YMMV / Dark Chronicle

• Angst? What Angst?: The reveal that Mayor Need has been deliberately keeping Palm Brinks isolated from the outside world to keep them ignorant of The End of the World as We Know It is met with absolute indifference from the town's citizens, who seem more interested in cheerleading the heroes' adventure than calling the mayor out on his lies.
• Ass Pull:
  • Late in-game Monica ends up being kidnapped by Gaspard, leaving the player without access to her for a short while. The player must travel to the future in order to obtain an item that lets them progress in the dungeon. Since the player doesn't have access to the blue atlamillia in order to travel back to the past, Max's red atlamillia suddenly gains the ability to travel to both the future and past, with only a passing Handwave theory to justify it.
  • Paznos getting a Humongous Mecha form comes completely out of nowhere, to the point where the game actively hangs a lampshade on it. Ultimately it's Handwaved as a result of Max and Monica's changes to the future.
• Awesome Music: Frequently.
  • The theme that plays when you're in the Flower Garden in Dark Cloud 2.
  • The Kazarov Stonehenge theme.
  • The music that plays during the battle with Jaming. Sadly the battle is very short, so you don't get to hear much of the song.
  • The game's vocal theme, Time is Changing.
• Cult Classic: It didn't make much of a splash commercially, but Chronicle's story, combat system and side activities created a small but devoted fanbase.
• Disappointing Last Level: That stupid dream stairway that comes between the second-to-last final boss and the final boss. Fortunately, with properly leveled up weapons, it shouldn't take long. Still, it stalls what was up until then a very intense climax in the game.
  • To be clear, the stairway itself isn't the problem, as it's atmospheric and awe-inspiring. The problem is that it consists of a handful-of mini-boss fights separated out by huuuuge stretches of featureless walkway. As in, maybe two completely dull minutes of running uphill between fights.
• Game-Breaker: Where to begin? This game gives you a lot of tools to utterly break it to pieces.
  • Max's apparent downside is that he attacks slower than Monica. However, he also hits harder - so it doesn't matter how fast he swings, since most enemies he can kill in a couple hits.
  • Steve, especially after you get him a propeller instead of legs. The ridepod's main feature is to take down bulky enemies. However, what works for Elite Mooks will also work wonders on regular mooks; Most of his weapons (even a lvl 1 Nova Cannon!) will absolutely toast anything in the dungeons. It's entirely possible to go through entire floors with Steve laying waste to enemies and sucking up the experience. By rapidly swapping back out of Ridepod, you can also transfer all the experience to Max or Monica, and both weapons get it shared - so you don't have to worry about them falling behind or even farm XP for your gun or bracelet more effectively than using it normally (where enemies are often immune to them).
  • By all rights, Name Change Tickets should be a Joke Item. In theory, they don't do anything but allow the player to change the name one of their weapons, a pure cosmetic action. However, in practice, you can change the name of any weapon to the name of another weapon in the same class (Sword to sword, wrench to wrench, gun to gun, etc) and the weapon will actually change into that weapon, meaning that you can change a weak weapon into the most powerful weapon in its class if you know the name. However, the stats are still the same so while you will have the most powerful weapons, it won't reflect it in the stats.
• Goddamned Bats: The literal goddamned bats...at least when you are required to use your melee weapon on them or Item attacks.
• Growing the Beard: While it's hard to pinpoint the exact game when this happened to Level-5, some argue that Chronicle is when they started.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of Monica's costumes looks very much like Jessica◊'s costumes in Dragon Quest VIII. Of course, they were both made by Level-5.
• Les Yay: In Chronicle, if Monica talks to Claire before she joins the party, Claire sort of crushes on her.
• Memetic Mutation: "Garbage Mail Clock", taken from the famous Penny Arcade strip about the game's idea system.
• Moment of Awesome: Paznos shooting down the Moon Flower Palace, and then catching it before it falls on Palm Brinks.
• Narm: Can be invoked by the player thanks to the costume system. The game's cutscenes are done using the in-game graphic engine, so they remember which outfit that Max and Monica are wearing at the time. This can lead to some dramatic scenes becoming unintentionally funny because the characters are dressed like this◊, or better yet, Max is literally dressed like a clown◊.
  • Can also be invoked by the player in city building. Since adding chimneys gives culture points regardless of where they are placed, you can get a bunch of culture points by literally putting chimneys everywhere on the house - resulting in an architectural monstrosity that would make a McMansion blush.
  • Those who watched cartoons in The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium (especially shows on Nickelodeon) might giggle at some of the voicework - especially Osmond (voiced by Michael Bell, using the almost exact same voice as Drew Pickles) and Sirus/Emperor Griffon who is voiced by Kath Soucie. That second one is subverted when he transforms into a larger, humanoid form voiced by Mark Hamill, who sounds appropriately evil and menacing in the role. However, the dub was actually a very good one at the time in 2003 - most games that had voice acting would hire Hollywood actors who had almost no experience in voice acting. For the English dub, Sony hired people who actually had careers in voice acting. These days, people might giggle at the dub just because the voices remind them too much of Nickelodeon or PBS-kids characters - but these were some of the most experienced voice actors at the time.
