Dark Cloud 2
Posted April 23, 2003
Got a few free hours this weekend? Got 150? Well, that's kind of how I felt when I received Dark Cloud 2 to review. I had no clue what was in store for me. The detailed complexity of this game was beyond anything I could have imagined. Remember how you felt when you finally beat Legend of Zelda, or Final Fantasy, or Dragon Warrior, or any similar games? You had invested hours of your time, turned down dates (if you ever had any), not changed out of your jammies for 4 days straight, and opted to stay inside in the A/C for several weeks over the summer. Dark Cloud 2 can/will have the same effect. Most of the games' intricasies were to its' benefit with only a few complexities being to its detriment.
The story starts out innocently enough, like so many other adventure games. Palm Brinks is a peaceful town with your typical townspeople and your typical town stores. One catch though, no one has ever set foot outside of the town gates! "Why?" you may be asking yourself. Well, because of the evil Flotsam of course! Flotsam is the evil clown that has held down the people of Palm Brinks, bought out the mayor, and is just an all around non-swell guy.
So you are then introduced to the main character Maximillian, who is just as cute a little cherub of a boy as any boy could be. He fancies himself an inventor but as you quickly learn he's better at beating up enemies with a wrench than he is at showing off his high IQ. There are constant references to how Max is searching for his Mother, and how he sees his escape out of town as a way to find her. This touching tidbit really isn't important to the overall game, but still worth mentioning.
Fairly early on you also meet Monica who will be the other main character you can play with. Monica is, of course, from the future and wields a gigantic sword, which only gets bigger as you progress in the game.
The plot admittedly takes quite some time to develop (and this was a bit of a negative for the game) but you eventually realize Dark Cloud 2 possesses one very important feature that it holds over many other games like it. This game takes place in the past, present, and future...all at the same time! Yes, there is more time travel in this game than in the entire trilogy of "Back to the Future". So much so, in fact, that you may be led to proclaim "Great Scott!"
In any event, Max eventually breaks out of town through a series of underground sewers, and once outside of town he travels to a variety of other locations and along the way meets a series of interesting friends, foes, and bosses. Sounds like a typical game right? Oh, but there's so much more...so, so much more.
Gameplay:
Where do I begin?...hmmm, let's see.
Well for starters, as you can probably tell already, there are about 20 things going on at any one time in this game. So I guess I'll just describe each one of them, and then try to make somewhat of a connection, and leave it at that.
The game is broken up by Chapters, which is a good thing because it does give you a sense of achievment when you advance to the next chapter. Granted, it's still very easy to go back to old levels and go through all the motions again, but at least you know you're moving forward. This story-like aspect keeps the game on a linear path, although (to put it in business terms) there is still a whole lot of growth going on horizontally while you move ahead vertically.
By that same token, the game does allow for easy transport from setting to setting with a "Move" feature in the main character menu. You can go from town to town, and even land at particular save points within each town. The only discouragment of such movements is in the fact that you can only skip out of a dungeon (fighting level) at the cost of half of your money. Definitely an "Emergency Only" situation.
Within each dungeon level you can play with one of several characters. Your two main choices are Max and Monica. Max has two main weapons: his wrench, and his gun. I'll explain weapon upgrades in a minute. Monica also has two choices: her sword, and her magic bracelet. Later on in the game Max can choose to fight as the Ridepod, which is one of Max's many inventions. The Ridepod is normally used for larger enemies, as it packs a much meaner punch in the early stages. Still later in the game Monica gains the ability to change into different monsters. In such disguises she can either befriend the monster (allowing her to gain items from the beasts) or she can attack with varying degrees of force. Different situations call for different fighters, and you learn fairly quickly which is best in each scenario.
There are a couple of different attack styles and methods of fighting. You have your standard attack with the sword or wrench, each of which can be turned into "combo" attacks by just pressing X constantly. You can block oncoming attacks using R1. R1+X allows you to pick up certain enemies if they're close enough to you and throw them, which then allows you to capitalize on their stunned state by beating the crap out of them. You can also pick up stones throughout the dungeons and attack using the same method.
