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Post by toei on Aug 17, 2020 22:16:26 GMT -5
I've only played through the first Dark Cloud, but while it was a decent game, it's nowhere as good as Soul Blazer. DC2 looks a lot more elaborate, though. The first game is mostly a straightforward dungeon crawler.
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Post by Ex on Aug 17, 2020 22:20:40 GMT -5
The first game is mostly a straightforward dungeon crawler. That's only half of DC1, though. The other half is a city builder that is way more intricate and complex than what Soul Blazer did. Crafting your own weapons, and designing your own town layouts, were the strongest highlights of DC1 for me. That said, if you were only going to play one DC game, the second is the wiser choice. |
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Post by toei on Aug 17, 2020 22:51:49 GMT -5
I don't remember the town building itself being particularly intricate or interesting to me, and crafting is just crafting. Every RPG since the PS2 era feels obligated to have it. I've only rarely really gotten into it (Vagrant Story and a few others), most of the time it's more like work. Soul Blazer was all about reviving a world, so each piece you brought back was much more rewarding as it was also a piece of the story. If I really wanted to build a city according to my exact specifications, I guess I'd play Sim City.
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Post by Ex on Aug 18, 2020 0:34:25 GMT -5
Soul Blazer was all about reviving a world, so each piece you brought back was much more rewarding to it as it was also a piece of the story. In Soul Blazer the towns are preordained insofar as their layout and design, liberated piece by piece by the player. The player has no agency over the layouts or designs of SB's towns at all. What Dark Cloud and its sequel offer, is interesting in a different way. Namely the Georama system. You don't just place buildings as you like in your DC towns, you also place the inhabitants as well. Depending on how the player constructs the town/inhabitants, bonuses are awarded. I think the dungeon crawling in Soul Blazer is more rewarding than Dark Cloud's, but the town building in Dark Cloud is more rewarding than Soul Blazer's. And anyone who enjoyed Soul Blazer and ActRaiser should certainly check out the Dark Cloud games, as it's doubtless the DC games were influenced by Quintet's work. |
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Post by Xeogred on Aug 18, 2020 15:15:43 GMT -5
Guess it's pretty subjective, I never beat Dark Cloud but played a LOT of it and I can't remember the town building at all, lol. I know it was there, but can't picture anything about it or how it worked now. On the other hand I definitely remember those randomly generated dungeons and a lot of endless dungeon crawling. Hey maybe I just had no clue what I was doing outside of the dungeons and spent more time in them hacking away at things.
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Post by Ex on Aug 18, 2020 16:16:56 GMT -5
Since everybody has forgotten how DC1's town building is, here's a little gameplay of it:
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Post by Xeogred on Aug 19, 2020 12:21:50 GMT -5
Is this person emulating it? Looks better than I remembered. Those menus gave me flashbacks though haha. Impressive how seamless it is going from building in the menu's to back on the ground. Looks like something I need to dig out again for some fun. I remember each region via town/dungeon would change up a fair bit, but the game seemed long? I want to say I got to like the 3rd or 4th area.
Whenever I dig more into 2 though, I'm not sure I'd like it as much because it sounds like they went super hard on the crafting, alchemy, etc, like you can level up any item and a bunch of other weird systems. Similar to Disgaea. Just TOO MUCH going on from the things I hear, but I haven't played it myself so who knows.
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Post by Ex on Aug 19, 2020 12:32:55 GMT -5
Without a walkthrough, it took me 33 hours to beat DC1 back in 2013, and I gave it a 7/10. I own a legit copy of Dark Cloud 2, but have not played it. I've read reviews and watched videos of the game, enough that I believe it's an improvement over the first game. But you aren't wrong, there's a LOT of subsystems and fluff integrated into the sequel. Which is good or bad, depending on the player. |
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Post by toei on Aug 19, 2020 13:04:02 GMT -5
Xeogred I would say 90% of the game was dungeon crawling, the town building was just a little side thing. You'd unlock new buildings or pieces of the town and you'd basically place them more or less how you liked. That was about it.
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Post by Ex on Aug 19, 2020 13:17:31 GMT -5
It depends on how much time you want to spend building the towns. If you only wanted to spend the bare minimum, you could make it just 10% of the experience. If you deep dived into the town building, and wanted to get 100% completion ratio on each town, you would be spending a much larger percentage of the game time on that.
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