Dark Cloud Walkthrough
With my latest weekend playing PS4, I started a new playthrough of the wonderful PS2 classic by Level-5 games, Dark Cloud. While the fifteen-year-old RPG has largely been ignored over the past decade due to a lack of online play and lack of a third entry in the series (the equally awesome Dark Cloud 2 was released in the US three years later), the Sony-published titles were remastered for Ps4 and offered on the Playstation store earlier this year.
I neglected to buy the sequel until much later. The sequel adds many more minigames and changes the leveling system a lot. Instead of having six characters, Dark Cloud 2 features only two, but each have one melee and one ranged weapon. You can also build your own fighting robot in Dark Cloud 2. While Dark Cloud 1 is more fantasy-oriented, Dark Cloud 2 is more steampunk. The stories are only loosely related.
One of the things that let Dark Cloud stand out from other games of the era (in a year which included Final Fantasy IX, Diablo 2, and Skies of Arcadia) was the combination of LoZ-esque hack and slash dungeon crawling, a deep RPG weapons progression system, and a fun and easy to use town building system that requires you to fulfill character’s requests. The dungeons themselves are procedurally generated in the same vein as Diablo-style dungeon crawlers, so you’ll see different layouts and find new weapons and items on every floor. There’s even a fishing mini-game that rewards you with more items and weapons to equip to your characters. In Dark Cloud, there are six characters that you meet throughout the course of the game, starting with the game’s protagonist, Toan.
The game starts with Toan obtaining the Atlamillia after the destruction of his hometown (and most of the rest of the world). The Atlamillia allows him to recover people who have been stored in Atla — little round orbs which protected them from the destruction of the world. The game’s major plot points are few and far between the length dungeon crawling sessions, but the cartoony characters and colorful villains are all entertaining to fight and learn about.
The game starts out with a mostly empty town, with only Toan, the Mayor, and a mysterious guide known as the Fairy King, who gives Toan his Atlamillia and ushers him into the dungeon to embark on a quest to find the Moon People and defeat the Dark Genie, but not before he rescues his friends and his family and rebuilds his hometown.
You’ll notice a few things very early on. It is VERY easy to break your weapons, you’re running out of your thirst meter fast, and enemies actually hit pretty hard. Luckily, the mayor gifts you with a starter kit which has some water to quench your thirst, repair powder to keep your weapons healthy, and bread to keep Toan healthy. At the beginning, it’s important to fully heal all three stats and restock these before starting each new floor. Although you’ll find more inside the dungeon, early on you’ll need all the help you can get. Later on, you’ll be able to buy them for fairly cheap, though it’s still very important to keep them stocked up. Until you obtain high powered characters (especially ranged characters) the game doesn’t really ease up on the difficulty level. Near the end of the first dungeon, you’ll start getting revival powders, stand-in powders, and auto-repair powders. Setting some of these as your active items is a great way to prevent game-over (see the three icons in the top center) and keep your weapons healthy in case of an accident.
One of the first things you’ll notice early on while collecting and using Atla to rebuild towns is that you’ll find little red boxes scattered about the town’s landscape. Some are fairly hard to find and will require you to enter the first-person view. These are called Miracle Chests. While it’s tempting to collect them first and think later, it’s very wise to catalog which ones you have already collected, as you may miss important items otherwise.
These miracle chests contain each character’s favorite food, which levels up their defense stat, Gourds, which increase the length of your thirst meter, and Fruits of Eden, which increase your health. They also can contain Pockets, which increase the number of items you can hold. Aside from a few gifts from villagers, these items are almost entirely exclusive to Miracle Chests. It may be worth looking over this guide and making your own checklist. There are even a few items that are completely missable in the second town if you chose to wait to collect them until later.
The miracle chest guide recommends progressing in each dungeon until you can no longer progress, collecting every miracle chest you can at that point, and only then starting to build. It’s also important to go back and finish building each town once you’ve completed the dungeon, as you’ll get more chests and extra rewards once you’ve fulfilled each villager’s requests perfectly. Note that some of the stat-attachments that are rewarded from the chests have randomized values from +1–3. You can opt to save right before opening these and reset if you don’t receive a +3 value, but it’s probably not necessary unless you want a specific +3 early on (grabbing a +3 attack for Xiao’s underpowered slingshot is a great idea).
The weapon progression system is exceptionally deep, as each weapon has five basic stats including weapon health points, five potential elements, and ten anti-enemy stats. These can all be improved by finding or buying the appropriate attachments. Aside from each character’s starting weapon, almost every weapon you find can be built up a number of times until it reaches its ultimate form. To build up a weapon, you require specific stats, as well as an increase in all basic stats (usually). For example, to build up a Sand Breaker into an Antique Sword, you require 5 Fire, 20 Holy, 20 Anti-dragon, 8 Anti-Undead, 10 Anti-Rock, and 10 anti-Mimic.