As for the Max's gun and Monica's bracelet, these are longer range weapons. You can lock on to targets and shoot the monsters with both weapons. Monica eventually earns the ability to catch the shooting attacks of enemies, store them in her sword and then shoot them back at the monster, a very cool and very useful feature.
Throughout the dungeons you will obtain different items via a sprinkling of treasure chests found all over the place. Within these chests are items for recovery (bread, banana, antidote drink), repair (weapon powder), attack (bomb, poison apple), material (rolling log, hunk of copper, paint), defense (antidote amulet) or build-up (power crystals). When you kill monsters each one will also give you money (gilda), experience points, and some will give you various other items as well. As the game progresses stores begin to pop up and the gilda comes in handy, but early on the treasure chests are the main source for building up your inventory.
Speaking of building up, the "Build Up" of weapons is crucial to success in DC2. The way this is done is through spectrumizing various items you have in your cache. Each weapon, whether it's Max's wrench or Monica's magic bracelet, has different power aspects. Lightning, attack, beast, flame, chill, and durable are some examples of such categories. The aforementioned power crystals can be spectrumized at any time from your items menu. They turn into magical orbs, whose power can then be injected into your weapons to build them up. You only have so many spectrumizing points to use though, so you need to be careful on which crystals you inject and into which players weapons. It can be a challenge to keep track of, but it definitely makes you a fiercer fighter. Spectrumization points are earned through the use of that weapon, so playing with a variety of characters and using all of their available weapons is crucial.
Meanwhile...
In each new town you come across there is a dilemma going on. The first major town outside of Palm Brinks is called Sindain. Here you will acquire (from the uber-friendly Firbits) a machine called the Carpenterion. This machine allows you to input materials to make different buildings, trees, rivers and add them to a Georama system (an open map for you to build on). You are allowed the privelege of building such things through the acquisition of Geostones, which you find in each of the many dungeons. Once you figure out the dilemma in each town, you then go about trying to build the area up so that in the future, the dilemma will be solved. Confused yet?
In the future...
You have the ability to go to the future thanks to Monica, who's from the future! Max has a "Take me to the future" amulet, and Monica has a "Blast to the Past" amulet, allowing the both of you to travel in between eras sans a flux capacitor. This is easy enough...what's not easy is figuring out what to do/build in the present that will postively affect the growth of that area in the future. The game is somewhat helpful in this sense by giving you a "To Do" list, but they are rather vague in exactly what to do. Here is where I will admit a walkthrough helped me tremendously. Knowing where to place certain items in the Georama system is very tough, but once you figure it out you will see the results.
Back to the present...
Aside from building houses, fences, and rivers (which are done through the use of many items found in treasure chests in the dungeons...see how it all fits together?) you also have to recruit people from Palm Brinks to come on your journey with you. Therefore you have to complete sometimes daunting tasks to convince these people (local baker, police cheif, gardener, weapons expert) to join your party. Then you are able to build them houses and move their ungrateful asses in. It is in doing so that the population of these towns you are single-handedly building are able to thrive.
As if fighting monsters, building towns, and searching for his mother weren't enough, Max also has a fetish for inventing things. Well then let's add that into the game! You acquire a camera early on, and so just about whenever Max feels like it, he can bust it out and snap some photos. He is then able to take these photos and combine them to pop that light bulb in his mind (the game actually shows this happening) and create an invention. The ideas for what to take pictures of are scattered throughout the towns, and it's probably useful to keep a journal of the different "picture worthy" items.
What's one thing every kid loves?...you guessed it, fishing! What game would be complete without some fishing attached. Not only do you gain the ability to fish, but you can also raise fish, and then you can use your raised fish to race other fish! This is of course, after you've built an aquarium. All in a hard day's work for a little tike like Max. You obtain bait along the way in case you were wondering if they'd let that detail slip by.
