Dark Chronicle (2002)
2025-03-20
things have been a struggle lately, and one of the scant few YouTubers i actually enjoy recently uploaded a video on the Dark Cloud series, so i felt like this was a good time to revisit one of my all-time favorites. i replayed Dark Cloud in 2023, and Chronicle has been on the list ever since; it just kept getting kicked down the road in favor of playing other things for the first time, like my bender through Suikoden and Grandia.
i never actually did write about my playthrough of Dark Cloud then, so i'll start there. that was my first time playing the game in Japanese, and i was pretty surprised by just how different an experience it was from the localized version. everyone knows about how the localization added the 100-floor post game dungeon, but there's actually quite a few other differences--the final boss only has two forms, not three; you have access to the back floors of the final dungeon (i think this difference is documented, though?); the weapon upgrading does not display the stats you need in order to reach the next upgrade point, which means you have to either guess or just look up the upgrade tree online; Baron Garyan doesn't exist in the game, so the best fish you can get is Mardan Garyan, which is worth i believe 400-500 fewer fishing points and really lengthens the grind. there may be more differences that i'm not remembering, and i'm kicking myself for not documenting those while i was playing. it's really interesting, though, just how much more polished the localized version of Dark Cloud is--i really see why it flopped in Japan, since the game was really pretty barebones. i still loved playing through it, though; there's such a hypnotic rhythm to its grind, even when it's significantly less polished than the version i played in my childhood.
this makes the jump from Dark Cloud to Dark Chronicle even more pronounced than i remember it being. it fleshes out just about every single mechanic from the first game and adds so many new ones it's like an autistic dream come true. i'd be happy enough with just more dungeon crawling like in the first game, but this adds: golf, taking photos, crafting, recruiting sub-characters, piloting a mech (sort of), raising fish, racing fish... it's really incredible just how much is in Dark Chronicle, seeing as it was Level-5's second ever game. i'm a long-time (semi-ironic) fan of Overblood 2, which was Hino Akihiro's first lead project, and you can actually see quite a bit of its ambitious DNA in Dark Chronicle. Overblood 2 is also packed to the gills with tons of weird little features and mechanics, some of which are entirely unnecessary and just there to flex. it's just, well, Dark Chronicle is infinitely more functional than that game. it's an interesting comparison, though, and one i'm not sure i've seen anyone else make.
the dungeon crawling is my favorite part of the game, and one that takes up most of the runtime, so it's good that Level-5 maintained and in some ways heightened the trance-inducing experience from Dark Cloud. i think the only thing i'd give Cloud over Chronicle in this respect is that i miss the back floor areas--the risk/reward of having to go through significantly tougher enemies in exchange for rare loot; the excitement of maybe coming across a key on one floor, then maybe coming across a back floor entrance on another floor... it really rewards the dungeon grind in a way that tickles my brain, and Chronicle unfortunately doesn't tap into that specific risk/reward.
that being said, every floor only takes a few minutes to go through, so it's easy to just tear through an entire dungeon in just a few hours if you sit down and commit to it. that alone would be enough for me, but the game drip feeds those other additional game modes and mechanics to vary things up--you'll unlock photos and crafting, then a few hours later unlock fishing, then town building, then golf and fish contests and monster transformation and so on and so on. it's a really smart way of spacing out the huge variety of content in the game and encouraging the player to try everything out. at the same time, though, the game never forces you to engage with absolutely everything in it--you can safely ignore golf, and fishing, and photos and crafting. you can do as much or as little as you want. it's so fascinating just how well Dark Chronicle is designed, and i feel like i have to reiterate that this was their second-ever game. (then Level-5 went on to develop Dragon Quest VIII after this. absolutely cracked. i'm so sad that they're stuck in licensed game hell now. i absolutely do not give a fuck about Inazuma Eleven.)
pretty much every single bit of side content in the game is fleshed out well, too. fishing is not only a fun minigame, but you're rewarded for grinding it by putting points into your fishing rod to upgrade it, which then makes fishing easier, which gives you more reward points, which makes it even easier... it's pretty devious! it directly attacks the part of my brain that lives raising numbers.
