Bio
Funk.
Personal Ratings
1★
5★

Badges


Gone Gold

Received 5+ likes on a review while featured on the front page

Popular

Gained 15+ followers

GOTY '23

Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event

Donor

Liked 50+ reviews / lists

Loved

Gained 100+ total review likes

2 Years of Service

Being part of the Backloggd community for 2 years

Well Written

Gained 10+ likes on a single review

Liked

Gained 10+ total review likes

Gamer

Played 250+ games

N00b

Played 100+ games

Best Friends

Become mutual friends with at least 3 others

Noticed

Gained 3+ followers

Favorite Games

Power Stone 2
Power Stone 2
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
The Beatles: Rock Band
The Beatles: Rock Band
Demon's Souls
Demon's Souls
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

484

Total Games Played

000

Played in 2024

008

Games Backloggd


Recently Reviewed See More

Deeply flawed yet eminently enjoyable.

Dark Cloud 2 is a game I've had an affinity for for quite a long time, and just recently I played it for the first time in 15 years. The amount of flaws in the game was staggering so I wanted to take moment to briefly recount them.

To start, the inventory system of the game is possibly one of the worst I've ever seen. The player collects so, so many items throughout the adventure in a variety of types. There's quest items, weapons, battle items, healing items, status items, crafting materials, upgrade materials, fishing materials, fish, etc. etc. All of these things co-mingle in the same inventory with no auto-arrangement options. Over the course of the game the inventory balloons to an unusable girth, and manually organizing things becomes a chore.

Crafting is such a fundamental mechanic of the game that a cumbersome inventory system is not only unforgivable (Spoiler alert: I end up forgiving this flaw) but mind-boggling in how the inventory made it out the door looking the way it does.

A second issue with the game is the implementation of the literal world-building mechanic relative to the first game. The Georamas were never too intricate in Dark Cloud 1 (DCX for the PlayStation fans) but they did go a bit further in the various requests of the citizens that the player had to keep in mind when arranging the cities of land. There was also that delightful totem pole puzzle in the desert area.

The city building in Dark Cloud 2, however, is pretty mindless. There's a reason for this: the amount of structures the player can build is largely uncapped. Let's look at an example:

In the volcanic area of the game there are a few buildings that need to be built a certain way. One needs to be elevated a few blocks in height, which entails committing materials to building those elevator blocks and then placing the house on top of it. So I did this, and when it came time to move a particular NPC into the village, I found that he needed a special house with a fence built around it.

In Dark Cloud 1, I'd have a conundrum here. I would need to construct more blocks around the house to allow room for the fence to also be built up a few stories high. However, in Dark Cloud 2, I can just build an entirely separate house on ground level, easily build a fence around it, and move the NPC into it with nobody occupying the higher-up structure.

By removing the cap on structures players can dedicate one house to each "building requirement", where before the very slight difficulty of the building sections came from balancing all of the requirements within the limited number of structures.

There are precisely two attempts to do something interesting with the building: One is a city that has to be built on four plateaus that rise and sink depending on the number of houses on them (???) and thus the player has to equally build on all to create a perfectly flat ground. The other is the final building section of the game that tasks the player with rebuilding a garden to the exact specifications laid out in a few portraits they can find in the nearby dungeon.

While these approach the more thoughtful usage of the building mechanics in the first game, neither is that mentally demanding nor engaging.

One is left thinking why they brought this mechanic back at all. Did Dark Cloud have that much star power that they needed to brand this as a sequel with ham-fisted legacy mechanics instead of just making a new game unburdened by what kids in Blockbuster perceived as "discount Zelda"?

Almost everything to do with the story of Dark Cloud 2 is another misfire. The voice acting ranges from mid to awful, and the awkward load times of the PlayStation 2 ensure that cutscenes never run smoothly. There are frequently awkward pauses as the next line of dialogue loads that produce unintended comedy as characters just stand around in otherwise dire situations.

A significant element of the story is time travel, and Dark Cloud 2 has some of the least thought-out time travel mechanics seen yet in games. There is no attempt to logically think through what time travel would mean in-world insofar as causality and logic. I'm fine engaging a game on its own level when it comes to these things rather than missing the point by nitpicking, but the way time travel is handled in this game is just so illogical that it can be difficult to accept at times for anyone who has engaged with the idea before in any other form.

The rest of the writing, too, is off. It's incredibly juvenile, which is of course fine were the game to be good for kids, but I the mechanics of Dark Cloud 2 are just one step above what most children would find approachable or even possible to engage with. The mismatch of the mechanical depth and the maturity of the writing produces some amount of cognitive dissonance.

And man are there just so many mechanics! At the base level there's world-building and weapon crafting, both fundamental to the completion of the game. But there is also photography, invention, monster recruitment, fishing, fish breeding, fish racing, golf (???), and robot customization. All of these exist in varying degrees of completion of depth, and none of them are particularly engaging. The dominant strategy of completing this game seems to lie in choosing just one of these, whichever you find the most fun, and forgetting all of the others exist.

And yet the core gameplay loop of this game is just so satisfying to me. Running through samey floors of dungeons, wiping out enemies, building up your weapons until they evolve (???) into another weapon, saving the nearby city until all of its inhabitants are happy, it's something I could do for hours. Despite all of the flaws listed above, I was incredibly disappointed when the game concluded after only 35 hours.

The Dark Cloud series will never win any awards nor be put on any best-of lists, but it is one whose gameplay resonates so completely with me as an individual. I love these games; I love playing them despite all of their warts. It may take a special kind of autism, but if you enjoy rote dungeon crawling, I recommend this game with my entire being.

It's probably easiest to describe the Infinite Wealth experience by describing my final 90 minutes of play.