One leisure activity surely isn't enough though, so towards the end of chapter 3 Max is introduced to the wonderful world of Spheda. Spheda ("Challenge" in Italian) is basically golf. You see, "time distortions" (the cup) have opened up all over the world, and shards of spacetime called "spheres" (Titelist) have fallen to the earth, and so it is your task to stick the spheres back into the distortions and plug up the holes in time. That makes perfect sense! Of course you have various levels of "sphera rods" (clubs) that you can earn and build up as the game goes on.
So as you can tell, there's not much going on at any one time in this game. I didn't even include the brief interaction with Lin, the young sage, who gives you the ability to travel backwards in time, completing the time travel trifecta. In any event, the game is bogged down with things going on. You will never say to yourself "I wonder what I can do next". There is always some task to be acheived, and if you accept the challenge of this game, then you'll have plenty of work to do to acheive it.
Graphics:
Two words: Color Palette. As if the Rainbow Butterfly (Second Chapter Boss) wasn't proof enough, the seemingly infinite number of colors used to decorate this game is second to none. The graphical depiction of everything from the enemies, to the backgrounds, to different characters themselves is very impressive and detailed. The landscapes are very unique and the creativity expressed in some of the futuristic developments of basic nature building blocks into whole villages truly satiated the eyes' appetite.
As I've mentioned, there is a bevy of cinematics in this game. As luck would have it, I recently wrote a novel entitled "Cinematics: A Journey Through Gaming Hell." Actually that's not true, but the point is that I hate cinematics. However, for DC2, while some of these can be rather long, they are all fairly essential to the plot. The point is that the graphics during these scenes are quite splendid, and they almost made me forget how pissed I was that I had to advance everyone's dialogue with a tap of the X button.
The game actually passes on a time clock allowing you to often have to play levels at night, or in rainy conditions, or any number of other real life climatic situations. The game never skips a beat in this regard, making puddles when it's raining, closing down village life at night, and even allowing fog to creep in on some levels. It's an accuracy that's often overlooked, but such attention to realism is still appreciated.
Audio:
Nothing too spectacular here, but it definitely gets the job done.
The soundtrack is pretty standard for an adventure game. Each board has it's own theme song, and admittedly they're all fairly catchy. Most importantly, none of the tracks really annoyed me. Not only were they pretty decent songs, but they are so often interrupted by the action of attacking, or by the thought provoking on-screen decision making, that it blended in well as a backdrop (which is the role of all gaming soundtracks in my opinion, short of Vice City).
Sound effects in this release were very impressive. Battle scene action was accentuated by the clanging of the sword, or the tearing into the flesh by the various battle wrenches, not to the mention the "death blow" reactions from your enemies. Then as you collected gilda and experience points, they had that cool doink sound as they were drawn to you like magnetic balls of joy. The clomping of the shoes on the ground is even fairly accurate. I'm a drummer, and one of my pet peeves is when the drums in music videos don't sync up with the songs. Well these footsteps were as accurate as any I've seen in the gaming world. But I digress.
Voices in this game are pretty good. Not only does just about everyone have a different voice, but most of them match up very well. From the Firbit elves in the second chapter that have squeaky voices, through Max and Monica having kid-sounding voices, all the way up to the Elder Jurak (large old living tree) having a deep wizened voice.
Conclusion:
A cautious "Bravo" to Level 5 for this release. I say cautious for one simple reason: this game is teetering on being too complex. It's almost as if they got a team of 20 programmers together to write this game, threw out some ideas, formed a general map for success, and then sent them to 20 different locations to code the game. Then, they re-convened and took everyone's ideas regardless. Granted, there is a very cohesive flow to this game, but there is just so much to figure out while trying to advance linearly through the game's story that it can become jumbled. DC2 is a game that you have to have patience with, and as I said in the beginning, you have to be willing to put in a lot of hours.
I flopped back and forth on how to rate this game overall. I definitely got into the story line after it started rolling, and the way the game allows you to build, and build up weapons, and discover new items and levels...it really held my attention. I dedicated two solid weekends and then some to playing it, and I wouldn't consider it time wasted.
