Dark Chronicle coming to PS4
It’s finally happening – Dark Chronicle – my favourite JPRG of the PS2 era – is coming to the PlayStation 4. Being a complete sucker, I will buy it again. For those of you who don’t happen to own a PS2 copy, it’s well worth the purchase, and not just because original PAL PS2 copies have held their value pretty well (the US release, Dark Cloud 2, is relatively easy to obtain).
If you aren’t familiar with Dark Chronicle, let me get you up to speed. Japanese developer Level-5 released their debut title Dark Cloud in the last few weeks of 2000 to a pretty poor reception in Japan – international uptake of the game was much better, and the company began work on a spiritual sequel. Rather than simply taking the ‘more of the same’ approach that many developers do, Dark Chronicle was a massive improvement over its predecessor, adding all manner of features and polishing out some of the annoyances I had with the first game.
One of the best things about Dark Chronicle is the variety of gameplay options on offer. A complete genre mash-up, it offers dungeon crawling, town building, fish catching & racing, golfing, photography – it really does feel like designer Hino Akihiro looked at a pile of his favourite games and decided they would all work together. While the depth of each activity offered doesn’t match that found in games which focus solely upon them, Dark Chronicle scratched my gaming itches in all the right places. I’m looking forward to experiencing the title all over again, it’s cel-shaded art style softening the blow of nearly 14 years of graphical progress.
Dark Chronicle will be available on the PS Store from the 19th of January. It is expected to fall in line with similar PS2 Classics prices at $22.95AU.
