Dark Cloud was notable for its blend of action-rpg, dungeon crawling, and light city-building. Far from merely jumbling those elements together, this game elegantly weaves parts of each that interact with one another from mode to mode, creating this addictive loop. Apart from the RPG aspects encouraging creativity and customization, the additional characters also enable strategic depth beyond their gimmick, not only providing a different combat style but also opening up new avenues to handle resource management, enemy interactions, and general dungeon crawling. The setting, characters, and graphics are for the most part uninspired, although especially Zelda-like are the enemies, delightfully irritating to fight with individual combat details that only add to the gameplay flow.

Not all of it works, unfortunately. Each unique dungeon disappointingly feels like a slight variation on the same theme with reskinned enemies, the Limited Zones mechanic makes certain floors way more tedious than it should, and the uneven boss bottles are either too easy or too frustrating. Even so, Dark Cloud remains an overall effective and sprawling work. It's impressive how Level-5 managed to fuse several styles into such a cohesive, calculated, engrossing whole.