If you don't feel you have the time to dedicate to an increasingly widening storyline, than this game isn't for you. However, if you liked the flagship adventure games of the past (Zelda, Final Fantasy) then you should really enjoy Dark Cloud 2.
The story starts out innocently enough, like so many other adventure games. Palm Brinks is a peaceful town with your typical townspeople and your typical town stores. One catch though, no one has ever set foot outside of the town gates! "Why?" you may be asking yourself. Well, because of the evil Flotsam of course! Flotsam is the evil clown that has held down the people of Palm Brinks, bought out the mayor, and is just an all around non-swell guy.
So you are then introduced to the main character Maximillian, who is just as cute a little cherub of a boy as any boy could be. He fancies himself an inventor but as you quickly learn he's better at beating up enemies with a wrench than he is at showing off his high IQ. There are constant references to how Max is searching for his Mother, and how he sees his escape out of town as a way to find her. This touching tidbit really isn't important to the overall game, but still worth mentioning.
Fairly early on you also meet Monica who will be the other main character you can play with. Monica is, of course, from the future and wields a gigantic sword, which only gets bigger as you progress in the game.
The plot admittedly takes quite some time to develop (and this was a bit of a negative for the game) but you eventually realize Dark Cloud 2 possesses one very important feature that it holds over many other games like it. This game takes place in the past, present, and future...all at the same time! Yes, there is more time travel in this game than in the entire trilogy of "Back to the Future". So much so, in fact, that you may be led to proclaim "Great Scott!"
In any event, Max eventually breaks out of town through a series of underground sewers, and once outside of town he travels to a variety of other locations and along the way meets a series of interesting friends, foes, and bosses. Sounds like a typical game right? Oh, but there's so much more...so, so much more.
Gameplay:
Where do I begin?...hmmm, let's see.
Well for starters, as you can probably tell already, there are about 20 things going on at any one time in this game. So I guess I'll just describe each one of them, and then try to make somewhat of a connection, and leave it at that.
The game is broken up by Chapters, which is a good thing because it does give you a sense of achievment when you advance to the next chapter. Granted, it's still very easy to go back to old levels and go through all the motions again, but at least you know you're moving forward. This story-like aspect keeps the game on a linear path, although (to put it in business terms) there is still a whole lot of growth going on horizontally while you move ahead vertically.
By that same token, the game does allow for easy transport from setting to setting with a "Move" feature in the main character menu. You can go from town to town, and even land at particular save points within each town. The only discouragment of such movements is in the fact that you can only skip out of a dungeon (fighting level) at the cost of half of your money. Definitely an "Emergency Only" situation.
Within each dungeon level you can play with one of several characters. Your two main choices are Max and Monica. Max has two main weapons: his wrench, and his gun. I'll explain weapon upgrades in a minute. Monica also has two choices: her sword, and her magic bracelet. Later on in the game Max can choose to fight as the Ridepod, which is one of Max's many inventions. The Ridepod is normally used for larger enemies, as it packs a much meaner punch in the early stages. Still later in the game Monica gains the ability to change into different monsters. In such disguises she can either befriend the monster (allowing her to gain items from the beasts) or she can attack with varying degrees of force. Different situations call for different fighters, and you learn fairly quickly which is best in each scenario.
There are a couple of different attack styles and methods of fighting. You have your standard attack with the sword or wrench, each of which can be turned into "combo" attacks by just pressing X constantly. You can block oncoming attacks using R1. R1+X allows you to pick up certain enemies if they're close enough to you and throw them, which then allows you to capitalize on their stunned state by beating the crap out of them. You can also pick up stones throughout the dungeons and attack using the same method.
As for the Max's gun and Monica's bracelet, these are longer range weapons. You can lock on to targets and shoot the monsters with both weapons. Monica eventually earns the ability to catch the shooting attacks of enemies, store them in her sword and then shoot them back at the monster, a very cool and very useful feature.
