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YMMV / Dark Cloud

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  • Awesome Music: Frequently. The Opening/Main Theme is a great melody.
  • Character Tiers: Overall, Toan and Osmond are the best, because they're easy to be effective with. Xiao and Ruby are harder to use, but can be argued to be the best when used properly. Ungaga and Goro are the worst, because they're not Toan but still have their uses. To the game's credit, all the characters can be made into complete killing machines through the upgrade system and they're all not useless even without that.
    • Toan has the biggest weapon pool, the longest combo (which ends in an extra-strength attack), and two invincible charge-attacks. His hitboxes are also very nice, and he can easily hit multiple foes. Further, his weapons tend to be the best in the game, with high stats across the board. It's easy to spend nearly the entire game using Toan, switching to other characters only when the game forces you to.
    • Goro's weapons often have a high attack power and durability. His charge attack can deal insane amounts of damage when executed correctly, and is essentially an even stronger version of Toan's second charge attack, meaning he is invincible while executing it. However, his basic attack has a very poor hitbox, and comes out slowly, meaning he can be difficult to use without careful planning. Furthermore, unless he's using a weapon with a high speed, he will sometimes be completely unable to attack for a few moments, which is a huge issue. That said, he boasts the highest single-hit damage in the game, making him excellent in specific situations. He also runs slightly faster than Toan, which combines with his high power in a way that makes him a nightmare for enemies who try to stay at a distance. His Battle-Axe weapon, gained from completing all the requests in Matataki Village, is excellent overall, and will likely be the first weapon player gains with a high-enough speed stat to avoid his biggest problem.
    • Ungaga has three things going for him: his excellent reach/hitboxes, his damage-per-hit not lagging far behind Goro, and his charge-attack, which racks up damage quickly. His weaknesses include his weapons being very fragile, and his attacks being somewhat slow. The problem is that his excellent reach oftens means hitting multiple foes, and multiples hits against guarding foes, which synergize with the aforementioned fragility to mean that his weapons can break in just a few poorly-timed attacks. Further, his reach means little in a game where half the cast has projectile weapons. Luckily, the Mirage that the player is given for completing all of the requests in Muska Racka is an excellent weapon, and as long as the player is careful with his attacks, he can actually be rather useful.
    • Ruby's weapons are largely based on their Magic attribute, and as such the player often has to manage her active elements to exploit enemy weaknesses if they want to get good mileage out of her, which is fine, but slows the game down. That said, she's the only ranged attacker with a charge-attack, and a close-range charge-attack that strikes the enemy's weakness can do more than respectible damage. Unfortunately, being close-range negates the point of using projectiles, and, while all ranged character's damage drops off as distance is added, Ruby is affected the most by this. Further, of the long-range characters, Ruby has to stop moving the most when attacking because her animations take longer, which means making herself unnecessarily vulnerable, especially when combined with her need to get close to deal her best damage. Ruby also has the interesting property of 'half-charged-attacks', wherein she begins charging an attack, but fires before completing the charge, which deals markedly more damage than standard attack, without the extra damage to your weapon of a 'proper' charged attack, which means she can be the most efficient damage-dealer in the game. Unfortunately, this technique means she has to stand still even longer, exacerbating her main weakness. She and Xiao gain weapons with the 'steal' trait, which sometimes gives the player items when they hit enemies, and does not affect the enemy's likelihood to drop an item on defeat. This makes them both very easy on the player's wallet, and means Ruby is an efficient attacker in two ways.
    • Xiao unfortunately is the worst of the ranged attackers, and the second worst character in the game (before Goro) with her only redeeming quality that she is the first ally you recruit. Her damage output lags far behind the other ranged attackers and she has the lowest starting health and defense in the game. What compounds all these flaws is that the obstacles she is able to cross - gaps with a point to jump across - can be crossed by Osmond without having to go into a cutscene. She does have sole access to Steve and Super Steve, a pair of unique weapons that advise the player on how to deal with enemies it targets.
