'Dark Cloud 2': Sony's answer to 'Zelda'?

By Marc Saltzman
Gannett News Service

"Dark Cloud 2" players collect scattered pieces to create buildings, vehicles, trees and rivers to reconstruct villages and move the story line forward. They also can create their own types of weaponry. PlayStation 2 Genre: Role-playing game (RPG) Developer: Sony Computer Entertainment Japan/Level 5 Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America Web site: playstation.com Price: $49.99 Rating: T for teens (ages 13+) (out of 5)

Just be sure not to make any plans until the summer — it may very well take you that long to finish this elaborate role-playing game (RPG).

"Dark Cloud 2" chronicles the adventures of a young handyman and inventor, Maximilian, who becomes the first person to explore outside his peaceful town. What Max discovers with the help of Monica, a visitor from the future, change him and his world forever.

As with most RPGs, the protagonists must venture to faraway towns and dungeons, battle all kinds of unique monsters and find essential items such as better weapons and armor, treasure and magic spells.

But as with its predecessor, "Dark Cloud 2" introduces an innovative new game-play mechanic to the genre called "Georama." Throughout the adventure, players must collect scattered Georama pieces and use them to reconstruct villages by creating buildings, vehicles, trees and rivers. Players can then walk through these fully interactive 3-D towns to unveil new elements of the story line.

Maximilian also can create new weaponry and equipment to help him face more intense combat later in the game, especially against 50-foot tall creatures. This is achieved by acquiring a special camera and taking photos of items, which are then combined to create inventions such as a trumpet gun or an energy pack. This open-ended element is ambitious, but players quickly learn how best to mix and match items.

The battles take place in "real time," so there's no pause in the action. The fighting system has been tweaked from the first "Dark Cloud" game, introduced in 2001, so the new adventure includes bonus moves such as blocking and dodging and a simplified targeting system.

Maximilian and Monica each have their own attack styles and maneuvers, special abilities and unique side to the story.

Visually, the game looks better than its predecessor. It uses a popular graphical technique called "cel-shading" that makes the characters and worlds look like a Saturday-morning cartoon, which perfectly suits this fantasy adventure.

Oddly, the text font is bland and the size too small.

Another minor issue is the peculiar Japanese-to-English dialogue translation, so that some sentences don't make a lot of sense. Fortunately, this doesn't detract much from the overall play experience.

Not only is "Dark Cloud 2" one of the best-looking PlayStation 2 titles to date, it's one of the longest, with an estimated 100+ hours of game play. If you're up for this kind of a time commitment, the good news is that the game's quality matches its quantity.