Throughout the dungeons you will obtain different items via a sprinkling of treasure chests found all over the place. Within these chests are items for recovery (bread, banana, antidote drink), repair (weapon powder), attack (bomb, poison apple), material (rolling log, hunk of copper, paint), defense (antidote amulet) or build-up (power crystals). When you kill monsters each one will also give you money (gilda), experience points, and some will give you various other items as well. As the game progresses stores begin to pop up and the gilda comes in handy, but early on the treasure chests are the main source for building up your inventory.
Speaking of building up, the "Build Up" of weapons is crucial to success in DC2. The way this is done is through spectrumizing various items you have in your cache. Each weapon, whether it's Max's wrench or Monica's magic bracelet, has different power aspects. Lightning, attack, beast, flame, chill, and durable are some examples of such categories. The aforementioned power crystals can be spectrumized at any time from your items menu. They turn into magical orbs, whose power can then be injected into your weapons to build them up. You only have so many spectrumizing points to use though, so you need to be careful on which crystals you inject and into which players weapons. It can be a challenge to keep track of, but it definitely makes you a fiercer fighter. Spectrumization points are earned through the use of that weapon, so playing with a variety of characters and using all of their available weapons is crucial.
Meanwhile...
In each new town you come across there is a dilemma going on. The first major town outside of Palm Brinks is called Sindain. Here you will acquire (from the uber-friendly Firbits) a machine called the Carpenterion. This machine allows you to input materials to make different buildings, trees, rivers and add them to a Georama system (an open map for you to build on). You are allowed the privelege of building such things through the acquisition of Geostones, which you find in each of the many dungeons. Once you figure out the dilemma in each town, you then go about trying to build the area up so that in the future, the dilemma will be solved. Confused yet?
In the future...
You have the ability to go to the future thanks to Monica, who's from the future! Max has a "Take me to the future" amulet, and Monica has a "Blast to the Past" amulet, allowing the both of you to travel in between eras sans a flux capacitor. This is easy enough...what's not easy is figuring out what to do/build in the present that will postively affect the growth of that area in the future. The game is somewhat helpful in this sense by giving you a "To Do" list, but they are rather vague in exactly what to do. Here is where I will admit a walkthrough helped me tremendously. Knowing where to place certain items in the Georama system is very tough, but once you figure it out you will see the results.
Back to the present...
Aside from building houses, fences, and rivers (which are done through the use of many items found in treasure chests in the dungeons...see how it all fits together?) you also have to recruit people from Palm Brinks to come on your journey with you. Therefore you have to complete sometimes daunting tasks to convince these people (local baker, police cheif, gardener, weapons expert) to join your party. Then you are able to build them houses and move their ungrateful asses in. It is in doing so that the population of these towns you are single-handedly building are able to thrive.
As if fighting monsters, building towns, and searching for his mother weren't enough, Max also has a fetish for inventing things. Well then let's add that into the game! You acquire a camera early on, and so just about whenever Max feels like it, he can bust it out and snap some photos. He is then able to take these photos and combine them to pop that light bulb in his mind (the game actually shows this happening) and create an invention. The ideas for what to take pictures of are scattered throughout the towns, and it's probably useful to keep a journal of the different "picture worthy" items.
What's one thing every kid loves?...you guessed it, fishing! What game would be complete without some fishing attached. Not only do you gain the ability to fish, but you can also raise fish, and then you can use your raised fish to race other fish! This is of course, after you've built an aquarium. All in a hard day's work for a little tike like Max. You obtain bait along the way in case you were wondering if they'd let that detail slip by.
One leisure activity surely isn't enough though, so towards the end of chapter 3 Max is introduced to the wonderful world of Spheda. Spheda ("Challenge" in Italian) is basically golf. You see, "time distortions" (the cup) have opened up all over the world, and shards of spacetime called "spheres" (Titelist) have fallen to the earth, and so it is your task to stick the spheres back into the distortions and plug up the holes in time. That makes perfect sense! Of course you have various levels of "sphera rods" (clubs) that you can earn and build up as the game goes on.
