Dark Cloud 2

As grandmother always said: "If at first you don't succeed, get Sony to finance a sequel to do it right the next time...."

The GamePro School of RPG Design offers three tenets that all sequels should adhere to: One, the new game should be original; two, it should expand on the series' strong points; and three, it should fix or remove any annoying bits the original suffered from. Dark Cloud 2, the sequel to Sony's innovative yet maddeningly dull action/RPG, follows all three rules to the letter. Sniff. It's so rewarding to see such apt pupils.

I'd Rather Be Fishing
Dark Cloud 2's core is much like the original's?Max and Monica prowl through random dungeons, discovering magic stones that serve as fuel for their side business of rebuilding villages. The chief new feature is Max's invention skill: You can take photos of nearly everything in the game and combine them to come up with new weapons and such.

Is this game better than the last one? Well, it certainly looks better: The cel-a-delic characters are beautiful in motion, and the backdrops combine with the soundtrack to create this sort of homespun, European-countryside atmosphere for which RPG nuts will go weak in the knees. The control scheme is also completely stress-free, despite all the buttons it uses, and in-game help videos cover any sticky points.

No, Wait, I'd Rather Be Golfing
Most importantly?and this will make Dark Cloud fans very happy?Level-5 has fixed nearly everything wrong with the first game. You don't have to feed water to your party all the time; there are only two characters instead of five, so you're not wasting time raising useless party members; and each dungeon has several optional objectives, from time attacks to fishing to even an odd version of golf, so the endless fighting in the original is also gone forever.

It still ain't perfect (the translation's off in spots, and finding HP/defense upgrades for Max and Monica is unfairly challenging), but it's close enough. Dark Cloud 2 is an excellent game in its own right, and it deserves far more than the dreaded "something to tide you over until Zelda" stigma.

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