Dark Cloud 2
Level-5 returns with a sequel that's bigger, prettier and more well-rounded than the first game, but is it all that much better?
Published: March 7, 2003
Reviewing Dark Cloud 2 is a tough call. One the one hand, everything about the sequel – from the graphics to the combat to the enemies to the story to the improved Georama system is an order of magnitude better than the first game. The problem is, as good as the whole system is, there's something to be said about a good solid 40 hours of non-stop fighting and Georama with very, very little real story thrown in.
This is Dark Cloud 2's biggest problem; it's just too much to take in in a classic RPG marathon game session. In chunks, the game works incredibly well, even luring you into a couple more hours than you originally intended to play. But when you have plenty of time on your hands and can commit six or more hours to the experience, things start to get not only repetitive, but horrendously long-winded. It may be Dark Cloud 2's undoing, really, gameplay that's at first so engaging and fun that you can't help but try to play as much as possible, but then extended time spent with that gameplay quickly begins to show its flaws after just a few hours.
Dark Cloud 2, much like the first game, plops you down at the storytime table and serves you up a decent helping of back story and introduction to the main character, Max, who quickly finds that the sheltered life he leads in the walled-off city of Palm Brinks is soon to get quite a bit richer. After deciding to leave the town where he grew up and setting off to do so, he quickly finds that the red amulet his father gave him is more than just a pendant with a honkin' jewel in the middle. After meeting up with the protagonist you'll be sparring alongside, Monica, it's revealed that that jewel inside the pendant is an Atlamillia, an object that should be familiar to anyone who played the first one.
Max' bling's true nature now revealed, it's then further explained that the secluded life Max and the town's folk of Palm Brinks were leading was necessary; the world outside had essentially been erased, and Monica's role as a time-traveler was to help Max restore major cities' origin points – the points in time where the burgs' first got their start, which have been systematically erased by the game's head bad guy, Emperor Griffon.
And that's about all the story you'll get for the first 20 or so hours. A bit more is revealed after that, with some major plot revelations coming into play around the 25-30 hour mark, but for the most part, you'll be doing two things with your time in Max and Monica's worlds (Monica boasts a blue Atlamillia to Max's red; both of which allow time travel from Max's era to Monica's 100 years in the future): rebuilding the origin points of important places in the future, and exploring seemingly endless levels of dungeons in the area to acquire the Geostones to do so.
The dungeon crawling aspects are rather pedestrian in nature. Each time you enter one of the dungeon's levels, the floor/room/whatever is randomly generated with a different layout, enemies, items and powerups. This keeps things semi-fresh, especially since early on you'll be revisiting the same few rooms to level-up your weapons and characters because Dark Cloud 2's difficulty seemingly exists on two planes: controller-tossingly hard and cake walk easy, with little crossover or happy medium. Combat is similar to the first game in a lock-on-and-smack-the-crap-out-of-everything approach that's essentially identical to the first game, which borrowed it's combat heavily from the 3D Zeldas.
The Georama aspects, however, are where the game really sinks its teeth into you. Unlike the first game, which really required you to specifically recreate the towns as they once were from comments dispensed from the rescued residents, DC2 gives you quite a bit more freedom, usually only laying out a half dozen or so "requirements" like putting a house near a river or making sure someone lives in a particular place. Some requirements, like the person living in a house might have a sub-objective like making the house purple or offering a mailbox, but that's essentially it. Once you've fulfilled a particular requirement of the locale, you can travel 100 years into the future to see how the fruits of your labor have shaped the world. You'll also find power-ups for health and defense here, which is the only real way to "level-up" your characters, essentially limiting how powerful (or weak) they are for a particular part of the game.
About a quarter of the way through the game, and then again about halfway through, you're tossed a couple wildcards in the form of minigames. The first, fishing, is exactly as… interesting as it sounds, letting you fish with different kinds of bait for different kinds of fish (later in the game, you're given the option to raise, name, and race them if you so choose). The second, however, is one of the game's more refreshing diversions: that of a variation on golf called Sphera. Using a club, you simply try to smack a ball into a space-time fissure to repair damage to the fabric of reality. Your reward is a ultra-rare or useful item, and thus it's a good idea to try to connect the ball with the vortex as often as possible. The catch comes in the fact that the ball and the fissure must be opposite colors. To swap colors, the ball must smack against something with enough force to flip it from red to blue or vice-versa. This suddenly adds a level of strategy to the otherwise simple extreme golf nature of the game, and trust me when I say there are few things as fun as caroming a ball off a couple cliff walls and dropping it right into an opposite-colored vortex in a single shot. It's almost enough to make you forget that you've been doing the same thing over and over and over again for the past 15 hours. Almost.
