The game had some flaws - there were far too many secondary playable characters to get used to any one of them, and item durability was both an unwelcome addition and very stringently addressed, with even the most upgraded, high-powered weapons disappearing entirely if they happened to break - but it was one of my first favorites for the system and a reassurance that the level of high-quality JRPGs I loved for the PlayStation 1 was definitely attainable on this new platform. If your instructions for one house is to have three bridges leading away from it, which location makes the most sense? How many river tiles will you need to place for those three bridges to work? And that's just the town-building mode the dungeoneering itself has all sorts of mechanics to adjust to, as you strategically fight your way through crowds of monsters in real-time.
However, the game goes one step further than its inspiration by affording the player some wriggle-room in how each village is restored, providing them some rough guidelines as to what should be placed where and in what capacity that turns this town-building mode into something approaching a logical puzzle game not unlike their later Laytons. By exploring the depths, the player recovers and re-establishes these buildings, landmarks, natural features and populace in an effort to recreate the world. Dark Cloud builds on the blueprint created by Quintet's 1992 dungeon-crawler SNES RPG Soul Blazer, establishing a world in which every town was suddenly wiped off the map, broken into pieces and hidden in the vast and dangerous dungeons underneath each one. But I'm getting ahead of myself I'll definitely be revisiting at least two more of those in the case files to come. It's a remarkable debut streak, to say the least. Those five games just happen to be five of the greatest RPGs of that generation.
RAYMAN LEGENDS GAMEFAQS SERIES
They would go on to develop five games for Sony platforms before breaking from their exclusivity to create the Professor Layton series for Nintendo's DS handheld. Level-5 was a studio set up only a couple years before by one Akihiro Hino as he departed from collapsing cult Japanese adventure game developer RiverHillSoft. Given the level of innovative confidence on display in this game developed for a still-new platform, it's odd to think that Dark Cloud is Level-5's first ever title. Considered.Īt this point, the only PCSX2 screenshots I'm happy with are title screens. I never finished the game and always meant to, even with the aforementioned single-player handicap, so I'm moving this one through to the next stage. This, 3D Dot Game Heroes, their mascot-friendly Monster Hunter spin-offs and to a lesser extent the colorful Enchanted Arms and the extremely goofy Metal Wolf Chaos were comparative departures. I suppose the most remarkable thing about this cutesy friendship game is that FromSoftware was behind it: the company has a long-reaching legacy that goes back many years before they hit the big times with Demon's and Dark Souls, but the majority of those games were equally grim dungeon-crawlers or dramatic mech sims. In spite of this, it's a fantastic and distinct with a surfeit of imagination and deceptively high difficulty hidden beneath its fluffy exterior. However, it's not so much the split controls that trips you up than the fact that you can only really focus on one character at a time. You can play the story mode solo, though it's fairly awkward: you use both analog sticks to move the two characters concurrently. This is one of those games that, since I lack a second person to play it with, can't be given its proper due - if you've not seen it in action, it's very similar to that one co-op Mario Party 4 mini-game where one player pulls levers and turns wheels to allow the other player to move forward. For whatever reason, Europe decided to retain the Japanese name. The name might not be familiar, but this is the co-operative top-down puzzle-platformer known as The Adventures of Cookie & Cream over in the States.
RAYMAN LEGENDS GAMEFAQS FULL
Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links! Case File 011: FromSoftware's Kuri Kuri Mix The PAL box art is literally the Japanese box art with a sweet fire decal around it. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done, five games at a time.
RAYMAN LEGENDS GAMEFAQS PS2
My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection.
Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. The Top Shelf: Case Files 011-015: "It's Oni Fair"