Dark Cloud
Dark Cloud is an action oriented role playing game for the Sony Playstaion 2. Players upgrade their weapons throughout the game from a rusty sword to a highly advanced version of the sword, while they upgrade their town as well.
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Developer: Level 5 Publisher: SCEA Release Date: June 30, 2001 Platforms: PS2 JustRPG Score: 74% Pros: +Unique weapon upgrade system. +Fun combat system. Cons: -No replayability. -Weak story line. |
Dark Cloud Overview
Dark Cloud is a fun action oriented role playing game which was released for the Sony Playstation 2 in early 2001. Players upgrade their weapon throughout the game and take it from a rusty sword to a much more advanced version of the sword. While players are upgrading their weapon they will also receive upgrades and new buildings for the town they are staying in at the time. As players advance through the story line they will go to new towns and then upgrade those. While the combat system is fun and the upgrade system keeps the player interested, the story line is very weak and the dialogue is awful.
Dark Cloud Screenshots
Dark Cloud Featured Video
Dark Cloud Review
By: Jason Ferguson
| Dark Cloud was supposed to be the Playstation’s answer to the popular Zelda series. I’ll be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of the Zelda games, but still, Dark Cloud just isn’t at the same level. Nonetheless, Dark Cloud is not a complete Zelda ripoff, and does feature some innovation here and there. |
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In a dark shrine an evil military officer named Flag has resurrected the powerful Dark Genie. Together they fly throughout the world destroying everything in their path! But the world is spared by a magical being known as the Fairy King. He uses his power to seal pieces of the world away before they are obliterated by the Dark Genie, and these pieces are spread all over the world trapped in little balls called Atla. You play as Toan, the young boy selected by the Fairy King to unlock the Atla and restore the world (Oh, and he looks just like Link from Zelda). Toan wakes up to see most of his world in ruins and begins his search for Atla. The story takes a back seat in this game and it’s sparingly told throughout the game. You’ll spend a huge majority of the remaining game running through very uninspired dungeons searching for atla and rebuilding towns. You don’t hear much of Flag or the Dark Genie after the first few minutes, and I had trouble keeping myself playing the game because it never seemed like I was making any progress in the storyline (and that’s just because there wasn’t really much of a storyline). |
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Toan will find several allies throughout the game, who will join your party for almost no reason. The characters are never really developed much and all you learn about them is explained in the first few minutes after you meet them. Not to say the characters were BAD really. They were an interesting variety of people who probably would’ve been interesting if some time was taken away from roaming around dungeons and used toward a little character development. |
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Now to the real meat of the game. Toan’s got an arsenal of different swords he can wield. He’ll also find all sorts of different gems that can be attached to the swords that will give his weapons different attributes or increase their stats. If you use a specific weapon enough you will be able to upgrade it and absorb the attachments. You can even evolve a weapon into an entirely new weapon! Once you’ve pumped a weapon up five times you will be able to evolve it into a synthsphere, which you can attach to other weapons and power them up. You’ll want to use the same few weapons a lot so that you can power them up and evolve them, but each weapon has individual hit points and becomes damaged after every hit. You have to constantly repair your weapons (using repair powder) or they will break and be totally lost forever! This was VERY annoying when you’d been working on powering a weapon up for hours and then it was totally gone. Early in the game is when it’s most annoying because you don’t have a lot of money for repair powders, and because you don’t have a lot of other weapons to fall back on if one breaks. The weapons were very customizable in Dark Cloud, and the weapons system (other than the fact that they seemed to break every 5 minutes) is a high point in the game. It’s pretty difficult to power up your characters. They don’t level up at all, but you can occasionally increase some stats by finding items in chests. To really power yourself up you need to depend on powering up your weapons. Toan and his buddies also have a thirst meter, which depletes as they run through the boring dungeons. Eventually Toan will dehydrate and his health will begin to deteriorate. You can buy water to replenish your thirst meter, but this is never too bothersome. Dungeons often have springs which fully restore your thirst meter and health (gotta love that). And, you can just switch to a new character when one has a low thirst meter. |
| Although numerous other characters will join up with Toan, you can only play as one at a time. You’ll likely spend 80% of the time playing using the same two characters (Toan, Ruby), but to annoy us all, Level 5 decided to force you to use certain characters at sudden parts of the game. There are various “limited” zones where you have to play as a certain character, you can’t change weapons or your thirst meter goes down irregularly fast. The dungeons get boring very quickly and you’ll run around for HOURS collecting maps, killing bad guys and having to repair your crappy weapons. There are some very uninspired puzzles in the game, but they’re so easy solved that they hardly count. (Solving them usually involves nothing more than switching characters.) To lighten things up a little bit they added a fishing game where Toan can gather bait as he runs throughout dungeons, and take his pole to fishing holes. Unfortunately the fishing game isn’t much fun, but it’s a way to get some really good stuff in exchange for your fishing points, and it’ll help keep you sane when you’re tired of dungeon crawling. |
| With the Atla you collect you rebuild various towns. Each building has specific pieces that you’ll be asked to find, and to complete it you may have to find the people who live there, their pet llama, a shed and other stuff. Once you gather all the necessary parts to a building you usually receive some sort of a reward. The buildings also have specific locations that the pieces are supposed to be located in and you’ll have to talk to the occupants to get clues on how to rebuild their house and where to put them. When you first arrive in an area it can be prety bothersome because there are no item shops, but these are usually within one of the first few atla you’ll find in the dungeon, and once you’ve got an item shop you’re fine. You can also be transported by the Fairy King from place to place so you can quickly go back to an old town to pick up items from a shop there, or transport directly to a dungeon so you don’t have to waste time walking. Combat is real time and you can lock onto a target and pretty much just smash X from there and beat the monster senseless. You can also block and use items in combat. You can select three items that can be easily accessible from the main screen. There’s a second form of combat which will give you a taste of something new. There is a dual command where you have to hit certain buttons at specific times while Toan and the enemy fight it out. It’ll give you a rest from running around dungeons, and if you get a chance to glance at the battle (even though you’ll probably have to focus on hitting the right buttons) it looks pretty cool. |
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The sound is very high quality. In the early morning you’ll hear the sound of crickets chirping, or in the dungeons you’ll hear the crackling of fire. Unfortunately there aren’t any voices in the game, which made it seem a little dull, but the sounds that were there are very nice. |
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The graphics in Dark Cloud are good, but by no means groundbreaking. Characters are highly detailed and movements look convincing, backgrounds are nice (although repetitive) and cutscenes are high quality. There’s certainly better graphics out there, but there’s much worse too. Being an early release Dark Cloud was unable to take full advantage of the PS2’s power, but it’s still impressive. |
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| Dark Cloud probably received more attention than it really deserved simply because it was an early launch title…and a decent one at that. Although I can’t say I love the Zelda games, Dark Cloud is clearly not enough to overthrow the popular Nintendo series. The dungeons are long and boring, breaking weapons and dehydration grow tedious really quick, and the story and characters are very weak for an RPG. Still, the weapons system was deep and innovative, graphics and sound were nice, and combat was easy to catch onto. If you’re desperate for an RPG then give this a shot, but otherwise this is just an average RPG title. |
| Final Grade: 74% |
Dark Cloud Screenshots