As I mentioned before, part of your mission is to make sure history doesn’t change. Much of this is done with the Georama System, in which you use the Carpenterion to build cities. The Carpenterion is kind of like a big-flying-mechanical-tree-house that can construct buildings. This area of the game can be described as a SimCity lite. It is nowhere near as complex or detailed as SimCity, but the most basic concept of creating a little city is the same. The reason you want to create a city in the first place is to make sure it’s there in the future when it’s needed. It may sound a little complicated, time altering often is, but it is explain so well in the game that you’ll be a regular Bob Vila in no time.

The camera helps give Max ideas for new inventions.

The graphical style of the game couldn’t be more perfect. It uses the ever popular cel-shading technique that so many games are now using that it is really starting to lose it’s freshness. Nevertheless DC2 uses it so well that once you play it for a little while you can not think of any other style that would of worked nearly as well. There is just a sense of quality and cleanness that comes through from the opening moments and maintains that level though the entire game, which is no easy task since there is up to 100 hours of gameplay to go through. The battles are real-time instead of turn based and include the “lock-on” targeting system a’la Zelda. The spells, variety of weapons and large assortment of baddies make the battles challenging and very entertaining.

It is obvious that Level-5 spent a great deal of time polishing Dark Cloud 2 and that it was not a game that was rushed into production. Everything about this games shines like a Roll-Royce. The voice acting is top-notch even including the secondary characters. The script doesn’t sound like it was written as an afterthought. The interface is just about second nature from the minute you start playing. There are tons of little details that just come together in an awesome package. One example is when you go to your item screen to use something to increase your health after a battle. Instead of hunting around your inventory looking for the needed icon, Dark Cloud almost reads your mind and has the health item blinking, making it incredibly easy to find. Granted, this is a small thing but it just goes to show the amount of thought and massaging that went into the game. And DC2 has the best help system that I have ever seen in any game. Heck, it’s the best help I’ve seen in any application period. I found myself going though the help on things I already knew just because it was done so well.

There is so much more to this game than I have time to write about. I haven’t gone into the very fun fishing activity where you can catch fish and then raise them or eat them for health. There’s also the way you can build up your weapons by finding magical items and using them on the weapons and how many different build paths there are for each weapon. I would go more into these but, honestly, I would rather go back and play some more.
one.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 96%.  Dark Cloud 2 is simply a terrific RPG that is so well polished you might need sunglasses to play. Highly recommended.

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