Dark Cloud
This one hurts. I really wanted to fall in love with this classic. I remember seeing it played when I was a teenager by someone. I say it was my oldest brother, but he says it wasn’t him. Maybe it was my other brother.
So Allie picked my next game out of the hat. After playing Tales of Arise I was excited for a retro game to come out, and got right into it!
Well my excitement lasted about two hours. I’m going to probably cause some controversy here but this game does not hold up unless you have nostalgia glasses on. If you can relax your death stare for a moment, I’ll explain why.
The battle system and the dungeon exploration are my main gripes here. First the battle system is extremely rigid. Blocking is useless on some of the enemies, and the “dodge” is to manually time your character moving around to avoid as opposed to a more graceful button push to sidestep and take advantage of an opening. Guard works on some enemies, but there was this living suit of armor that would use a hammer, and go right through my block. I learned to just go in and hit and back up, but still. Half the time I was swinging my dagger I completely whiffed. Some enemies, specifically bats, had weird hit boxes. I know other PS2 era games that were action based, that did not suffer from these maladies. As for the dungeon exploration, it was extremely boring. Each floor was randomly generated, and sometimes you would have enemies way beyond your current ability to withstand attacks spawn. Normally you would just avoid them, but to progress to the next floor you need to kill enemies to drop a “key” to open the door. Well if you killed all the easy enemies and all that’s left are the big baddies, well you either fight to the death or use an “escape powder” to get out and try all over again.
There is also a weapon durability mechanic. As you use it you deplete your weapons durability points. When it reaches 0 it breaks. Before you open up the shop, you can be granted basic items to survive a trip through a floor from an NPC (bread for HP, repair powder for your weapons, and water for your thirst gauge), but after you open the shop you now have to purchase all these. So now dungeons went from annoying to tedious management issues. After about 5 hours I ended up actually getting into a situation where all my weapons were busted (so I could only deal 1 damage with one of my characters) and had no money to purchase repair powder to get it back in working order. At that point I just said “time to move on.”
On the flip side I loved the music and the “Georama.” The Georama is a system where you find pieces of your town in the dungeon and then you get to place them back where you want. Once you place people they tell you what they want you to add to their house and other things that will make them happy such as “i like to fish,” so you could put the fishing pond next to the house.
I think this game would be greatly helped by a remake that streamlines the action battle system and makes the resource management a little less strict. I respect anyone who loves this game, and I think I’ll go back and give it another shot someday, but for now I need to leave it in the abandoned pile.