the same is true of weapon upgrading, which is way more fleshed out than it was in Dark Cloud (which i already found extremely rewarding and loved grinding, even in the more obtuse Japanese version). it's so much fun to level up weapons and pump tons of upgrades into them, especially towards the end of the game where you can have 50+ upgrade points to spend at a time. i think the only thing that Dark Cloud has above Chronicle here is that, in that game, you can manually select whichever element you want your weapon to be imbued with at any given time--in Chronicle you're locked to whatever element has the most amount of points. this isn't really relevant outside of the post-game dungeon and certain enemy types that are highly resistant to certain elements, but i feel like it's a bit of an unnecessary limitation. it cuts down on the amount of time you spend in menus, i guess.
the photo mechanic is really great, but i do wish that the associated crafting menu could be, well, organized at all. it gets to be a pain to sift through the gigantic list of recipes to find whichever particular one you actually want! most of the recipes are pretty pointless, too. but, again, you don't have to engage with this at all--i'm the one who decided to unlock every single recipe, haha. i could have just unlocked the useful ones and called it a day.
golf, though? golf is perfect. flawless. it's fucking randomly generated golf courses because you do it within the dungeon after you clear the dungeon level. whoever came up with that idea is the genius of all time. i will say, though... it's significantly easier to enjoy golfing when you're playing on an emulator and can use save states, because on hardware you're stuck only having one try and if you screw up you have to just redo the whole dungeon level to have another try. i, uh, can't really see how that was necessary. being able to retry as many times as i wanted made it so much more fun, especially with the more difficult dungeons; every single shot was its own problem to solve, and it was super rewarding to figure all of them out. i didn't even touch the optional minigame accessible from the title screen that's literally just the fucking golf game. clearly they knew they'd struck gold with it if there's an entire game mode dedicated to it.
thankfully the post-game dungeon actually exists in the Japanese version this time, so i got to enjoy that too. it starts off pretty approachable, but as you continue it gets more and more devious; by the end it's a sweaty experience trying to get through every enemy on a given level. part of this is likely because i didn't get the ultimate weapons; i went down different upgrade paths and ended with things that are, like, second-best tier, which i think made a pretty big difference in my overall damage output. i didn't intend to make it harder for myself, but i ended up feeling glad that i did because of how much of a struggle the end levels of the dungeon were compared to how i breezed through the rest of the game. i think i ended up spending about ten-ish hours on that dungeon alone? and most of that was spent with me in a trance while listening to Weather Report and Chick Corea concert recordings. it was awesome. more like this, please. (speaking of, the music in this game is really excellent. it's perfectly nostalgic for me; i would, as a child, leave the game on just to listen to stuff like the Gundorada Workshop theme and the Luna Labs theme, and i can see why i did.)
i haven't touched on the story and character writing, and that's because it's literally entirely inconsequential. and this is coming from someone who really prizes character writing in particular in games, so it's kind of funny for me to have this opinion. unlike Dark Cloud, there is an actual story and (kind of) character writing, but i just literally don't care. Monica is cute, so that's good, but other than that i was just not even paying attention to the cutscenes so i could get back to dungeon crawling. it is impressive just how much more production value there is in this part of the game, though, compared to the first. the voice acting is charming, and the story does a good job of staying funny except for a certain few scenes that try to be serious and fail completely. looking at everything regarding Gaspard, who is called "Giltony" in the Japanese version which just makes it even harder to take him seriously. weird stuff. again, i don't really care, this game could have literally no dialogue whatsoever and i'd be perfectly content.
i actually went into this with the intention of 100%ing the game for the first time, but towards the end i realized just how much that would actually entail--i settled for getting, well, most of the medals in the game and clearing golf for every stage. and that's enough for me! i came out of the experience with even more appreciation for Dark Chronicle, and the realization that a lot of what i love in RPGs came from me playing this game and being totally obsessed with it as a kid: dungeon crawling, randomly generated dungeons, weapon upgrading with minute control over stats, fishing, crafting, unlockable costumes, character recruitment, town building, making numbers go up... all of my love for all of these things came from this. there's a (very long) arc of history from me loving Dark Chronicle to me loving Shadow Tower. funny how that happens.