19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
What little they could have wrote on, they didn't, February 9, 2002
This review is from: Dark Cloud : Prima's Official Strategy Guide (Paperback)
Dark Cloud is a very random game, with its dungens, when you get people and their houses, items, weapons, ect, which makes making a guide about it very hard. But with what could have been put in the guide to make it at least worth a purchase, Prima didn't put hardly any worth while info in. In fact, one of these reasons is probably why you bought/want to buy this strat guide. You probably expected...
1.) Detailed maps of where to put peoples homes, and their requirements to make them happy (probably your primary reason for getting/wanting to get this)
2.) Enemy and bosses weaknesses, and how to dispatch them in a format that is clear and not confusing as heck
3.) A detailed layout of what each weapons strengths are when you get them, and/or a layout of each requirement for the weapons to be able to build them up
4.) A list of what each items price is, what shops have what items, and where to find them
Well if you expected any of those, then you're sadly mistaken. Prima decided to keep the strat guide at a bare minimum of info, lacking almost everything that is needed to make it considered a strat guide and not an over-glorified handbook that comes with the game. In a nutshell this guide just tells you...
1.) What weapons build up to what (none of the requirements, stats, or anything else useful though)
2.) A little very biased characters guide, favoring Ruby over every other character in the game (which is pointed out in almost every chapter when you get her making you probably hate her by the time the book's done)
3.) Tons of worthless information. Such as talk to the villagers (well duh), the names of each of the villagers and some info on them, what water pools does in every chapter like you're going to forget every 5 minutes, ect
4.) A very clunky guide on how to fight bosses (It took me 6 trys at the Ice Queen even after disecting the boss guide since it didn't tell me jack about her attacks other than "...her attacks will freeze you in place" and "...she will attack and defend relentlessly". Prima nicely neglected to state that in order to get to the ice queen you have to dodge tornado attacks as well as her constantly following ice blast that doesn't leave you alone. In other words, very little effort was put into telling you how to dispatch bosses)
5.) Just a brief skimming over what each item does (nothing special, but you can just select the item in your menu and it tells you what it does making this info worthless)
6.) A list of georama analysis over what items are required to trigger an event (Which is rather pointless, due to you can just ask the villagers. Besides, you have to talk to the villagers to find out what they want before you can put the required item in it's proper slot anyway. This was just added in the strat guide to take up space much like everything else)
Almost everything in this strat guide is just worthless information that you can find out by exploring, reading the handbook that came with the game, and just talking to villagers. If you're stuck at a part in Dark Cloud, this guide will probably not provide you with much more than just colored pictures, and telling you that Ruby is the best.
All in all, after reading this strat guide I didn't get anything out of it other than what each weapon can build up to, which was a great disappointment considering what the price is of this thing. If everything that is worthless info was cut out of this guide, it would just be about the size of a 2 page pamplet of what info is worth while...it's not worth a purchase, let alone your time looking through it.
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19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dark Cloud is a hard game to write a book for - and Prima, July 12, 2001
This review is from: Dark Cloud : Prima's Official Strategy Guide (Paperback)
shows you exactly why. One big replay point for Dark Cloud (DC) is the RANDOMNESS of the dungeons. Apparently the group that wrote this book didn't realize this. Several limited zone floors that are listed as concrete numbers are in fact variable game by game, and a great deal of item info is flat-out wrong. Several pieces of info are repeated over and over, with the exact same text and caption. Example: They explain what a pool of water does for EACH AND EVERY DUNGEON! They easily could have condensed this guide into a three page fold-out in a magazine and wouldn't have lost a word of information.
I rate strategy guide by percentage of information you wouldn't get from an Internet FAQ. I give the DC Primagames guide a 2% - for the pictures.
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