Follow up to Dark Cloud, with a bigger budget
Dark Cloud 2 is a lot like it's predisessor in a lot of ways, only you can't help but feel that the people who call the shots have taken a look at Dark Cloud 1 and said, "OK, great game, you can have a lot more money to make the sequel".
First difference you'll notice is the new cell shaded engine. Or sort of. In reality, it is little more than the old Dark Cloud engine with black lines drawn around the charecters, it's not really cell shading. However, it looks really good. It's not like Wind Waker, where you will get people complaining that it's too childish. Think Wild Arms graphics improved by a long way, and you'll see what I'm getting at.
Second difference you'll notice is that the game actually has much more of a plot now, and lots of voice acting to go with it. Unlike the previous game, where after the opening and tutorials you were pretty much thrown into the game straight away, here it plays out a lot like a normal RPG, leading you into things slowly. It's not until a few hours in that you get to the Georama sections. And in my opinion the game suffers a little for that, because the first few hours aren't really very good, being mostly plot heavy in a way, and don't do the rest of the game justice.
Which leads me to my main critisum of the game. What on Earth is up with the plot?!? It starts off reasonably at first, however towards the end it just goes to hell. If you've ever seen Austin Powers 2, you'll know exactly what I mean. Thankfully, Dark Cloud is a dungeon crawler at heart and relies more on gameplay than plot, so it is not such a problem as it would be in a game like, say, Final Fantasy, which relies mostly on plot.
Do I have any other niggles to meantion? Well, yeah a few. Every time you change charecter there is about a half a seconds load time. Not much, but it gets a little annoying after a while. Why not just have them all loaded into memory at the same time? Secondly, it can be a little too easy to die. Thirdly, it gets really annoying having to search around for treaure chests that contain Life Up and Defense Up items so you can toughed yourself up after completing each dungeon, more so than in Dark Cloud 1. Couldn't you have just leveled up with each dungeon floor cleared?
With the only real bad points out of the way, I can move on to more postive things: like the gameplay.
Gameplay in Dark Cloud 2 has remained much the same as Dark Cloud 1, only with almost every bug or annoyance ironed out. (You no longer lose broken weapons, they just become weaker. Switching charecters is quicker - you don't have to go into the menu anymore to do it. Uzis now actually do decent damage. No more thirst bar - thirst has been changed into a less annoying status effect. And so on...) You go into a randomly generated dungeon, clearing it a floor at a time. (And by that I mean, you can get back out, save, stock up, and so on, inbetween each floor.)
Fighting is done in realtime, using a Zelda-like system. This time round, each charecter has two types of weapon - a close range attack and a long range shot - meaning that no longer do you have to switch charecter because you want to drop a sword for a gun.
The cast of 6 from the previous game has dropped to merely 2 in this game, each charecter inheriting 3 sets of weapons each, plus some new ones.
New to the game is a big mechanical robot, which is delibrately far more powerful than the other charecters. However, it is somewhat expensive to keep running, and over using it will cause your charecters to miss out on EXP, adding a nice tactical choice to the game.
The generated dungeons have been improved by quite a way over the efforts from last game as well, partly by adding more features to them, and partly by just improving the generation. A feature that I particularly like, is that often each different dungeon will have a certain style to it's floors - e.g. the forest dungeon is full of long paths and clearings and small ponds, while a dungeon set above a ravine will be long with either a long drop or a river in the middle.
However, the best feature in Dark Cloud is probably the way that you level up your weapons. Rather than charecters having stats for attacking and so on, your weapons have the stats instead. As weapons level up, you can add parts onto them which boost their stats. (Stats include power, endurance, PSO style %s which work against certain enemies, and also status effects on a weapon.) When weapons meet certain requirements, you also have the ability to transform them into new, more powerful weapons. (Which is interesting, because it is possible to go through the game without buying a weapon from a weapon shop once, just by leveling up the weapon that you start with. Should you decided to switch weapons however, there is also the option to break your weapon and add it's power onto a new one.)
The above probably accounts for at least half of the gameplay in Dark Cloud 2. However, there are a hell of a lot of optional things to do.
First off is the invention system. It's a nice idea - to make new things, you take a photograph of items that will give you ideas, then combine them into an invention. Unfortunatly, the working combinations are so obscure that you are unlikely to find anything without reading a guide or using the suggestions that the game gives you, but it's a nice try. Hunting down all the photographs is fun too.
Second is the Georama system. Apart from the first town, Dark Cloud 2 gives you the option to completely rearange and create all the other towns in the game. Although technically you have to complete it to finish the game, it's possible to just dump things down to forfill the requirements. But those of an artistic side are free to spend some time and really make the villages look good. The requirements that you have to meet are far less stringy than on Dark Cloud 1, making it easy to make a town pretty look much any way you want it to. Gone is the grid system (you can now place things in 3D, at any angle). Gone is the set inventory for each village - you make what you want C&C style.
Third comes fishing. Completely optional, and I haven't really tried it. Basically, take a standard fishing minigame, only you can level up your fishing rod. It takes a lot of time if you want to do it properly, because of the need to level up your rod. It's good if you are the sort of person who likes fishing games.
Forth, is golf. Yes, golf. Knock a ball into a hole. Only in Dark Cloud it is usally insanely hard, due to the sheer ammount of pitfalls that you can knock the ball down. Although it is still quite fun, especially when you finally nail a tricky level.
What's the point of Golfing and Fishing? Well, you can earn medels, which can be traded for rare items in the game. Only, the items take a lot of medels to obtain - it would be nice if they were less expensive.
Sound
Sound effects are pretty good, if not too noticeable. Music varies. Some tracks stand out as being quite good, the rest are pretty average.
Reviewer's Bias
Mildy for
Summery
Sorry if this is a little long, but Dark Cloud 2 is a long game. We're looking at 40 hours just to finish, and even aproaching 100 if you want to do everything possible.
As for a score, I'd give it 8.5/10. The plot drags it down a little, especially near the start and the end of the game. In fact, if you're part of the emerging plot-over-gameplay trend, you might want to give this game a miss. Otherwise, it's a great game.