Early shots of Level Fives Dark Cloud drew favorable comparisons to Zelda, which excited PS2 owners everywhere. Finally those PS2 fanboys that secretly loved Zelda could play an Action-RPG and tell their friends about it without becoming embarrassed. After a lengthy wait, Level Five has released an absolutely enormous game that does indeed play like Zelda. Unfortunately the title isnt as refined as a Miyamoto release, a problem which will frustrate many gamers.

Dark Cloud begins in the village of Norune under the light of two moons. Norunes townspeople are dancing around bonfires in celebration of the Harvest festival. Not far off, in the Dark Shrine, a much darker evil dance is being performed. Colonel Flag looks on as the dancers move together in a mysterious ritual to raise the Dark Genie from a giant urn in the center of the room. Hungry after being trapped for 400 years, the genie munches on Flags assistant as Flag gathers the courage to pronounce himself the genies master.

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That's not Link, honestly we've never heard of the guy.

Unbeknownst to the happy inhabitants of Norune, Flag and his genie make their way high into the night sky to enact their evil plan. Down below, a young boy named Toan looks through the crowd for his friend Paige. Just as he spots her, fireballs rain from the sky and destroy the village. One of these fireballs strikes a tower, causing it to fall towards Paige. In a heroic, but futile attempt, Toan dives to knock her out of the way. Everything goes black and we are brought to the present

Toan awakens to find himself in the presence of the Spirit King, who has brought Toan there because he recognizes him as a brave soul. The King explains how just before the village and its inhabitants were destroyed, he cast a magical spell over the land to protect them. As a result of this magic, everyone and everything was now encased in magical spheres known as Atla. Due to the power of the blast, the atla are now scattered all over the land, and it is Toan who is charged with collecting them and restoring peace to the land.

As Toan, you must wander the land while collecting atla, rebuilding towns, meeting townspeople, and deciphering just what exactly is going to happen when everything is back to normal. The perspective and control scheme that the game uses is much like what is found in any of the Nintendo64 Zelda game. In fact Ill go ahead and say it here, this game rips off Zelda in numerous shameless ways. Theres borrowing, and then theres taking, and this game took. Theres one button for swinging your sword, items can be assigned to buttons, and theres even a lock on targeting system which is exactly like Z-targeting. Throw in an elf-like figure that wears green, and yells when attacks, and I shall call him Mini-Link comes to mind. Atla are scattered throughout huge random dungeons, which are divided into floors. After beating a floor you can continue on, or leave, this allows you to save your progress often. When one dungeon can take 3-5 hours to complete, the ability to leave after every level and restock your inventory and save your progress is invaluable.

Each dungeon is filled with a limited variety of cartoon-like monsters. None of them look particularly intimidating, nor do they look very original, more like a random smattering of enemies from videogames past. Skeletons, giant plants, bats, you get the picture. While the monsters may not be interesting, the weapons that you will use to kill them are. Each weapon can be customized with certain attachments that will increase the strength of the weapon, its effectiveness against a particular type of creature, or how powerful it is. Care must be used while fighting, because these weapons can break, in which case they will be lost forever. Since I realized early on that I should save every twenty minutes, breaking a weapon wasnt a tragedy since I could go back to my save, but playing for two hours and then losing a weapon that you spent 20 hours upgrading is enough to make a grown man cry.

As you progress through a dungeon and collect atla, it will become necessary to rebuild Toans town. This is done by using the innovative Georama system, which allows you to place buildings and recreate your city in real time. Rebuilding involves first placing a building, and then any items like stairs, signs, storage sheds, or any person thats associated with that building. After youve done this, you can go to that building, speak to the person and find out what additional items they need, and any special requests like their homes location that they may have. After beating a dungeon, collecting all the atla, and rebuilding the town, Toan will move on to the next area and rebuild another town. As Toan progresses through the game, hell meet up with various people that are willing to help him on his quest. Xiao, a cat-like girl is the first to help him. She is able to leap across long distances, thereby making areas that Toan couldnt reach instantly accessible. After a while, she obtains a talking slingshot named Steve, who loves to comment on the enemies he is about to shoot. The unexpected Steve is hilarious, and he was my favorite part of the game. Maybe hell get his own game, thatd be something to see.

If you build it...
He will come.