The first game hit the PlayStation 2 early on in the system's life, and it showed. While the game tended to avoid the usual pitfalls most first-gen PS2 game had, it was still basically textured and not overly pretty. It was solid, sure, but didn't really have that wow factor. Dark Cloud 2 does. Yes, the game's characters and enemies are cel-shaded, but it's done to quite the positive effect, and when combined with an almost painted look for the rest of the world, the whole look is rather unique – even among cel-shaded games.
The game engine is also remarkably robust, especially compared to the first game. Instead of claustrophobic caves and narrow tunnels, the game actually takes stabs at sprawling vistas. It doesn't happen too often, and more often than not you'll still be gallivanting about in caves and tunnels, but at least the engine has taken a few steps up and shows it on rare occasions. Texture work is surprisingly detailed and varied, and the draw distances and effects that are thrown into the game are quite impressive. Developer Level-5 had to cheat a couple times and lay on fog or tilt the camera to hide pop-up, but for the most part it's not really an issue since it rarely affects the gameplay.
Whereas the first game managed to pull off a simple, but effective palette of aural compositions that were very much reminiscent of Yasunori Mitsuda's work on Chrono Cross, Dark Cloud 2 seems to have grown a bit more into itself. The music is by no means anything stunning, but it has a very specific, lilting style that works well. Some of the latter pieces are a bit over-moody or dramatic, but overall the game seems to stay light and enjoyable aurally, which is quite an accomplishment given that you'll probably hear the same few songs cycled literally hundreds – if not thousands – of times while you play.
Overall, Dark Cloud 2 is a much, much better game than its predecessor, but whereas the first game managed to cull bits and pieces of different games into something wonderfully unique, the sequel just seems to build upon all those pieces. Sure, the game is infinitely more impressive when each piece is broken down, but with an experience that begs to be played ad infinitum, yet quickly screams to be over long before it finally ends, the whole experience can feel a little flat. If you play the game in bite-sized chunks of only a couple hours rather than the eight plus hour sessions that I did, you'll likely walk away with an RPG experience than ranks among the best on the system. Just make sure you do so in bits, or you'll quickly tire of Dark Cloud 2's more addictive aspects, tainting the whole experience.
This is Dark Cloud 2's biggest problem; it's just too much to take in in a classic RPG marathon game session. In chunks, the game works incredibly well, even luring you into a couple more hours than you originally intended to play. But when you have plenty of time on your hands and can commit six or more hours to the experience, things start to get not only repetitive, but horrendously long-winded. It may be Dark Cloud 2's undoing, really, gameplay that's at first so engaging and fun that you can't help but try to play as much as possible, but then extended time spent with that gameplay quickly begins to show its flaws after just a few hours.
Dark Cloud 2, much like the first game, plops you down at the storytime table and serves you up a decent helping of back story and introduction to the main character, Max, who quickly finds that the sheltered life he leads in the walled-off city of Palm Brinks is soon to get quite a bit richer. After deciding to leave the town where he grew up and setting off to do so, he quickly finds that the red amulet his father gave him is more than just a pendant with a honkin' jewel in the middle. After meeting up with the protagonist you'll be sparring alongside, Monica, it's revealed that that jewel inside the pendant is an Atlamillia, an object that should be familiar to anyone who played the first one.
Max' bling's true nature now revealed, it's then further explained that the secluded life Max and the town's folk of Palm Brinks were leading was necessary; the world outside had essentially been erased, and Monica's role as a time-traveler was to help Max restore major cities' origin points – the points in time where the burgs' first got their start, which have been systematically erased by the game's head bad guy, Emperor Griffon.
And that's about all the story you'll get for the first 20 or so hours. A bit more is revealed after that, with some major plot revelations coming into play around the 25-30 hour mark, but for the most part, you'll be doing two things with your time in Max and Monica's worlds (Monica boasts a blue Atlamillia to Max's red; both of which allow time travel from Max's era to Monica's 100 years in the future): rebuilding the origin points of important places in the future, and exploring seemingly endless levels of dungeons in the area to acquire the Geostones to do so.