    • Osmond breaks the game in half when he's introduced. As a result of when he appears, he has the smallest selection of weapons in the game, and is somewhat less likely to end up with maxed out health or thirst than anyone else (as the player has likely used the limited supply of items that do this on their other characters). However, he's the only character in the game who doesn't have to stop moving at all when attacking, and his machine gun weapons can rack up damage very quickly when buffed the right way. If you put critical hit on his machine guns, he can effortlessly kill anything in the game. But that pales in comparison to his laser cannons, which do massive elemental damage at a distance. Once you get Osmond, you never need to use Xiao again because he can fly over the obstacles you use to need her for. His ability to move and attack at the same time makes the bonus dungeon a joke.
  • Demonic Spiders: Any enemy with unblockable attacks that knocked you down. Arthurs, Crescent Barons, the Golem's model swaps...
  • Epileptic Trees: The Duels in this game are battles played out through Quicktime Events. There are very few of them, and the final one is a big anticlimax, it's not even a fight, and it happens about 70% into the game (the third-to-last dungeon starts collapsing, and you have to Duel to cross a bridge). Some players speculate that the Dark Genie vs Sun Giant fight was supposed to be a Duel, as it plays out like one visually, and would have an appropriately climactic use of the mechanic.
  • Goddamned Bats: The dragon enemies that shoot fireballs from a distance, and tackle you when close, causing Stop status.
  • Game-Breaker: Synthspheres. Characters in this game are about as strong as their weapons, and Synthspheres are weapons turned into weapon-attachments. Equipping just about any one to a given weapon will max out at least 2 stats. Consider that you can make synthspheres from the weapons of your strongest characters, and attach them to the weapons of your weakest, and it becomes an easy way to subvert Can't Catch Up.
    • Using the Broken Dagger Glitch can net you an endgame-level weapon before you've even completed the first dungeon.note 
    • Ruty's fish shop in Queens is extremely helpful, since the fish she sells are the resident dungeon's Back Floor keys: with this, you can go to a Back Floor pretty much whenever you want (as long as you buy ice to keep the fish cool), allowing you to potentially farm extremely rare and valuable items for a fairly low price.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: The first phase of the Final Boss attacks you with his hands... which you hit to damage him. Combined with his appearance, he resembles Darkside.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Goro. Mouths off and acts selfish during his only speaking roles, but suffers deeply from father issues and abandonment issues.
  • Low-Tier Letdown: There's been arguments that basically everyone besides Toan can fit in here, though it is downplayed. Every party member's efficiency can be raised to roughly equal levels with the right weapons. But if you don't have any of those weapons, here's what to expect.
    • Xiao starts with an almost comically weak weapon, and her health and defence aren't much to write home about either. Her ability to fight at range helps, but the number of hits her default weapon takes to defeat all but the weakest enemies might discourage players from using her, even once they get weapons that make her damage match the other party members.
    • Goro doesn't share Xiao's problem of damage, health or defence, but his whole playstyle can be hurt by one simple fact; his slow attack speed. Most enemies can dodge Goro's attack before it hits, and maybe counter attack while he's still stuck in his animation. Even with a faster weapon, he can't combo, and the enemy is just as likely to dodge, so you need to really plan out how you're using him. Notably, unlike most of the other characters, there isn't really a way to address the problems with Goro, as his animation speed will always be the same, regardless of what weapon he uses.
    • Ruby has mostly avoided this compared to the others, but still often gets overlooked compared to Toan. This is most likely because her combat style is the most dependent on switching your weapons element to maximise damage. Since this can only be done in the menu, this slows down her playstyle more than anyone else, making it tempting to just use other characters instead.
    • Ungaga is the last melee character, and fights closer to Toan than Goro does, with quick combos and decent range. The problem for him though is that almost all of his weapons have lower endurance on average than the rest of the party. Considering managing repairs is already one of the game's more divisive elements, this hurts first impressions of him.
