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My internal soundtrack has now changed from When the Levee Breaks to Gimme Shelter. Such is my perversity.

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Last night we finished Dark Cloud 2, after about a year of playing on and off. It was quite an enjoyable game, on the whole. It was a bit hack and slash for my usual taste, but had enough interesting variations in gameplay to keep me interested. I'm particularly happy that while there were a lot of minigames (fishing in dungeon levels after you defeat all the monsters, for instance), they were 99% unnecessary to the core game, so you could pick whichever ones interested you and never get stuck not having built up your skills in some random game (I'm looking at you, Final-Fantasy-8-card-game). As it turns out there were only a few things we skipped (monster transformation, basically never got around to it) or gave up on (photographing the reclusive, and invisible, Hot Spring Spirit. I think it's a bad joke), and we finished up in 104 hours. 100 hours is my typical estimate for a good-sized in-depth RPG, so this felt about right.

The plot and the characters were... not cloying, exactly, but sweetness and light and not really engrossing for me. (Until we got enough medals to buy the female lead her panther bikini outfit, that was fairly engrossing for a while.) I would have been happier with a more complex plot. but this game was really not about plot as much as really well implemented gameplay.

Actually, although the mechanics of the game were by and large quite well done, there were a number of odd (though rare) bugs that seemed to indicate insufficient QA time. Mostly they were little things like save points appearing if you entered an area from one direction, but not if you entered from another, but a couple were more severe. In one of the later dungeons I shot a monster, and it vanished. Not died, just popped off somewhere. So I could never finish the level and exit, because that monster had never been registered as dead. Also, in the bonus section, for which undertesting is I suppose more forgivable, there was something wrong with the walls, and especially how the walls interacted with Spheda (essentially golf). The ball got stuck halfway up a wall once. Another time, it bounced over a wall, having somehow slipped by the ceiling. On a third occasion, it oscillated in a nook for what I was worried might become an indefinite loop, but only lasted about 30 seconds before being determined, strangely, to be off course. But none of these was as entertaining as when the ball got wedged up against a wall and the game teleported our hero right up next to it for the next shot... placing him halfway into the wall. I quickly discovered I couldn't get back into the room, but (aha!) I could walk off the edge of the map. And promptly fall. Now, in fact, I can't recall any time in the normal course of the game when a character falls, and yet as soon as I began to fall he adopted an arm-flailing obvious falling pose, which seems to have been coed up just in case you ever fell off the map. Again, I was afraid that this might be an indefinitely long condition, but luckily for me altitude seems to have been stored as a normal signed integer, so I soon feel back past the map again, and since I still had horizontal control I slid sideways back into the main map area... and landed in a rock. Or, more precisely, in the boundary between rock and not-rock. I was again stuck incapable of moving back into the normal map, but alas this time I couldn't fall through either, and I was forced to restart. I think it would have been even more entertaining if I had contrived to walk away.

Oh, hmm, I've written quite a bit about the bugs in the game there, but really they are exceptionally rare occurrences, and do not especially detract from the game, being at worst a minor irritation when one has to repeat a level. Overall, I would give the game a good recommendation. Not the greatest thing since FF7, but fun.