The dungeon crawling aspects are rather pedestrian in nature. Each time you enter one of the dungeon's levels, the floor/room/whatever is randomly generated with a different layout, enemies, items and powerups. This keeps things semi-fresh, especially since early on you'll be revisiting the same few rooms to level-up your weapons and characters because Dark Cloud 2's difficulty seemingly exists on two planes: controller-tossingly hard and cake walk easy, with little crossover or happy medium. Combat is similar to the first game in a lock-on-and-smack-the-crap-out-of-everything approach that's essentially identical to the first game, which borrowed it's combat heavily from the 3D Zeldas.
The Georama aspects, however, are where the game really sinks its teeth into you. Unlike the first game, which really required you to specifically recreate the towns as they once were from comments dispensed from the rescued residents, DC2 gives you quite a bit more freedom, usually only laying out a half dozen or so "requirements" like putting a house near a river or making sure someone lives in a particular place. Some requirements, like the person living in a house might have a sub-objective like making the house purple or offering a mailbox, but that's essentially it. Once you've fulfilled a particular requirement of the locale, you can travel 100 years into the future to see how the fruits of your labor have shaped the world. You'll also find power-ups for health and defense here, which is the only real way to "level-up" your characters, essentially limiting how powerful (or weak) they are for a particular part of the game.
About a quarter of the way through the game, and then again about halfway through, you're tossed a couple wildcards in the form of minigames. The first, fishing, is exactly as… interesting as it sounds, letting you fish with different kinds of bait for different kinds of fish (later in the game, you're given the option to raise, name, and race them if you so choose). The second, however, is one of the game's more refreshing diversions: that of a variation on golf called Sphera. Using a club, you simply try to smack a ball into a space-time fissure to repair damage to the fabric of reality. Your reward is a ultra-rare or useful item, and thus it's a good idea to try to connect the ball with the vortex as often as possible. The catch comes in the fact that the ball and the fissure must be opposite colors. To swap colors, the ball must smack against something with enough force to flip it from red to blue or vice-versa. This suddenly adds a level of strategy to the otherwise simple extreme golf nature of the game, and trust me when I say there are few things as fun as caroming a ball off a couple cliff walls and dropping it right into an opposite-colored vortex in a single shot. It's almost enough to make you forget that you've been doing the same thing over and over and over again for the past 15 hours. Almost.
The first game hit the PlayStation 2 early on in the system's life, and it showed. While the game tended to avoid the usual pitfalls most first-gen PS2 game had, it was still basically textured and not overly pretty. It was solid, sure, but didn't really have that wow factor. Dark Cloud 2 does. Yes, the game's characters and enemies are cel-shaded, but it's done to quite the positive effect, and when combined with an almost painted look for the rest of the world, the whole look is rather unique – even among cel-shaded games.
The game engine is also remarkably robust, especially compared to the first game. Instead of claustrophobic caves and narrow tunnels, the game actually takes stabs at sprawling vistas. It doesn't happen too often, and more often than not you'll still be gallivanting about in caves and tunnels, but at least the engine has taken a few steps up and shows it on rare occasions. Texture work is surprisingly detailed and varied, and the draw distances and effects that are thrown into the game are quite impressive. Developer Level-5 had to cheat a couple times and lay on fog or tilt the camera to hide pop-up, but for the most part it's not really an issue since it rarely affects the gameplay.
Whereas the first game managed to pull off a simple, but effective palette of aural compositions that were very much reminiscent of Yasunori Mitsuda's work on Chrono Cross, Dark Cloud 2 seems to have grown a bit more into itself. The music is by no means anything stunning, but it has a very specific, lilting style that works well. Some of the latter pieces are a bit over-moody or dramatic, but overall the game seems to stay light and enjoyable aurally, which is quite an accomplishment given that you'll probably hear the same few songs cycled literally hundreds – if not thousands – of times while you play.
Overall, Dark Cloud 2 is a much, much better game than its predecessor, but whereas the first game managed to cull bits and pieces of different games into something wonderfully unique, the sequel just seems to build upon all those pieces. Sure, the game is infinitely more impressive when each piece is broken down, but with an experience that begs to be played ad infinitum, yet quickly screams to be over long before it finally ends, the whole experience can feel a little flat. If you play the game in bite-sized chunks of only a couple hours rather than the eight plus hour sessions that I did, you'll likely walk away with an RPG experience than ranks among the best on the system. Just make sure you do so in bits, or you'll quickly tire of Dark Cloud 2's more addictive aspects, tainting the whole experience.