grindgrindgrind
For some reason, I decided to replay Dark Cloud 2 recently. I don’t really know why. You know what, though? Having played it a second time doesn’t change my opinion of it one little bit. It’s still longer and grindier and cutscenier than it should be. And holy fuck does it have a lot of awful minigames.
Along with 62% of all video games, it has fishing. But it has like RPG grind-fishing, where you have to level up your fishing pole by catching lots of shit fish and then spend your points on stats you don’t understand, 40% of which don’t actually do anything. If you get really good at fishing, you get big money and big prizes, but the game only makes you do it once, so it’s not as bad as it could be.
The golf minigame, on the other hand, is exactly as bad as it could be. The game still only makes you do it once, and technically you don’t even have to win, since you can make the CPU do it for you. But still, fuck this. It’s the worst minigame of all time, and I’ve played me some terrible minigames.
The world-building minigame is sort of fun, until you get to Chapter 7. In Chapter 7, it’s bullshit and horrible and I’d strongly suggest you look up the solution on the internet rather than jumping through the game’s hoops.
Minigames aside, this game is another one of those games that tries really hard to build up all sorts of sympathy for all the villains, and then gets to the end and realises that it hasn’t left itself with anybody to be the final boss. So you just fight some ghost and then go home. Final Fantasy IX was that way also, but at least that game didn’t couple its overwhelmth of sympathy with boss diarrhoea — the "final boss fight" is actually a sequence of something like ten boss fights.
On the subject of boss diarrohea, the designers of Dark Cloud 2 clearly had desires for bosses well in excess of what they had ideas for, since the game contains no fewer than nine "bosses" that are nothing but pallette-swaps of regular mobs with a bit more HP. Pretty lame, Level 5. In all seriousness, that’s about the same number of fake-o bosses as the game contains actual proper bosses.
I’m not sure if it lost something in the translation or what, but the game’s overpowering quantity of cutscenes isn’t as bad as it could be, mainly because the dialogue is often so stupid you’ll laugh at it. Example: Max and Monica (the heroes) rush up into this burning lighthouse to save some people. They get to the top and discover that the bad guys are blasting at it with a big cannon from their flying ship. Then, absolutely out of nowhere, Max suddenly blurts out "the lighthouse is on fire!" as though he’s only just noticed. It’s priceless. The song, on the other hand? Not so good. Holy shit is that not so good.
Oh, also, localisers? It’s best if you make sure all your voice actors are pronouncing the names the same. I’m just sayin’.
