I have been reading through some of the epinions of this game, and I was noticing how a lot of people like to compare this game to Nintendo 64's versions of the Zelda's.
Although I can see the similarities in the fighting, and even some of the characters sound effects, I think Playstation added a lot more to this game than the Legend of Zelda ever did to their game play.
Generally speaking, Zelda games always involved the tri force, there is nothing used as an equivalent in Dark Cloud for starters.

Game Play

Toan is your main character, you receive him first in Nocturune village. His village and all other villages in the game were destroyed by a powerful Dark Genie that was released by a man, hoping to gain power from it. The only thing that he had succeeded in doing was destroying the world, and being unable to stop the destruction. Toan sets out with the help of the fairy king, to re-build the destroyed villages starting first with his own. He can find pieces known as Georama in each level of the dungeons. Georama are the houses, people and pieces needed to rebuild each village. Almost every resident of every village has a preference to where they want their house to be, if you manage to make everyone happy, you recieve special skills or items from them.
Weapons are something to be watched closely when fighting, because they can break, and you can lose them. If your weapon's health, gets down to 0, it breaks. Use repair powder before this happens to prevent it. Wepons also have experience points known as abs. When your abs is full on a weapon, upgrade it. There are attachments for your weapons as well, such things as Mage Breakers, Beast Killers, Spells, and pieces to raise defense, attack power, and magic points, etc. It is always good to make sure that these are equipped before an upgrade, because your weapon will absorb them and keep those statistics. After a weapon reaches level 5, it can be voluntarily broken (status break) and attached to another weapon. By now it has to obvious how much time I spend playing the game.

Characters

This is a feature previous games of Dark Cloud's type had never had. Yes there were always characters you ran into, but never any that joined your party (with the exception of the Final Fantasies). You will have by the end of the game six deifferent characters that you can use within the dungeon. I only have three now, and each of them serves a different function. Toan is the only one that can open the Georama, the cat- girl is the only one capable of completing some of the jumps, and the chubby kid needs to hit various switches and open doors. You can switch characters within a dungeon by pressing select.


Another feature of this game is the real-time display system. Your whole enviroment changes with the time of day. Events, what people say or do, can depend on the time of day.


Final Word

Ok, so there are some similarities to other games that can be seen in Dark Cloud, but honestly the game takes it to a whole new level that other action/adventure or roleplay games have not been able to accomplish. Whether, you like Zelda, Final Fantasy, Sim City or Diablo this is a game worth trying.


Recommended: Yes