Remedial Reading

But the biggest and most obvious problem with the game has to be its story. There was not a single, solitary moment during the game where I was even the slightest bit interested in or entertained by its copious, well-voiced, cinematic sequences. The game's movies are like a cake made of boring, with cheap sentimentality slathered on for icing. The story seems tonally aimed at small kids, but the game is really complex, difficult, and has surprising moments of violence.

It's not that I want every RPG to carry a mature story like FFX or Xenosaga, but I crave nuance and originality, and there's none of that here. On top of that, the character animation is extremely poor, and the direction of the sequences is flat and dull. It mainly takes its cues from anime, a medium I love. But the cinemas vainly grasp at an epic sweep that's well beyond them. Fortunately, the game's appeal lies so far from its story that this doesn't cripple it much -- all the same, it's an obvious flaw that breaks the game's pacing.

Running Out of Steam

Despite this, there's no ESRB warning about tobacco. Slackers.
Pacing problems aren't limited to the story sequences. You don't get to play with the Georama system for the first several hours of the game. More problematically, you won't be able to really access it whenever you want. The Geostones you collect also reveal your objectives for restoring the town; usually you won't be able to even begin building until you collect the lion's share of pieces in the chapter. The game would be more fun if you could switch between modes at will; as it stands, you have to dungeon crawl a bunch and then Georama for a long time. Often I found myself getting fed up with the dungeon-crawling bits and wished I could build, but every time I went back after finding another Geostone some objectives were still unclear and I had no recourse but to press on.

In almost all of the dungeons you'll be able to switch between Max, Monica, and Max's Ridepod -- a wooden mech -- at will. Having both Max and Monica available, though, doesn't add anything to the game but a lot of extra work. Each character has two weapons, and these weapons each raise levels independently and require a lot of tinkering besides. This stuff is fun, but it's too much; Max's wrench is slow but strong; Monica's sword is quick but weaker. It would be a vast improvement had Level-5 limited the game to just one character that's quick but strong.

Choose Your Incarnation

Gee, Monica, I'm tired of raising your weapons.
At first, I used Monica since her agility helped me survive the initial dungeons. Once I got the hang of upgrading weapons, though, Max pulled ahead. But then I had to double back to keep Monica's levels on par with Max's so I could progress through those few situations where the game forced me to use her. You also have to keep up with upgrades to Max's Ridepod and Monica's monster transformations. The pacing, then, is reduced pretty much to a shambles; it's a linear game that feels almost like a non-linear one because you're usually left to your own devices.

I'm not even going to go into depth on the fiddly and cumbersome invention and photography systems that have a tenuous relationship to the rest of the game. I wasn't even remotely interested in messing with them at all -- managing six different permutations of the player characters' accessories was plenty for me on top of crawling dungeons and building towns, thank you very much -- until I began to hit a brick wall midway and discovered that the developers, as with the dungeon design, expect you to deal with these game systems through brute force instead of genuine appeal.

Post Mortem

A Ridepod named Steve.
Still, I have to say plainly: Despite these myriad issues and my laundry list of complaints, this is a very good game. I'm mostly just frustrated that it's not an excellent one. The graphics are its most obvious appeal, but the weapon upgrading system is extremely addictive. When I'm playing a game for review I hurry a little. Despite that, I couldn't resist lingering and leveling up my weapons -- including, for some time, a giant frozen tuna -- just to see what I could get. Spheda, the golf mini-game, is fun (but sometimes it's utterly defeated by the randomness of the dungeons.) There's so much here that I can't help but recommend this game to those of you who crave value. It's the sort of game you could play for a couple of months, if you love building things up and digging for every single trinket and facet of a game.

There's no question in my mind that Dark Cloud 2 is one of the most solid RPG adventures for the PS2; but what I am sure of is that it doesn't quite live up to its potential. If Level-5 had worked out all of the kinks, it'd be one of my favorite games for the PS2. Sadly, it's not. While it has my grudging respect, there are many games that I prefer, thanks to DC2's idiosyncrasies. Although I have no doubts about its overall quality, I've lost count of the times I've let loose an expletive and rebooted the machine while playing the game, or even turned it off in frustration or temporary disinterest. If you're looking for a pure RPG, you'll do better with Final Fantasy X or Xenosaga. If you're looking for a dungeon hack, you can have more fun with .hack//Infection or Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. But if what you want is Dark Cloud 2, here it is, warts and all.