    • For the most part, Osmond's play style doesn't get as much criticism as most of the rest of the party, but the fact he joins so late into the game still causes some to compare him unfavourably to those before him. By the time he joins, it's unlikely you'll be able to fully increase his health or thirst, and it's also less likely for the player to get some of his more powerful weapons unless they specifically go looking for them. Overall, it can be easier to just stick with the characters the player's already been using up to this point, and keep Osmond in reserve.
  • Narm: It can be quite hard to take a few moments seriously when the script flat out misses words or have embarrassing misspellings.
  • Nightmare Fuel: A surprising amount.
  • The Scrappy: Combine Low-Tier Letdown with the fact that Goro acts like a total Jerkass during his only speaking roles, and you get this.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Thirst. The second game did away with this mechanic and instead made it into a status ailment.
    • Each character has a favorite food which they eat to increase their defense. It will increase their defensive stat by 5, 6, or 7. Obviously, to maximize their potential — you get no more stat boosts after Yellow Drops, they're just enough to keep you from being one-shotted in your current dungeon, and the monsters in the last couple of dungeons hit REALLY hard — you want each food item to increase defense by 7. Get 5 or 6? Too bad, either live with it or reset the whole damn game and try again; there's no way to load a saved game from within the game. Dark Cloud 2's defense food items give a fixed increase, which is preferable.
    • You will have to pretty much tape your square button down to hold a Dran's feather.
    • The fact that your weapons need constant repairing is enough of a Scrappy Mechanic; so much so that when you have all 6 characters, half of your inventory space will be dedicated to repair powder. But to make all this worse, any weapon that’s not a character’s default one will disappear forever upon breaking. Oh, and weapons don’t degrade at a fixed rate; sometimes they degrade by multiple points from a single attack. Say goodbye to all the hard work of building up that sweet arsenal and having it disappear because you thought it would hold out for another attack, only to have the Random Number God say “no”.
    • On the subject of inventory space, you'll have to be ruthless in selling items that you might need but most likely won't, or you'll run out of space. Items don't stack, unlike in the second game, so two repair powders take up two slots. Your bag space tops out at 100 items, plus 60 slots in storage, and if that sounds like a lot, well....
    • There's a limit on how much gold you can carry: 65,535 (which is the highest number that can be expressed with 16 bits). Any gold you pick up will be wasted, and you'll be unable to sell anything to clear inventory space without spending gold first. Fortunately, you can buy or sell a gold bar for 1,000 gold, so it's a way to store excess gold...but where do you put the gold bar?! It's going to take up space, which you don't really have to spare!
    • Weapon Build Up. The mechanic itself would have been fine if it weren't for several of Toan's/Xiao's weapons wanting Anti-Metal Stats. Anti-Metal is the hardest to find (nobody sells Metal Breakers in the entire game outside of fishing, unless you don't mind forking 3k for Opals/Diamonds). The only way to get Anti-Metal without fishing, and pre-Fairy King is to use Bombs on Statues in the first dungeon. However, you can't buy bombs until Queens unless you knew ahead of time the trick about Gaffer's Buggy. This means that half of your weapon upgrade paths are just outright unavailable unless you get a Bandit's Slingshot. On the subject of fishing...
    • Fishing. It seems to be so picky, requiring frame-perfect button presses to reel a fish in. The rewards are awesome, but yet the mini-game appears to be nearly impossible to actually do successfully without ridiculous amounts of practice. The fact that baits cost 300+ gold don't help, and your main source of income near the beginning of the game is selling baits for money.
    • Opening Atla requires being Toan, which forces plenty of menuing if you want to play as anyone else. While he’s thankfully more than powerful enough to be your primary character, it really puts a damper on the idea of using other characters.
  • Squick:
    • "Pumpkin Panty Fortune Telling". There are no words to describe it. Monica's default costume has a piece called Pumpkin Shorts. Is she related to Yaya?
    • They actually drew Dran's butthole and the game has graphic deaths scene when fighting the Killer Snake. Both yours and the snake's.
  • That One Boss: La Saia has a bunch of ice attacks that can hit you from pretty much anywhere. One in particular freezes you, regardless of whether you have an anti-freeze amulet equipped, and lets her get 1-2 powerful shots in.

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