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I love this game and do NOT recommend going for the platinum


jjemmb

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Sorry, this is way longer than I meant it to be, lol. TLDR at bottom.

To preface, I have a huge nostalgia hard-on for Dark Cloud on the PS2, as probably tons of others do.

 

And it's for good reason - this game is dripping with character. The music, the characters you meet, the charmingly sweet georama city building, the chilling/dangerous/mysterious atmosphere of (most) of the dungeons... there's something crazy melancholy about this game, and the way it was produced. But the dungeon gameplay... oh my god, the combat. It's disastrously unrefined. It's understandable from a historical point of view - it was created at a time when 3D dungeon crawlers were trying to find their footing and it shows. Lock on, attack radius, windup time, enemy placement, HP amounts, WHP degradation, randomized floor modifiers, are all broken. It works well enough for the first dungeon, but falls apart at the seams after the third dungeon's ally is added to the team. There are ways to trivialise almost every encounter, and ways that enemies can trivialise encountering you, and neither are satisfying or even feel intended. The first 5(!) bosses can be beaten in less than 30seconds each if you know what you're doing with 0 grinding, but if you don't have a strategy, they can take upwards of 10-15 minutes.

 

That's all fine and good though honestly because it doesn't impact the platinum experience, if you're going in guided/with experience (or with dev mode glitches that max out your stats that can be found in the first 20-30min of gameplay). That being said, why do I not recommend going for the plat? There are two trophies that make this platinum an awful experience and actually marred my memory of the game:

 

Let's Go Home: The first is the trophy you get for winning the game, or more specifically beating the final boss.

(The last two dungeons are already kind of boring because the game decides to ditch the village-building and character-meeting mechanic that made the first four dungeons so rewarding, opting instead to linearly assemble a mech, and then a story, with no player input as to how they're created. This isn't to mention that they are the longest dungeons in the game, barring the optional extra dungeon that has no trophies attached.)

The final boss is busted beyond belief. About half of his attacks are telegraphed, and then literally unavoidable - and they will most often damage you for half your HP. Both phases use a laser attack that have an AOE at the base of the laser that isn't defined at all and similarly deals a bonkers amount of damage. The genie is invulnerable about 80% of the time, and when it allows you to attack, you can only attack once before it cycles for another unavoidable attack. To beat this boss it's essential to carry 10 - 30 full heals depending on how safe you play it, and if you play it safe, you will be in this arena for 20-30 minutes before finally winning (with moderate grinding out weapon xP beforehand). You will be pausing the game every 5-10 seconds to swap the attribute on your weapon because the boss's vulnerability changes that often. Pause, change attribute, attack once, get hit by an attack you can't avoid, pause to heal, camera bugs out and you get hit by something you wouldn't have if it hadn't bugged out, pause to heal, pause to change attribute... and if you die with no revives/swap ally potions, you must do the whole broken fight again. It's incredibly unsatisfying to finally win after healing your max HP 20 times over.

 

A Rare Catch: The other trophy is awarded for catching the rarest fish in the game.

As a rule, I LOVE fishing minigames. This game is the exception to that rule. Fishing in Dark Cloud sucks big old donkey balls. It's not critical to finishing the game or even moderately helpful unless you spend hours doing it, and it's both 1) stupidly expensive to do and 2) buggy as hell. Your bait will "run out" before you get a chance to actually pull in a fish about half the time, forcing you to start again, with hundreds of gold down the drain. Then there's the task of actually catching the Baron Garayan for the trophy. It will only bite 1 bait out of 8 or so, it will only bite at a specific time of day, and it will only spawn in 2 of the 6 or so fishing spots in the world. I think 2 of these hints are vaguely alluded to in missable/unrepeatable dialogues with specific NPCs, and then you're on your own. Then, once you actually know how to catch the damn thing, you have to sit at the fishing spot for potentially 2 hours in real time before it might spawn, actively dropping into the minigame, then out, then in, then out, then in, then out, looking for a big blob in the water that's bigger than the other blobs that the game calls "fish". Then you can either:

  1. Start straight away with the only insanely expensive bait that it will bite, and hope that the other 3 fish in the pond don't eat it first, or you "run out of bait" after 5 seconds, or the big blob is actually some other worthless fish
  2. Use several other, specific pieces of costly bait to see if the blob is the Baron first, then use cheap bait to catch all the other fish, then use the expensive bait to catch the Baron that sometimes ends up just being a different worthless fish anyway.

On top of this, the fish has a crazy low chance to spawn. It's slow, boring, unrewarding, the village's music sucks, if you miss the dusk period to catch it you have to wait 10minutes real time before the day cycles again, if you run out of bait you have to grind the dungeon a bit to get money to buy more. It's bizarre.

 

TLDRThis is all to say that if you're thinking of going for this plat, I hope you either really like unpolished JRPG dungeon crawlers with janky mechanics and terrible balance from the early 2000s. I don't play many/any JRPGS, and really don't like grinding, so take this with a grain of salt if that's your thing. IMO the game is great apart from the gameplay. That's my takeaway. I'm interested to hear what others have to say.

 

Honorable mentions:

  1. IMO there should be a trophy for completing the final extra dungeon, because the trophy list feels unfinished without it. But the extra dungeon is almost as long as every other dungeon put together (100 floors!), there's only 1 dungeon theme, the reward is a sword that has no purpose other than bragging rights as there's no more content, so if they had then I would probably say that even people who loved the game when they were a kid should stay away. But... there isn't a trophy, so thank god.
  2. Weapons breaking when they reach 0 WHP would not be that bad if there were not enemies that were capable of damaging your weapon by 20% per strike, combined with the fact that the main character's main attack is a combo that will keep attacking for up to two hits after you finish the input, breaking the weapon that represents 90% of your progress in the game with no choice but to reload an earlier save.
  3. 2 of your allies are completely useless and are only ever used for puzzles that don't make sense, and floors that are restricted to just that ally (which you can cheese by just throwing bombs at everything).
Edited by jjemmb
add low chance for Baron to spawn
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Pretty much every game I have at 90% completion I'm still enjoying it but by the time I have 100% I'm glad it's over. That's the journey.

 

This game I loved on the PS2 but I already know that for me it should remain in the past, I don't want to sully the memory going for the platinum.

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