my haiku, ruined
by an extensive gauntlet
through excessiveness
Additional Comments:
I've learned something during my six month absence from Beat All Games: the desire to see a game through to the absolute end can often ultimately lead to a far different perception of said game than was originally imagined, and not necessarily in a favorable light. Sadly, one of my favorite franchises from the PS2 era led me to this conclusion. Damn my desire to explore every nook and cranny, locate every object, and experience everything a game has to offer. If it wasn't for my OCD tendencies to 100% everything, this post would likely be singing praises - not to mention, would have been posted some six months ago. Instead, I'm going to bludgeon Level 5's masterpiece to death. (Worthy note: it's the above statement that's caused me to loathe giant, open-world sandbox games, despite loving the concept of them, and the main reason why I've yet to complete any current gen game. Add DLC to the pot and it's a whole world of frustrated incompleteness.)
But before I prepare my writ of defamation, I'll take a step back, nearly eight to ten months back, and attempt to recall what I do like about this game - that is if I can remember any of it, because by the end everything on my Good list was savagely crossed out. It's funny. I know I genuinely enjoyed the game, at least up through the beginnings of the Gallery of Time, but looking back - exactly what did I enjoy?
*thinks* (I can feel the pops and fizzles exploding from my brain over this quandary. Good grief...)
There's always been two big draws in the Dark Cloud franchise for me: randomized dungeons and city, er...village development, or in the case of Yellow Drops, a giant space robot. Two past heroes from Beat all Games: ToeJam & Earl and ActRaiser solidified my arguments for both of these features - although ActRaiser's simulation aspect was a bit weak. Dark Cloud improved the simulation aspect tremendously while executing randomized dungeons with near finesse...well, almost. A third element that's always intrigued me is the leveling of weapons as opposed to characters. I don't know why, but there's something far more alluring about packing elements and statistics into an inanimate object allowing me to have exponentially more firepower or magically enhanced melee madness - although I somehow suspect it has to do more with the imagery and nomenclature associated with said weapon. And finally, I just love the scenery and locales. I even found the dungeons to behold great beauty, even if they're overall pretty bland and repetitive. But for me, the Moon Sea especially left an endearing impression - yes, all fourteen craters worth.
Most importantly, thinking on when I first played the game way back in mid-to-late 2001, I was just enamored with it all: the look, the story, the gameplay, everything. I felt like I was playing something completely new. Even if the game was nothing more than a minimal hack n'slash action/adventure game, it didn't carry the persona of such. It was different. And at the time, the concept of freshness occluded what should have been glaring flaws. I was far too overwhelmed with awe to realize the game's laundry list of shortcomings. Unfortunately, the Ice Queen, La Saia, put an end to my Dark Cloud experience for nearly twelve years. If that bitch wasn't such a nightmare to defeat, I probably would have begun to unearth glimpses of a padded out excursion to the Dark Genie and beyond. Heck, I probably would have never moved on to Dark Cloud 2 at the time. Yikes! To think that my all time favorite PS2 game could potentially be a complete train wreck when and if I ever return to it. But to be perfectly honest, I did start feeling the apathetic game design somewhere in the depths of Moon Flower Palace and, surprise surprise, never finished the game. Kind of wish I did the same with the first one. True, being impeded by La Saia's near instantaneous death sorcery for so many years left me wanting more, but perhaps I should have accepted it as a black omen for what was to come.
Is it really that bad though? No. In fact, like I said, up through most of the Gallery of Time, I thoroughly enjoyed the game. However, the Gallery of Time began to wear out its welcome and the Dark Genie was a bit over the top - especially when you compare relative boss to dungeon difficulty - or heck, even boss to boss difficulty. Yes, it's the final boss, and as such should cause some hair-pulling, controller-throwing reactions, but when you consider how pathetically easy all the other bosses are, it sort of leaves you wondering. That's right, I said all of the other bosses, including that ice bitch, La Saia. Turns out she's one of those brutal bosses that unfortunately, or rather fortunately, has a massive weakness that can be exploited thanks to sprite/level design - sort of reminiscent of Dark Link in Zelda II. And then, while optional, you have the arduous trek through one hundred floors of uninspired architectural madness. But before I yammer on about how much of a game killer the Demon Shaft is, I want to first address some of the more essential gameplay elements.
While I love the concept of weapon leveling, I equally hate the idea that I have to play the game feeling far more empathetic towards material goods as opposed to characters. Dark Cloud places far too much value on weaponry and next to nothing on characters. It's such a bizarre mechanic to have to wrap your head around. In most games, a death typically equates to a great loss of work. Here, a death equates to a meager loss of funds...and that's about it. I suppose if you push deeper and deeper into a dungeon without returning to town, than a death might hold some meaning, but when the ability to return to a safe haven is so easy, why bother? Not only that, but there's so many items that help work against death plus an almost 90% chance that not just one, but two healing springs will be present in any given dungeon. The result: battle shit to the bitter end, I say. And if on the odd chance health is at a premium, there's more than enough chickens, bread, bananas, cheese, stand-in powders, and resurrection powders to see through even the most horrific battle.