Everything to this point is what the game does well, now its time to look at what the game did poorly. These are the things that people with patience, who are deeply engrossed in the experience will be able to look past, but many others wont. The biggest problem I had with the game was the snails pace it moved along at. This was caused by the ridiculously enormous, repetitive dungeons. The dungeons are essentially a means to an end; they are basically just places to hide atla. They arent difficult, and this makes them even less enjoyable. Since each dungeon is randomly generated, they are very poorly laid out. Often times I wouldnt find the level map until the last room I was in, or the exit would be right near the entrance which often made for excessive amounts of backtracking. If the dungeons had been planned out ahead of time, they would have taken half the time to navigate and they wouldve been less unbearable. In fact the dungeons still could have been random if they just added some code that made sure things like maps and item locators were located near the front. Even little things, like always having to walk around to the other side of a treasure chest (because due to the random placement they are rarely facing you as you approach them) begins to grate on the nerves after five hours in a boring dungeon.

The other annoyance of the game was the sheer amount of maintenance that your characters require. In addition to watching Toans health, his weapons hit points, how many points it had until the next level, and curing different curses inflicted upon him, you had to monitor his thirst level. In no way, shape, or form could watching a characters thirst be construed as exciting, interesting, or even necessary. Unfortunately for us, someone at Level Five thought different and weve now got to give Toan water every few minutes when in a dungeon crawl. Nothing is more frustrating than having to exit a dungeon because your hero is thirsty, its ultra lame. It gets easier to manage as you progress in the game, but it shouldnt have been an issue to begin with. Why not give Toan Osteoporosis? That way I can have the pleasure of making sure he gets enough calcium and monitor the stress put on his fragile bones while I play. That would be a blast! The last gripe that Ill voice about the gameplay is that lack of an audio warning when your health is low. Theres a beep when your weapon is about to break, but nothing when you are about to die, and in the beginning when Toan is very weak, it caused me to die many, many times.

Had this game been released a year ago, on the Dreamcast, its visuals might be impressive. Instead, on a whole they are unimpressive, though they are nice looking in certain places. Each character looks nice, has a detailed look, and shows quite a bit of detail. Of course Toan looks just like Link - sans the pointy ears, so nobody stayed up too late designing his character. Each town is very nicely represented, from the outside of the buildings to the items contained therein. For some reason, even though the buildings dont seem like theyd be too taxing on the system, heavy fogging is used to compensate for a poor draw distance when walking around town. With only a handful of semi-detailed townspeople walking about, they still fade in and out like the characters in Shenmue. Had you been able to see further, and had there been more people milling about town, the outdoor levels would have been a thing of beauty, but alas it was not meant to be. There are some nice uses of real time lighting, from the way the setting sun shines into a building, to explosions lighting a dark room. Nothing as intense as what was found in Twisted Metal, but Twisted Metal this isnt. The story is told through countless cut-scenes that arent outstanding, but they do get the job done. All of this is done with quick load times, and given this games slow pace, trading fmv for cut-scenes is a good trade.

The dungeons, on the other hand are downright ugly. Their biggest problem is the lack of texture variety, or any variety at all. Each dungeon room looks just like the next, and the next 100 after it. If not for a handy on-screen map, theyd have been very difficult to navigate, instead they are just difficult to look at. Other problems like seams in the textures, and clipping dont help the games cause. Throw in a camera that has a nasty habit of getting stuck behind objects while you are fighting a locked-on target and this game wont be winning any beauty contests.

The games strongest point is its outstanding soundtrack. Composed by Tomohito Nishiura, the light acoustic music compliments the games theme very well. Light chorus mixed with pan flute, a guitar-like sound and a very light bass, is the best way to describe the typical song found in the game. Despite spending countless hours in the same dungeon, I never found the music repetitive. The games other sounds arent nearly as impressive. The monsters and characters dont make much noise other than grunting or the occasional sigh as they recover their energy in a pond. I dont think that any game nowadays should use subtitles in lieu of real voice actors, and unfortunately this one does. Of course, given the repetitive nature of the conversations youll have with the various townspeople, maybe being able to skip over the text is a good thing.

If you can get into this game, it offers a ton of gameplay, about 40 hours to beat the quest, and then theres a bonus 100 level dungeon that would probably keep you occupied until late 2004. I cant imagine anyone playing through the entire game twice however, I know I wouldnt be able to stomach it. On the other side of the coin, there are going to be people that play this game for about four hours before they give up on it and return it to the store. This game is not for everybody, but if you are into RPGs and can look past several faults, youll have a good time. Id recommend a rental first to see if this game is right for you.