Platform	PlayStation 2
Available	Feb. 19 (U.S.)
Price	5,800 yen
Genre	RPG
Developer	Level-5
Publisher	SCEA

10 years professionally reviewing games, and about a year designing them. And now, defeated.

How embarrassing.

In a way, Dark Cloud 2 is a victim of the sheer ingenuity of its developers. Perhaps they just didn't know where to stop? As it stands, the game is overwhelming -- and not necessarily in a good way.

Dark Cloud 2 is a game with brain-melting amounts of ingenuity. It's basically what I'd call a variety RPG. All the usual RPG-ish things you can think of are there. You play a Puckish blond kid who wants to see the outside world. You explore 3D towns in real time, ala Grandia. You get hints and mini-quests from a cast of NPCs. You have a real-time, Secret of Mana-esque 3D combat system. You power up your weapons and kill baddies until eventually your sword is at ultimate-mega-gaia level, and then you go off to find the big overlord who's causing all the trouble.

The problem is, it all somehow feels like a lot less than sum of its impressive parts. But why?

The game simply doesn't know when to quit. And by virtue of that alone, it overwhelms.

Start the game. It teaches you how to use a new combat system. Ok, it says, go get used to it. But as you do, here's three other combat concepts too! And here, have some mini-quests! And new some characters to play as and learn! All within 10 minutes. Level 5 were so eager to show you their new ideas, that they didn't bother to pace the introduction of them even slightly logically.

Take the textbook example of a learning curve: any Miyamoto game. In Wind Waker, you are given the opportunity to learn how to use each and every new move, item, skill you acquire in an intuitive, in-game scenario. You're actually given the chance to feel comfortable with skills as you play, before the game sticks you against a boss and expects you to be seasoned professionals with them.

In Dark Cloud 2, you get no such treatment. It may sound like a minor gripe. But when a game is throwing entirely new concepts, modes and controls at you every 20 minutes for the first 10 hours of the game, it seriously compromises the game experience. And that's a pity, because Dark Cloud 2 obviously has great ideas in spades.

Others have praised an extensive set of training videos in the menu. I found this incredibly lazy design. Who wants to keep stopping a game every 20 minutes to watch a non-interactive, patronisingly narrated video on how to use a new feature? Specially not when there are slots for nearly such 50 videos in the menu.

And what an unnecessaily muddled weapon upgrade system! Every single item in the game can be used to upgrade your weapon. Hundreds of them. Even bread. Even chicken. Ridiculous.

Everything needs to be broken down into a spectrum of molecules, which can then be bound to your weapon. But here's five other issues to complicate things! Each weapon has systhesis points, so you have to play an hour or so -- EACH TIME -- to earn enough to experiment with the literally hundreds of compounts you can bind to your weapon. Where you have to choose one of 12 weapon attributes I might add. This process alone takes hours, and frankly, I fear for anyone who has time in their week to even complete this part of the game, let alone the remaining 95%.

So within about an hour of play, you established that Dark Cloud 2 is an RPG with above average complexity. That's when they hit you again.

The invention system. Picture this: you have a camera. You can take pictures anywhere, at any time. In your photo menu, you can combine these pictures to form 'ideas' -- like, photos of a milk can, a belt, and the sun = a special energy pack. Cool idea in theory.

Terrible implementation.

You see, anything can be photographed -- pots and pans, desks, tables, right up to particular rare attack in the middle of a boss fight. Indeed, literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of items in the course of the game can be photographed and kept. The game does give you tips, but only a few. With everything else going on in the game, to combine these all and get anything useful is about 20 hours of gaming in itself. Heck, it's an entire genre of video game. And it's about 10% of Dark Cloud 2.

Once again, an idea too far. Less would have been so much more.

And it feels fake -- it's not my own ideas I'm trying to make, it's more a case of predicting what photos a bunch of developers thought happened to corresponded to each item.

Oh but we're not even getting started. Maybe three hours in, you're introduced to a robot sidekick you can switch to at any time -- who requires an entirely new set of upgrades, fuel, and parts maintenance.

Five hours in, just as you might be getting comfortable with the flow of the game, your main character is switched with a totally new female. Again, with her own set of moves, weapons, upgrades, and -- hey hey! -- the introduction of a magic system. Sigh, back to square one.

And it turns out that she can turn into dozens of monsters and fight as them too -- each one requiring their own upgrade and build up time of course. Great!

By this stage you're trying to figure out if you will actually live long enough to put a dent in this game. That's when they really fuck you. The introduction of the Georama system.

Turns out all the levelling up, elemental balancing, magic collecting, character swapping, random-dungeon beating, photo collecting, invention creating antics you've been doing for 10+ hours is really a subset of the REAL game, which is about changing the future.

So now here's a whole new set of controls for a sort of bizarre, Sim City resource-based city building game, where you must build a town from a top down view and keep visiting the future to see if you've rebuilt a future civilisation correctly.

Perfect placement, culture analysis, trawling endless dungeons to get the little pieces of crystal you need to build certain things, even mixing colours you find to paint stuff. This would be a huge game in itself.

And you have to do it in each new location the game throws at you.

This is to say nothing of the dozens of mini quests required to actually convince people to move into your newly build towns... and in a certain order. Or the fishing game. Or the golf game, which on its own is about as extensive as SCEI's multi million selling Minna No Golf. Where does it stop?


The thing that hits you most when you move from writing about games to designing them, is that great ideas alone don't make a good game.

Good implementation equals a good game.

Ideas need a structure. They need a framework. They need to flow logically as the player's in-game experience and confidence grows. In GTA3, stealing cars transitions neatly into 'I wonder if I can actually collect fares from these cabs...' -- and you can. A whole new game mode stemming logically an established one, building on controls and a world you already know.

Dark Cloud 2 feels like its trying to throw everything at you but the kitchen sink. And it does so in such a haphazard, unstructured, counter-intuitive manner than you can't help but be disoriented.

In critiquing games like this you always run the risk that some will scoff and say, 'you need to but your back into it more!'. But games have evolved. Surely we're past the days where just sheer perseverance is rewarded.

An intuitive learning curve can make or break a game. Anyone can muscle their way through if they have the time. But games like Wind Waker, Halo, and GTA3 have raised the bar. Hell, Metroid was doing it better 10 years ago.

It's disappointing. As Level 5 grows in experience, one hopes that they'll learn to better structure their great ideas into -- at the very least -- a game worthy of the sum of its parts.


- Justin Keeling
EMail Justin