So as you can tell, there's not much going on at any one time in this game. I didn't even include the brief interaction with Lin, the young sage, who gives you the ability to travel backwards in time, completing the time travel trifecta. In any event, the game is bogged down with things going on. You will never say to yourself "I wonder what I can do next". There is always some task to be acheived, and if you accept the challenge of this game, then you'll have plenty of work to do to acheive it.
Graphics:
Two words: Color Palette. As if the Rainbow Butterfly (Second Chapter Boss) wasn't proof enough, the seemingly infinite number of colors used to decorate this game is second to none. The graphical depiction of everything from the enemies, to the backgrounds, to different characters themselves is very impressive and detailed. The landscapes are very unique and the creativity expressed in some of the futuristic developments of basic nature building blocks into whole villages truly satiated the eyes' appetite.
As I've mentioned, there is a bevy of cinematics in this game. As luck would have it, I recently wrote a novel entitled "Cinematics: A Journey Through Gaming Hell." Actually that's not true, but the point is that I hate cinematics. However, for DC2, while some of these can be rather long, they are all fairly essential to the plot. The point is that the graphics during these scenes are quite splendid, and they almost made me forget how pissed I was that I had to advance everyone's dialogue with a tap of the X button.
The game actually passes on a time clock allowing you to often have to play levels at night, or in rainy conditions, or any number of other real life climatic situations. The game never skips a beat in this regard, making puddles when it's raining, closing down village life at night, and even allowing fog to creep in on some levels. It's an accuracy that's often overlooked, but such attention to realism is still appreciated.
Audio:
Nothing too spectacular here, but it definitely gets the job done.
The soundtrack is pretty standard for an adventure game. Each board has it's own theme song, and admittedly they're all fairly catchy. Most importantly, none of the tracks really annoyed me. Not only were they pretty decent songs, but they are so often interrupted by the action of attacking, or by the thought provoking on-screen decision making, that it blended in well as a backdrop (which is the role of all gaming soundtracks in my opinion, short of Vice City).
Sound effects in this release were very impressive. Battle scene action was accentuated by the clanging of the sword, or the tearing into the flesh by the various battle wrenches, not to the mention the "death blow" reactions from your enemies. Then as you collected gilda and experience points, they had that cool doink sound as they were drawn to you like magnetic balls of joy. The clomping of the shoes on the ground is even fairly accurate. I'm a drummer, and one of my pet peeves is when the drums in music videos don't sync up with the songs. Well these footsteps were as accurate as any I've seen in the gaming world. But I digress.
Voices in this game are pretty good. Not only does just about everyone have a different voice, but most of them match up very well. From the Firbit elves in the second chapter that have squeaky voices, through Max and Monica having kid-sounding voices, all the way up to the Elder Jurak (large old living tree) having a deep wizened voice.
Conclusion:
A cautious "Bravo" to Level 5 for this release. I say cautious for one simple reason: this game is teetering on being too complex. It's almost as if they got a team of 20 programmers together to write this game, threw out some ideas, formed a general map for success, and then sent them to 20 different locations to code the game. Then, they re-convened and took everyone's ideas regardless. Granted, there is a very cohesive flow to this game, but there is just so much to figure out while trying to advance linearly through the game's story that it can become jumbled. DC2 is a game that you have to have patience with, and as I said in the beginning, you have to be willing to put in a lot of hours.
I flopped back and forth on how to rate this game overall. I definitely got into the story line after it started rolling, and the way the game allows you to build, and build up weapons, and discover new items and levels...it really held my attention. I dedicated two solid weekends and then some to playing it, and I wouldn't consider it time wasted.
If you don't feel you have the time to dedicate to an increasingly widening storyline, than this game isn't for you. However, if you liked the flagship adventure games of the past (Zelda, Final Fantasy) then you should really enjoy Dark Cloud 2.