• Nightmare Fuel: Emperor Griffin, particularly when you finally first confront him in his palace. The reveal that he's a rabbit person should make this encounter pure Narm, but then he starts kicking your ass while an intense, frightening musical track plays in the background, and at one point he stops the fight to rant about how all of humanity should be wiped out. Then after the fight he gets physically scarier and gains Mark Hamill's voice.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • When you kill an enemy, loot spills out, including ABS to level your weapons, and must be picked up or else it's lost. After you kill the last enemy, if Spheda is available, you are offered the option of being transported directly to the sphere to start playing immediately. Great...except it's offered before you can get the loot, meaning that unless you've reached the point where you just plain don't care about that (weapons fully leveled, more gold than you can spend, all Georama finished, basically endgame), you end up turning it down and having to hoof it to wherever the sphere is, which can be a long way.
  • Say you have nineteen repair powder. The limit is twenty. You open a chest, and it has two repair powder. Great! Not great. Instead of topping you up and wasting one, both get thrown away.
  • Some of the floor objectives are a real pain in the ass. In particular are "Item only" floors and "Monster Badge only" floors. Item weapons tend to be powerful but very inefficient for clear an entire floor with nothing but them and Monica's monster form is very weak without extensive grinding, and even at higher levels, it simply is not equal to Max's mech as an alternate form (or even equal to just Monica's standard form).
• Ship Tease: Though being kids the game is almost completely innocent, the fact that Monica illegally goes back to the past using a starglass, which transports people to the most important moment in time-space for them, says something when she appears in front of MAX. (Also, some of her more friendly speech-bubble conversations with Max contain love hearts)
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer:
  • The game adds more freedom to the city building (you can make tons of items to decorate the houses or the areas around them, you can move in more people even after getting 100% completion if you want, etc.), than its predecessor, making it fun to play for the heck of it.
  • Fishing activities are also revamped. You can level up your fishing poles, and there's a fishing contest that gives prizes for the largest fish, and an aquarium where you can feed and breed your fish to prepare them for the Fish Race.
  • The golf-like mini-game (Spheda) can net you some awesome prizes on some floors.
  • Medal collecting, photography, and Item Crafting are all very fun and can be very time-consuming if you dig in.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Graphics were improved, voice acting was added, weapons no longer permanently disappear, the city-building mechanics were given more depth, and tons of addictive minigames were included.
• That One Achievement: "Medalhead" from the Playstation 4 re-release, which requires unlocking every medal in the game. On top of needing to complete all the "Items Only" floor challenges, as well as all the "Monster Only" ones, if you beat the final boss before getting all the medals from The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, then you become locked out of getting the medals from that dungeon. Even if you don't do this, getting all of them is a lengthy process, and will likely take more than a few attempts of certain levels.
  • "What? Your Monster Is Evolving!" isn't particularly easy either. It requires fully evolving any of Monika's monster forms to their final form. While this sounds easy, the low stats of most monster forms, the Guide Dang It! nature of getting the better ones, and how much training they need to reach their first transformation, means that this can be a time-consuming process, even if you use the Character Swap trick for easy ABS.
  • "A True Visionary" requires you to unlock all invention recipes. You NEED a guide for this, as not only are the recipes often not obvious at all, but some of the Scoops required for certain recipes can be missed. A similar problem exists for the "Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer" trophy (which requires reaching photography level 8), but that one's difficulty is overshadowed by "A True Visionary".
• That One Boss: So you're fighting a boss voiced by Kath Soucie using her Blake Gripling voice? Well, they have way way more health than anything you've ever faced (Except for ridepod-only enemies) and move way way too fast to use the Ridepod. Oh, and there's a photo you can take too. The easiest way to do it? Right when they're in your face trying to attack you or throw a projectile that can pierce your guard. Fortunately, it doesn't stun you.
• That One Level:
  • The level in Ocean's Roar Cave ironically labelled "Improvements". It's a red seal level (meaning you can ONLY use Monica) and it's filled with enemies that can only reasonably be defeated with the Ridepod. Many players opt to shell out money for a seal-breaking scroll for this level.
  • The gutters that are everywhere in the Sewers can make playing Spheda particularly frustrating.
• That One Sidequest: Use "Items Only" to defeat enemies. Especially when the level is populated with high-flying Goddamn Bats, and items are expensive. Can be somewhat mitigated by using poison apples to defeat enemies with damage-over-time, but of course, you can't poison undead or non-organic (such as rock/metal) enemies, although the former die instantly to thrown holy water.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Max's father, Gerard, was the previous holder of the Red Atlamillia. It's also heavily implied that he knew of his wife Elena's origins and decided to hide them from Max. However, outside of one cutscene, he barely has any presence in the story to speak of.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • City building. While this game does allow more freedom in building the towns than the first (wherein you simply placed buildings), in practice you were pretty much limited with having to fulfill certain conditions, many of which had to be done in very specific ways with little room for deviation. The second game gives you maps with extra restrictions, which would have made the player think more creatively. However, the city-building is in practice more of a Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer.
  • The Monster Morph Mechanic. Aside from the one single time it's used for the plot (Namely, being required to buy the Flower Badge at Jurak Mall for the sake of introducing the Gift Capsule concept), Monster Morph has very little use compared to all of the Sidequest mechanics that Max's game-play is designed around. Monster forms start off embarrassingly weak and are an absolute chore to grind.^note Even if you abuse the Character Swap system to mooch ABS Their only benefit is being able to talk to monsters....That have nothing important to say. While they have decent Synthesis rewards if you spend time Min-Maxing the forms, the abundance of Synthesis items in the dungeons renders these rewards not worth the work.