An interesting Cloud! (Dark Cloud (PS2))

Member Name: heekeer

Product:	Dark Cloud (PS2)
Date:	14/08/09 (13 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of playable characters, good combat, mix of gameplay types

Disadvantages: Plot kind of fades away.

Dark Cloud is an adventure game for the Playstation 2 developed by Sony.

The story of the game follows a young hero called Toan, during a happy festival to celebrate the years harvest his village of Norune is destroyed by the evil Dark Genie. A spirit tells Toan it is up to him to rebuild his village and so the journey begins! The game is not really to story driven and the plot is very basic but gives you a bit of motivation to press on with the game and see if you can complete it.

The gameplay in Dark Cloud will have you journey to several dungeons, to progress you must journey your way through the dungeon defeating enemies and finding the rare Atla items which are used to rescue the villagers and to fufill the goal of rebuilding your village, you can even talk to the villagers to discover what they want and you place buildings and objects as they want and they will reward you.

Combat in the dungeons is done with a variety of melee weapons and ranged weapons, you can earn more throughout the game. You can get other characters to join up with Toan and play with them and use their unique abilities and weapons, from Goro the warrior who uses axes, Ruby the genie who attacks with magical rings and Xiao the cat girl who attacks with slingshots. The combat is rather basic but is satisfying enough you can lockon to enemies and perform basic strikes as well as a power attack, it is reminiscent of the combat in the Legend of Zelda series.

Graphically the game world is rather basic as it is an early Playstation 2 title but it does a fair enough job. At times dungeons can be a bit bland and are repeated which is a little disappointing.

Dark Cloud is rather a unique game combining city building with dungeon crawling and makes for an interesting play through.

Summary: Interesting mix of city building and dungeons