Dark Cloud 2

"A Delectable Journey For (and Through) the Ages."

When the commercial by Sony for Dark Chronicle originally ran on Japanese television, I had initially thought that this was some sort of new heartless adventure series with fancy graphics that Sony was putting out to compete with the upcoming Legend of Zelda: Kaze no Takuto. The commercial hardly showed any of the game itself. All it showed were the introductory English-language theme and a few excerpts from the cel-shaded cut-scenes - the typical stuff used to send fanboys into tizzies.

About three days before the game was released, I discovered what game Dark Chronicle was really a sequel to. Impressed by the improved and beautifully done cel-shaded graphics, I decided to purchase it in the hopes that the graphics were not the only thing experiencing an uptweak. I was pleasantly surprised that that was indeed the case.

To put it simply, Dark Chronicle took everything that was wrong with Dark Cloud and improved upon everything that was right and unbalanced with it. The story still remains fairly simplistic: guy (Yuris) meets girl (Monika) and they must kill evil villain (Emperor Griffon) to save world. The cast of NPCs provides a lot of enjoyment early on, but the storyline rarely deviates from its fixation on Yuris and Monika for long. As the Japanese title suggests, yes, there is a bit of time travel tossed in for good measure, and a couple of creative plot twists emerge from this. What the story lacks in originality is made up with style and heart. The Japanese voice actors, present in all cut-scenes, carry the tale well, and I was enormously impressed by how deftly one of the scenes at the end of Chapter 3 was handled.

The gameplay, which was one of those things that was right to begin with, was tweaked into tune. Exactly as in the original Dark Cloud, Dark Chronicle is a dungeon crawler, but such annoying features from Dark Cloud, such as getting thirsty after running around on a floor for too long, were discarded for the better. Each chapter features its own unique dungeon, ranging from the arboreal Seven-Colored Butterfly Forest to the sweeping architecture of the Moonflower Palace. The controls are extremely solid. The learning curve on the game's systems is friendly, and if at any time you're confused, the in-game help is clear and explicit about such things as how to improve your weapons, how to fish, the basics on how to defeat enemies, and even how to play the in-game version of golf, Spheeda.

One of your major goals is to rebuild the world by collecting Geostones, magical stones which contain the blueprints for the continent's reconstruction. Unlike Dark Cloud 1, where all you had to do is gather Atla (stones which actually CONTAINED the objects) and rearrange them to recreate the world, in Dark Chronicle your task goes one step further. This time, you have to gather the raw supplies in dungeons for your houses, trees, and rivers, after which you must build and arrange them appropriately to trigger changes in the future.

The dungeons themselves received a face-lift. In addition to your main quest of gathering Geostones and advancing to save the world, every floor of every dungeon has a variety of special bonus tasks, such as to kill all the enemies on the floor within a certain number of minutes, kill all of your enemies using only one kind of your character's weapons, or completion of a mini-game after defeating all of your enemies. While they are randomly-generated, automatic mapping systems render them friendly (if not always easy) to navigate.

Your two main characters, Yuris and Monika, have a melee weapon and a ranged weapon at their disposal. Monika always relies on her trusty sword up close and magic from afar. Yuris's melee weapon varies from a wrench to a hammer or a golf club(!). His guns, his ranged weapons, have an equal amount of variety, ranging from projectile to machine to laser.

In addition, as you advance through the game, you will also get to use Steve the Ridepod, a robot that you can customize after repeated use and through another unique feature of Yuris - the Invention system. As you explore Yuris's hometown in Parm-Brinks, you can take pictures of various objects, which you can mull over later to come up with new inventions, such as power packs, new weaponry for Ridepod, and even an - aquarium.

Monika, in contrast, gets the ability to shape shift into monsters using magic Monster Badges. You obtain new badges by feeding monsters various foods, such as cheese to Sewer Rats or crickets to Froggers, in special Gift Capsules. Once you defeat them, you obtain that creature's badge, and are henceforth able to transform into the basic monster in that family. As you kill creatures in that form, you gradually progress to new forms in that monster tribe.

The overall sound effects are incredibly solid - not too much, not too little. The music, composed by Nishiura Tomohito, is nothing special to write home about, but it's not overtly annoying either. The sole exception to that is the initial opening theme in English, ''Time is Changing'', which was clearly composed only for possible commercial value on J-Pop song charts. The melody is a tired rehash of most other J-Pop songs out there, and did nothing to excite me. The singer, Yano Chidai, sings it with a blatant Japanese accent. This is not a fault in and of itself, but her accent interfered with her pronunciation significantly, causing her to mangle the song's lyrics as a result.

My playtime from start to finish, approximately 85 hours, stems more from a maddening desire to power up all my weapons than any extreme length in Dark Chronicle's playtime. This game will take the average gamer playing in his or her own language approximately 35-40 hours to beat, and much much longer to get everything. Some people will definitely want to play this through a second and third time, if for no other reason than to make sure that they got absolutely everything there is to get.

This game, if you were fond of the original Dark Cloud at all, is an absolute must-buy. Due to the heavy amount of kanji in the Georama sections, I would not recommend Dark Chronicle as an import for the Japanese language novitiate, but I would heartily recommend buying the English version even if the voice acting turns out to be terrible. Everything else in this game will make up for that. As an action gamer of average ability, I found the game's difficulty to be fair, reaching hard as appropriate with the final dungeon. If you hated Dark Cloud 1, I'd still recommend purchasing this game upon its release; the lack of 'reason' to go through all those floors and floors is no longer an issue and is anything BUT tedious. Dark Chronicle is worth buying in its own right, and not as mere filler for the next Zelda game three weeks later. Give Sony and Level 5 your money with a smile!

My final ratings for Dark Chronicle:

Graphics: 8
Gameplay: 9
Voice Acting: 9 (Japanese Language)
Replay: 9
Sound & Music: 6
Controls: 10
Story: 7

Overall: 9

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/27/02, Updated 12/27/02