughout the
various dungeons, and provides them with a fishing minigame to
entertain them when they get tired of the core experience.
Having just beaten the game, though, I find that "good game" is
perhaps going too far.
As the old cliché goes, the devil is in the details. While
Dark Cloud has a lot of options for upgrading your weapons,
the characters themselves have a minimal growth path. You can use
gourds to increase their water meter, you can use fruit to increase
their maximum health, and you can use their "favourite food" to
increase their defense. That's it.
Even worse, there are a limited number of each type of object. The
last character you get has a whopping
two chances to get his
defense boosted; one wonders why the developers even bothered
giving him a food. There end up being plenty of gourds to go
around, and it's easy enough to max out your primary characters and
have lots of gourds left over.
The worst part about the character "development," however, comes
from increasing their health. The game places an arbitrary limit on
the number of fruit each character can consume. This might not be
so bad if the various characters were all equally useful. They're
not, though; two of them (Toan and Ruby) are so much more useful
than the rest that it's hardly worth leveling the other character's
weapons. Ruby will be stuck with 140 health throughout the entire
game, though, which means that a number of tough enemies can kill
her with one hit. Does the game care that she was my primary
warrior once she joined my party? Nope.
There are other flaws like this. Weapons break too easily, and you
lose all of your progress in the weapon along with its attachments,
effectively requiring you to hit the reset button unless you like
losing hours of development. Said hours of development tend to be
tedious. The menu system is slow and clunky, and switching your
weapon's attributes takes too much damn time; I ended up sticking
with Holy through most of the last half of the game, mainly because
I was too lazy to take the time to switch between the different
elemental affinities.
Where the game utterly fails, however, is with its "Limited Zones."
Every once in a while, you'll come across a level that
forces you to use a particular character. While this is all well
and good for Toan and Ruby, when you're forced to use Ungaga in the
last dungeon and he has to hit the enemies an average of ten times
to kill them, you realise that you should probably be doing
something more productive with your time. Other limited zones make
you get thirsty more often--oh boy,
more
micromanagement!--or make your weapons
lose experience
instead of gaining it. What sort of sadistic designer thinks
punishing gameplay is a valid design choice? (Well, Level 5,
obviously.)
The game's redemption comes in the form of the Georama mode, where
you rebuild various towns (and other things) throughout the game.
It's fun to play around with this, and right when it starts to get
boring the game mixes it up some. It doesn't make up for the rest
of the problems, but it gives people who like lots of small goals
something to look forward to as they progress in the game. Of
course, only Toan can pick up the Atla pieces that Georama
requires, forcing you to switch back and forth between characters
every time you come across one. (Did I mention this game has lots
of micromanagement?)
The simplest summary I can give of
Dark Cloud's problems is
that the game squanders its potential with lots of annoying--here
it comes--micromanagement. Switching between characters, changing
weapon attributes, keeping your weapons healthy, and staying
hydrated shouldn't be what you remember about the game; you should
instead recall the exciting battles and interesting (if sparse)
storyline.
I bet you can guess what I remember most, though.
Back to the
Playstation 2 review
index.