Bear with me, it may take a couple weeks to come up with an outline I like that is sufficient and all that jazz, but, none the less.
I’m gonna get the ball rolling with one of my all time favourite games, Dark Cloud
The Good
I am a huge fan of the RPG genre, and this game pulled it off relatively well considering there were several other games at the time to rival it. You start off as Toan, the guy you see on the cover; whose town is also featured in the background, gets violated by an angry mustached man and his magic genie he now has control of. The town gets blasted to bits, but lucky for you the Fairy King saves the town by putting everything into magic balls which you will eventually find in the dungeon on a succession of harder and harder floors as you get deeper. As you find these magic balls and recover them, you gain pieces of the town, which you can assemble, and rebuild, at your own discretion on a grid layout of the town. This is one of the best parts about this game. You can do what I did when I first got the game, and put all the houses in one corner, with no regard of placement or as you get pieces, and people, place them, then talk to the inhabitants of the town for their input. Each person has a place they want to be and it fits together like a puzzle; but it’s left to you to decipher and figure out the best way to make everyone happy. You move through several towns each with their own special themes, dungeons, and obtainable playable characters which have special abilities for when you are going through the dungeons.
This doesn’t even start to examine the unique feature of leveling weapons, and non-leveling characters. I could write a post about that alone. It worked extremely well, and you could spend the entire game on one weapon, upgrading it, tier by tier and customizing it to your own likes.
The Bad
I often hear complaints that the combat is rather dry, and repetitive, and I will say there is a bit of truth to this. You have one attack per character, and there is an option to charge said attack for a stronger effect. Some of the characters have different “attacks” if you attack several times in succession with one more powerful than the others as the last, but it’s all one button.
That being said, you get new team mates throughout the entire game, each with relatively different play styles. You could boil it down to Melee and ranged, but a sword attacks different than a mace, and therefore each has points where it shines and where you get face raped by a monster for using the wrong person at the wrong time. With that in mind, the monsters you fight are annoyingly diverse (I say that of course with love, it’s one of the best things about the game.) You cannot go running into every monster like you can with a simple Skeleton Soldier. There is a certain way to attack each and every monster to kill it with the least likely chance to get killed yourself; especially important when you enter side dungeons and monsters are buffed and early on could one hit you.
All in all,
Well worth the play. I know most people get jaded nowadays by graphics but I think the game has aged well, despite it’s relatively low fan base compared to other games out at the time. Not to mention, unless you play the game to the grave and back, you won’t find everything, and complete the game 100% the first time through, and there is a decent amount of re-playability, even outside of the sheer fact that it was a fun game to play.
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