It’s rare that I get to talk about games in these reviews that were genuinely formative for me and truly are some of my favorite pieces of media of all time, because the vast majority of those types of games are games that have been talked about to death and adding my voice to the void is pointless. The closest I’ve ever gotten is reviewing Silent Hill 2, but as I said before, I don’t feel any need to review Chrono Trigger or Symphony of the Night or Earthbound. I just feel like I’m repeating what anybody would say about a classic. But I felt like reviewing the Dark Cloud games because one, it’s a nice trip down memory lane and two, it’s one of the few series that are a gray area where they’re two of my favorite games of all time, but not a ton of people have actually played them, so I will talk about both games in one go.
Dark Cloud and Dark Cloud 2 (Or Dark Chronicle everywhere but the USA and Korea) are PS2 dungeon crawling… City sim JRPGs question mark. These games are weird and borrow elements from a ton of different genres, so let’s just call them dungeon crawling JRPGs. Released in 2001 and 2003 respectively by Level 5 Software and published by Sony; these games weren’t massively acclaimed but the original sold well enough to enter the Sony “Greatest Hits” branding, and the second one sold even more than the first. Despite getting a PS4 rerelease, these games aren’t really talked about much so I wanted to review a series that is near to my heart.
Story, Writing and Characters- The stories in both these games are… Fairly weak by JRPG standards. The first game I can give a break to, it started out as a PS1 game and then got delayed and reworked into a PS2 game. The budget was tiny and unfortunately, there’s no real story or even heavily animated cutscenes. Most of the games cutscenes are in engine, which feels incredibly quaint by today’s standards. That being said, the game manages just about to get by with virtually no voice acting and hardly any animated cutscenes. The translation is kind of hilariously bad in places, especially when it comes to NPC dialog. One of my favorite translation mistakes is when you first get to a desert town later in the game called Muska Lacka, every single instance is spelled that way except the first time where they misspelled it “Muska Racka” which just makes me feel racist.
The first game’s plot is generic dark fantasy stuff. There’s an evil genie and you have to stuff him back in a bottle. Where the game, characters and eventually story do shine a bit is at the very end when the villain basically trauma dumps his civil war PTSD slowly over the course of the last dungeon. It’s the best the game can do with such limited resources I guess, but without much dialog or animated cutscenes, it’s hard to connect to any of the party members. The second game however, has a small, but great party. Our protagonist Max, a plunky small town inventor’s apprentice starts the story off by spending a night at the circus, where the inciting incident is that Max finds out clowns aren’t trustworthy. And I’m only slightly joking. He has the magic stone McGuffin from the first game that gives him the power to restore the world. He meets a girl sent from 57 years in the future named Monica that helps use her knowledge of how the villain, Griffyn, destroys the world so they can put it back together in the present.
It works well enough as the framework for a Dragon Quest style episodic adventure, but the fully animated cutscenes and mostly voice acted interactions really add character to the scenes where the first one couldn’t muster much. And Dragon Quest is really what I’m going to most compare it to because the second game shows exactly why Level 5 were perfect to make Dragon Quest 8 just a few years later. At the end of the day, neither game has a particularly great story by genre standards, but the second one is pretty good, especially with the interesting anti-villain twist at the end and the time travel angle.
Gameplay and Systems- It’s a mouthful to explain what Dark Cloud actually is. Basically, you go into a dungeon and travel down randomly generated dungeon layers until you reach the end and then you move on. As you explore each one, you receive parts to rebuild the town. You must then talk to the people in the town and determine how to arrange the city so that it best reflects what the citizens want in a top down Sims style view. It’s something like Yoko’s Island Express that combines two genres that on paper, sound horrible but ultimately gel together shockingly well. The first Dark Cloud has bog standard hack and slash action combat, but the second game drastically improves the core gameplay. The combat is much more varied and enemy attack patterns are way more interesting and unpredictable. One of the biggest flaws of the first game is that you get too many characters and while it brings a bit less gameplay variety, the streamlining of the party to just Max and Monica (and the talking mech which is probably the coolest character in the game) is the best change because it allows you to focus your efforts on improving just two sets of weapons and characters.
The main boon of the games is the unique and really cool level up system. Instead of party members getting leveled up like traditional JRPGs, your weapons level up and transform as you fill out specific stats. It’s a really fun system that helps lessen the need for grinding and seeing your weapons evolve and get stronger feels like a tangible reward for sticking out the admittedly sort of samey levels in the dungeons. The first title is a pretty straight forward game with some extra features like the best fishing mini game in any video game ever. The sequel, however is so full of axillary systems that a lot of people might just straight up ignore them. There’s fishing and fish races and aquarium keeping and the invention system. Dark Cloud 2 is one of the most feature rich games of all time, and because of this, it really feels like a complete, epic adventure in the same way only Dragon Quest or a Legend of Zelda game really does. No, you don’t have to do every little quirky side mechanic or mini game, but all of the mechanics do reward you for engaging with them and they all sync well with the core gameplay. I think this is such a huge part of why I loved this game as a kid, there was a seemingly endless amount of things to experience with it. Trust me, the golf mini-game you play at the end of dungeons sounds stupid until you realize that you can use the clubs as weapons and upgrade them so you can hit the ball with more spin, or increase the distance and control. It’s the way all these game systems intertwine that makes them worth trying.
Presentation and Graphics- The original Dark Cloud is not a pretty game to look at. It’s obvious it has a low budget and the animation quality is weak, alongside a near complete lack of voiced cutscenes, fully CGI cutscenes or any sort of real character writing. Dark Cloud 2 adopts an ultra appealing cell-shaded style that has aged wonderfully. Enemy designs are unique and while there is a lot of pallet swapping, there are also a ton of variety of enemies to begin with. Dark Cloud 2 in particular has some stunning sky boxes and environments for a game made on the PS2. The variety in the visuals of the dungeons in 2 is also a massive upgrade compared to the generic cave/castle environments of the first one. Dark Cloud 2 is always the game I point to as the best sequel of all time because there truly really is not a single thing that Dark Cloud 2 doesn’t improve or expand properly on, yet its still different enough that it doesn’t make the first obsolete.
Music and Sound Design- The music in both games is stellar; memorable, nostalgic and catchy. There is a lot of variety between plucky string melodies, uplifting nylon guitars, entrancing traditional Japanese woodwinds and somber piano will all grace your ears before the first area has been seen in totality. While the first game lacks a little variety and has midi sound quality, the second game, unbound by restrictions has one of the most memorable soundtracks in any game for me. I find myself randomly whistling tunes from this game all the time. The sound design in both games is fantastic as well with some great ambient sounds and satisfying sound effects, especially when you open a chest or find a new dungeon exit.
It’s hard for me to go over every single flaw in these games, and trust me, they very much are flawed games. If you’re not a fan of the dungeon crawling, you won’t enjoy these games, but if you have the patience to really engage with it all, the second game in particular is an amazing experience. I go back to Dark Cloud 2 all the time, not even necessarily to achieve anything in game, but the simple act of grinding the core gameplay is relaxing to me, the calm of dungeon music juxtaposed with the panicked, frantic orchestra of the battle theme. It’s a game that I can point to that formed my taste in games and is definitely why I attached to series like Persona and SMT and even something like Etrian Odyssey. Dark Cloud is a series that I hold very dear and I hope my review gets more people to play these underrated gems.
GGreat Review. Makes me really wanna play them especially since I downloaded 2. You really sold me on it