The beginning of that block was spent running between every restaurant in town to order, literally, the entire menu on the off chance of catching one of the stupidest conversations conceivable between my party of characters whom I've grown quite attached to. Stupid jokes, everyone piss drunk and fucking up every enemy encounter we ran into, and the sheer absurdity of how much food I shoved down their throats on my quest to max out Kiryu's levels through any means necessary.

90 minutes later I experience the emotional nadir of my gaming career with the abject emotional sucker punch of the game's final musical sequence, an experience that had me in tears. Not to linger of how much of a loser I am, but it wasn't a misty-eyed sniffle so much as a head-in-hands bawling. The clarification is worth it to highlight the emotional capability of Yakuza 8, and for people who have played it, there's absolutely no mystery when it comes to the game's secret weapon.

Anyone who's played Yakuza 7 will sing the praises of its protagonist Kasuga. There's no surprises left to be found in this eighth installment; Kasuga is Kasuga is Kasuga. And what Kasuga is is a supernova of charisma. It's foolhardy to make a claim on the entirety of fiction across mediums, but contained to the realm of video games I feel pretty confident in singling out the writing of this character for excellence. Without going into a full character study, I'll say that the writers have found a successful mix of emotional depth and unwavering moral compass. The latter might imply a lack of growth or arc, but instead it's a constant string of challenges for Kasuga's character to shine through. Even if you know where it's going, it's never not exciting to see him keep on the righteous path despite all that goes on around him.

(This is my first parasocial relationship; how am I doing?)

It's the attachment to Kasuga that enables the emotional climax of the story. What, to me, initially seemed like an unrealistic act of forgiveness became the only logical course of events. Of course he resolved things this way, he's Kasuga. It's difficult to write about without spoiling things overtly, but it's a moment that will stay with me for a long time. One of my favorite scenes I've experienced in fiction.

Something I find fun to speculate is the complete opposite experience one could have while playing Yakuza 8. Infinite Wealth has two protagonists, of course, with the other being series idol Kiryu. I'm a secondary; I'm a late-comer Kasuga stan. For most fans Kiryu is the star of the show, and Infinite Wealth is a (backdoor?) tribute to the character and the series. A surprisingly large percentage of the content is dedicated to sending off Kiryu.

This includes references both overt and subtle to events and characters from all of the previous games in the series. Even random spinoffs like that survival horror zombie game (???) are paid homage. This is contextualized as Kiryu making peace with his life in light of his cancer diagnosis. I'd lying if I said it wasn't alienating for someone with no point of reference, but it's very easy to see that the game is not interested in catering to that group. Most of said content is optional, anyway. It's nice that fans have a chance to participate in a living funeral.

Kiryu has his own arc and spotlight within the game, including a scene immediately following the final boss that strikes me as particularly moving should one be familiar with the character. The notion that someone could have as strong of an emotional reaction as I did for a different character speaks to the quality of the game's writing.

I had been penning this review in my mind as I waddled along what was ultimately an 88 hour adventure. Until the story paid off at the end, I had envisioned most of this would have been written about the design of the open world.

Open world's in games are almost a joke these days. You look at your map, see thousands of icons that don't mean anything, climb a tower somewhere, and click fast travel buttons the vast majority of the time. Infinite Wealth has some of this nonsense, but it was the first time I had felt naturally encouraged to explore a world in a very long time.

Several of the side activities presented in the game are intrinsically fun to work through. Aloha Links, the friend making mechanic, simply asks you to press the dedicated Aloha button in the vicinity of certain people on the street. There's 200 potential friends and you bet your ass I found them all. There's a nice sound effect that plays when you form a link, Kasuga looks like an idiot as he mispronounces "aloha", and everyone on the street is having a good time. It's a pleasing gag that, when combined with watching a friendship meter fill until you make a certified buddy to cross off the checklist, never gets old. Take a taxi everywhere and you'll miss so, so many friends. It's just not done!

Other things you would miss include the photo rally that tasks you with snapping pictures of key locations for extremely minor rewards. But of course the reward is in the fun of the treasure hunt itself, as the items you need to photograph are only relayed to you in the form of small, context devoid image that forces you to suss out where it could be. It's very satisfying to be wandering around only to get a sense of déjà vu from some landmark and realizing it's on your list of to-shoot photos.


I had a lot of fun with these two mechanics, but they are admittedly minor. What wasn't minor was the effect they have on your play through. You walk around more, you fight more enemies, you get more resources, you upgrade your weapons more, you happen across more opportunities to train your team of Pokemon (Yeah), you take some time to do side quests, you find the hidden conversations your party could have only by walking by certain locations, your relationship level rises, you work through the party members' individual quests, and I could go on.

The point is that be tacitly encouraging players to actually inhabit the game world instead of warping around it constantly, the game naturally and smoothly delivers a drip-feed of its systems. In other games grinding of some sort would be necessary. Grind for resources, grind for experience points, grind for opportunities to raise your bond with your party. Infinite Wealth incentivizes and trusts the player the find perfect gameplay rhythm that the developers had built into it. It's very impressive.

When you have excellent, well-considered gameplay alongside a story capable of genuine emotional connection. That's a winner. Yakuza 8 is incredible across the board, and the only thing left for me now is the crushing void felt in its absence.

Fuck me for playing this one, I guess. The bulk of the game is better than my two star rating would imply, but the combination of a momentum halting, seemingly endless exposition dump at the climax of the story combined with sudden-onset-stupid-Japanese-wordplay made this one a chore to finish. I was just happy by the time it was finally over.

There's various plot twists, all of them dumb, but if taken at face value and contained to just the first three routes, Raging Loop is not the worst game in the world.

Put that on the box, please.