I've been playing Dark Cloud 2 pretty recently for the past couple weeks. As soon as I opened the box I couldn't stop playing it. Is it the engaging story I crave, like most games? Heck no. The dialogue in this game is so cheesy that I can eat plain macaroni while playing it. The story sequences are voiced, which is great, but all anyone ever says is "Yeah! and Right!" They also explain everything twice, which is really condescending I think. The main character is kinda dumb. He doesn't understand anything until the other main character, who's from the future so must be smarter, tells him. So you have one character telling Max, and then Monica basically repeats what the first character said, but more goal oriented. Such as, "The thing you need to save is at point X." "Okay." "So you need to go to point X." Then Monica will say, "Let's go to point X!" And Max suddenly gets all excited and says, "Yeah, Let's go Monica!" And Monica says, "Okay."
Anyway, it's just terrible to hear.
But I LOVE this game. Usually I live for the next dialogue scene, but in Dark Cloud 2, I love the dungeons. They are random, like Diablo. Characters don't level up, the weapons do. So you basically spend the game building up your weapon into the most powerful weapon you can. Each character has a ranged weapon and a melee weapon to play with. You go into the dungeon, you beat everything up, and then you have a couple things to do after that, which are optional. I can go fishing, or I can play golf. They don't call it golf, but it's golf.
On every floor there is a Geostone, which gives you pieces which you can build the world with. So you're basically playing Sim Town trying to bring back things in the future. Brick house there, cart there, throw in a couple trees... It gives you criteria for building, so you don't have to make stuff up, but you CAN. Also, since everywhere except your home town in a barren wasteland, you have to recruit people from town and move them into the new areas. Again, it tells you who should be where to make things go well in the future.
Honestly, RPGs are very addicting. The fun level of working my way through the dungeons is very high, but having to go back through them all to fish and play spheda(golf) is kind of getting annoying. You have to kill everything on the floor before you can do either. Also, if you fail, you have to go through it all again! Ack. Anyway, I just use all that killing to level up weapons so that I can combine them with my ultimate weapons to make even better weapons.
I don't think I have seen any adult content in the game, either, so it's safe for the younger people. The ESRB software rating will tell you more about that though. And, the dialogue might be more suited to younger people, as well.
I didn't write this to give it a score or anything at the end. I mostly just wanted to talk about the game, because I'm at work and can't play it right now! These are the kinds of reviews you'll see from me. I'll tell you about stuff I know from playing it.