Dark Chronicle, or Dark Cloud 2 depending on your location, is one of those games that contains a little bit of pretty much everything. At various points it can be a roguelike dungeon crawler, an invent-a-thon, a city builder, a fishing simulator, crazy golf, Pokémon Snap, and The Sims. None of those are made up. Despite cramming so much into a single adventure, Dark Chronicle doesnt suffer for it. If anything, other, lesser games should take notes on how to do things properly. Probably the only real flaw is that the combat feels a little clunky and unwieldy, possibly because the developers spent more time making other stuff to do rather than fine tuning it. Actual game progression does require quite a lot of dungeon-crawling and monster-bashing, and therefore a fair amount of combat, but its by no means a deal-breaker. Apart from the combat and weapon levelling-up system (which is incredibly innovative for its time), a lot of the rest of the game is taken up by the 'georama' city building aspect. Basically, time-travelling happens, as it often does in JRPGs, so in order to save the future you have to rebuild towns in the past to pretty exacting specifications. Its really interesting, and a lot of fun. Dark Chronicle is an absolute classic, and it does so many things so well its difficult to describe in such a short space. Seriously, go out and find a copy, you wont regret it. What's the most underrated JRPG out there? Let us know in the comments how many you've played!
