Years ago, I really enjoyed playing Dark Cloud 2. When I was young, I watched my brother play the original Dark Cloud from start to finish, trying hard not to make too much noise and bother him as I watched. I only recently acquired my own copy of Dark Cloud this summer, and while I was playing through it, I managed to find my own copy of Dark Cloud 2 within our moving boxes. I’ll be sure to review Dark Cloud sometime in the future, but for this week, I’ll be talking about Dark Cloud 2.

You play as Maximillian, a rich boy who works part-time as a mechanic of Palm Brinks, and Monica, a princess of a kingdom 100 years into the future. Max recently inherited a red gemstone known as Atlamillia from his father, which is very important. On the night of the circus, he overhears trope-master Flotsam interrogating Mayor Need discussing about said stone, and is now on the run from vicious clowns trying to kill him. Yes, clowns. It gets to the point that Max decides to skip town and see the outside world. This is also in part of wanting to see his lost mother again, which he writes a letter to in the beginning as a framing device. He manages to escape through the water channel, realizes the world is in ruin because of a man named Emperor Griffin, and joins forces with Monica to revive the world’s desolation so the future can be saved.

I loved Dark Cloud 2 when I was young. I was drawn in and mystified how beautiful the graphics were, first and foremost. I’m not one to care much on graphics, or believe a game should be defined by how pretty it looks, but it should still have something that makes the players feel welcome and drawn in. This was the first game I played that had graphics done by Level 5, and I’ve been keeping an eye on them ever since (Dragon Quest VIII, Rogue Galaxy, Ni no Kuni, ect.). The maps in both the town you live in, the towns you’ll create, and the dungeons you’ll fight through all look gorgeous, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The gameplay is very fun for a dungeon crawler. You advance the story by going deeper into dungeons killing monsters for weapon experience and dungeon keys. Once you find the key hidden until you kill a certain monster, you can head straight for the exit or continue killing monsters for exp. Each character uses a short ranged weapon and a long ranged weapon that work seamlessly into gameplay; Max uses heavy blunt weapons (wrenches, hammers) and guns, while Monica uses swords and armbands for magic. Each time a weapon levels up, you can synthesize a specific item (most preferably a crystal) into it for increased stats like attack, fire attack, or durability. When your weapon stats reach a certain number, you can class it up to a new, more powerful weapon, and repeat the process again and again. This makes fighting through dungeons fun to the point that you wish there were more to kill.

There are even monster clown balloons that pilot their own mechs!

But the main point of both Dark Cloud games, aside from fighting and weapon buffing, is recreating towns. Around Chapter 2, you get use of a device that allows you to create everything you need for an ideal town that will be a hotspot in the future, which you can travel into with the hero’s Atlamillia. The creativity is limited depending on how you want to proceed, because you have to accomplish certain goals to fix the future. The puzzle management can either be a plus or a minus to gamers, depending on how well they can manage placements and accomplish the needed goals.

As fun as Dark Cloud 2 was to replay though, I realized it wasn’t as great as I envisioned the first time. For starters the story was weaker than the original. Not only was it too kiddy and campy with the script, but the urgency never really hit me. All but the town of Palm Brinks was destroyed to extinction, and no life could be replaced that would make the future the same. You could recreate the buildings, but what about the people? You have to get them to migrate from Palm Brinks after doing some sort of favor and then place them in a residence, and they become the new ancestors of the future points. And everyone in the future is still the same for some reason, even if the difference is 100 years.

While fighting monsters is very fun, the mini-games are just annoying. There’s fishing, which involves throwing either a bait or lure rod out to see and trying to catch big fishes that might compete in fish contests. It takes forever to get skill points to level up the rod and make it stronger for better catches, but it’s a timed investment that exponentially diminishes with stronger levels. And at least you can fish more than once in a dungeon level.

The other mini-game, Spheda, is basically time-distortion golf and can screw you over depending on the randomized dungeon mapping. Some shots can be easy to make, while others are impossible. I once got a level in Starlight Canyon where I had the ball and hole only a few inches away from each other so it only required one shot. The problem was that there was a cliff wall right in the middle, and it was impossible to even try and hit it over from the position. Spheda aggravated more than a fun mini-game should, and if you fail, you had to redo the mission and kill the monsters all over again. It frustrated me a lot in trying to finish, as I needed to complete 10 to get another Palm Brinks villager onto the train.

Speaking of monsters, another flaw is the Monster Badge gimmick. It’s introduced early enough when you have Monica in your party, and can transform into select monsters to fight as them and maybe learn some secrets from monsters of the same species. But unlike Max’s Ridepod, which is very powerful to start and stays that way, the monsters start out so weak they deal little to no damage to monsters outside the starting dungeons. It also takes forever to level them up and rank up for stronger forms, and by the time they become remotely useful, you should have weapons strong enough to have finished the game. Finding all the different badges besides the one to progress the game (Himarra) is pretty much pointless aside from the few medal rewards that require Monster Transformation.

Dark Cloud 2 is still a fun game though, with the right kind of addicting weapon crafting that leaves you wanting more. Urgency in world saving isn’t that big a deal when you can spend days fishing or weapon grinding, but its still fun to go along recreate towns sometimes. There also a lot of other stuff I haven’t mentioned like inventing, or the Ridepod customization, but frankly it goes without saying that this game has a LOT to do. Even if you didn’t like how kiddy the story is, Dark Cloud 2 is simply fun if you wish to kill a bit of time (and of course save it in context).