Weapons, on the other hand.... Miscalculate a hit, run out of auto-repairs, or just ignore that annoying beep that's telling you, "Hey! You're favorite tool of destruction is about to bite the big one," and you're in a world of hurt, especially if it's your most powerful weapon. I reset the game on multiple occasions just because I misjudged my button presses and broke my weapon. On the other hand, the couple of times I died and didn't have any stand-in powder handy. What's my loss - about 2500 gold and all my characters have been healed. Fuck it, I'll take another death just for good measure. Maybe I'm just missing the point - that material goods far outweigh human life, or even that of a Neko, genie or moon rabbit. (Oh! Was that a spoiler? Too bad...)
In addition to the vast plethora of items to help make death seem like a thing of the past; as a segue into my next grievance, if one character drops, you've got between one to five more to carry on, depending on how far into the game you are. Thing is, outside of life support, the additional character's bring next to nothing to the table. Actually, I take that back. What I should have said is the game doesn't successfully make use of the extra characters. Their main function is to jump gaps or unlock doors. That's it! Add in the fact that only Toan can gather Atla and you quickly realize there's far too much needless character swapping going on. Eventually, at least in my experience, focus is only put on a single weapon on a single character, since weaponry is the most important aspect of the game, and voilà - I find myself tackling the entire game with just Ruby. To be honest, as a self-imposed limitation, I tackled each dungeon with differing characters to try and make them all feel useful, but once I reached the Demon Shaft, Ruby saw most of the action with Osmond a distant second. Ah! That brings up another interesting bit of information: the uselessness of melee weapons, especially in the Demon Shaft. After the Gallery of Time, both Toan and Goro would have been wise to just pack it in and return home to Norune and Matataki respectively. No matter how many Endurance gems you cram into a melee weapon, their natural fragility against everything dictates the superiority of ranged weaponry throughout the entire game. Yes, even Xiao and her slingshot of powerless pebbles proves more worthy than Toan's most formidable blades, and that's just pathetic.
But all in all, even with the above grievances, it's still an enjoyable game. Honestly, despite the flaws and the encroaching lazy design finally poking its head out in the Gallery of Time, I would still have been satisfied with the game upon its end. Sadly, I tackled the Demon Shaft and that's where everything immediately went south. It's not that it's hard - it's not. It's that it's fucking boring, padded unlike anything I've ever seen, and a complete waste of time when you consider that it brings absolutely nothing to the table. Yes, it's optional, and as such there's no real place for argument, but just because something's optional doesn't mean developers should pop something in that makes watching paint dry sound fun. It's the 200 lightning strike jumps all over again. The Demon Shaft is one of the main reasons it took me so long to finish this game - seriously, I beat the Dark Genie months ago. By the time I got to the last twenty floors, I just started chucking Poisonous Apples at everything. It wasn't worth my time anymore, and it sucks when a game crosses that threshold. And the icing on the cake, you may ask? Equating difficulty to infinitesimal amounts of hitpoints. That's not difficulty - that's fucking idiocy!!
Nano-Win:
I hate to end it all on such a sour disposition though. What's that? I've yet to discuss the soundtrack? One thing Level 5 nailed is the music. Right from the very beginning when you first hear the Main Theme kick in, through gems like Open Your Eyes (visiting Treant was always a high point just so I could hear that silky bass bend and I'd often go out of my way purposefully for that very reason), or the calming Daily Life, the soundtrack is just magical. Each and every one of the village themes are especially noteworthy, but the standouts have got to be Queens and Brownboo. And the dungeon themes are well crafted for each of their representative dungeons; A Sinking Ship being the quintessential example of mood. Overall, it's far too difficult to name only a few songs as the whole soundtrack is worthy of mention.
Nano-Rant:
Ok, I tried and I couldn't do it....
Fuck that stupid ass glitch that causes Jibubu to act like a total cheese-dick where he refuses to return home so I can give him the foundation! I have to wonder if the Sun Gem would have changed my opinions on Toan. We'll never know now, asshole!! And I certainly wasn't going to start over that late in the game because of a fucking glitch.
Rating: 3.5 Pointy Chestnuts out of 5*
*It was a tough call and I tried to place far less weight on certain "optional dungeons" than I probably should have while considering this game's fate, but then again those same "optional dungeons" seriously altered my perception of the entire game.
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