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Since most weapons only allow you to have two or three attachments at a time, these stats are usually built up over a number of levels. There are also super-attachment gems, which increase multiple stats by +10. You can find these on back-floors (which can be opened with special items), by getting a perfect score in quick-time events, or by purchasing them in the late-game from the Fairy King or Fishing Shop.
The final way to increase your weapon’s stats is to use a synth sphere. Upon reaching level 5, each weapon is able to be turned into a synth sphere, which takes 60% of that weapon’s stats and turns it into a special attachment that can be slotted into a weapon (once per level). In addition to reaching stat totals, this is extremely useful for leveling up underpowered weapons, as you can temporarily slot the synth-sphere to that weapon, which will now receive a huge boost of stats, and then take the synth-sphere off when you want to build it up. Since you start with only Toan and his dagger, one of your first priorities should be to get it up to level 5 and turn it into a synth sphere to be used on your next character, Xiao. Almost immediately after getting Xiao halfway through the first dungeon, you are forced onto a limited floor which forces you to use her! This pattern is the case with almost every new character you obtain, so building up strong Synth spheres will keep you prepared well in advance. Until you find a weapon you are sure you want to build up, I’d recommend hoarding your synth spheres and attachments by expanding your inventory and making good use of the storage in Norune Village, which can be accessed by completing the Hag’s House.
Of course, choosing which weapons to turn into synth spheres and which to build up is difficult at first (even more so if you neglect to take care of your weapons and they break forever!) Each character has a fairly complex weapon chart, with the most complex being Toan’s. Toan is also the only character with one-of-a-kind weapons such as the Serpent Sword, the Sun Sword, and the Macho/Aga’s Sword. If you synthesise these/build them up/break them, you’ll never see them again! I made this mistake in my first playthrough, so I sought to rectify it this time.
Since most weapons you obtain will be from chests, it’s impossible to accurately predict how you’ll progress through the game. Instead, I took note of which weapons were buyable or obtained from gifts and traced what these weapons evolved into. This way, I could focus my time on upgrading weapons that would never be buyable or gifted to me (or towards weapons that have special abilities, like Poison or Drain). For instance, since I saw the tier 3 Wise Owl Sword would be buyable in the second town, that meant everything else building towards an Atlamillia Sword could be turned into a synth sphere instead (or in some cases, built towards the Dark Cloud sword). Xiao is a bit harder, as all of her weapons are randomized until fairly late — if you’re lucky you’ll find a “Bandit Slingshot” for her and be able to focus on building her up as a thief, otherwise the Steve Slingshot is a fun alternative. But you can always go with anything else you find that works for you.
Soon, you’ll meet
Goro. If you complete his village, you’ll get his Battle Axe. Since his second to last hammer, the Last Judgment, can be found in chests, I decided to focus on building up that Battle Axe until I find a Last Judgment. After this, the weapons that are gifted in the next few villages start to be a lot closer to the weapons that you’ll find in chests or the ones you’ve already built up. It’s always easy to buy them if you haven’t found one you like or if you want a certain one to turn into a synth sphere. As I mentioned previously, the game will often hit you with limited floors that restrict you to one character, so it’s important to have powerful weapons for each character and a synth sphere ready to power up the new arrivals. Even Xiao, who often gets outclassed by the other ranged characters like Osmond, will sometimes run into limited floors in the late game.
Just as you’re getting used to your character lineup and weapons, the game will throw something different at you, whether it be a new weapon, a new limited floor, a new type of enemy, or a boss. While enemies eventually start to be recycled towards the second half of the game, most of them offer a unique challenge when you first face them — such as a new status effect or type of attack. The bosses, who each have their own unique story that leads you to fight them, are very iconic and most require you to utilize your newest character to defeat them. The first one requires you to shoot him down with Xiao, while the third boss (often considered the most difficult) requires you to take advantage of Ruby’s magic abilities combined with someone with a non-elemental attack.
Upon completing the game’s story, you’ll unlock the Demon Shaft. The Demon Shaft is a 100-floor dungeon culminating in a boss fight that awards Toan the powerful Chronicle 2 sword. One of the best things about the game is that it offers you this incentive to keep playing because even when the story’s over, there’s no way you’ll have every weapon you wanted to build. The game does a great job of captivating players with a deep leveling system and simple but satisfying combat, and it’s a formula that fans like me are still begging for today, fifteen years down the line.
For a quick list of these and more starter tips, view my gameFAQs thread.
