Moose plays Dark Chronicle

I'm still in the RPG mood, so I figured I'd replay this as well as playing Beyond Good & Evil.

It starts with a small scene in some castle somewhere. A girl, presumably a princess, is running away from some monster things. You get control and are introduced the combat for a brief moment. It's real time! YAY! I can move and attack and block whenever I want! YAY! Anyway, after you beat them she runs to her father's room, to find him laying on the floor with some strange silver haired guy (the strange guys always have silver hair. What's up with that?) standing over him. The strange guy then vanishes into a portal of some kind.

Then we cut to Max, who's telling this story in a letter to his mother. He works at some mechanic/odd-job place with an old guy. He's also excited because he has a ticker for the circus. He's also wearing some red jewel that his father gave him yesterday. Apparently it's important or something. Anyway, it's time to start the game. I have to fix a vacuum cleaner or something.

One thing that's immediately noticeable. DQ had animations for reading books and opening cupboards and stuff, but this doesn't. A little thing just pops up telling you you've obtained whatever item.

Some little shit just stole my circus ticket.

Caught the kid, but Max gave him the ticket anyway, since he's annoyingly kind that way. But it turns out it was a test and the kid had magic powers or something, because he was all "You passed the test. You can do it. The first door is waiting." And then he vanished.

Alright, the circus! There was a guy juggling clowns, a woman with big tits, an elephant did a backflip... you know, the usual. Max snuck around the side of the stage for a better view, where over hears a conversation between the mayor and the ring master. The ring master is forcing the mayor to look for some stone or someth-... Wait, a stone you say? It's couldn't be, could it? Of course it could.

They also say some stuff about the outside world, and how it would be terrible if the townspeople knew what was happening out there. Anyway, Max gets discovered and runs away. But this Flotsam circus guy means fucking business, and busts out his giant robot spider clown thing.

Max escapes into the sewer with with his friend Donny though. Donny gives him a gun (no idea why a child has a gun), and Max decides he's going to go through the sewer to the outside world and find out what's happening.

You know what this means. IT'S OUR FIRST DUNGEON! A SEWER... YAY!

Got to the first boss fight. It was against the circus elephant, which is just weird. My puny weapons couldn't damage it, but luckily Cedric (the guy from the shop) came to the rescue on the ridepod. Which is basically a robot that you ride in and attack stuff with. He helped me escape, and now I have to repair Steve (yeah, the ridepod is called Steve).

This is where the inventing system is introduced. You take pictures of stuff to record them as ideas, and then put ideas together to invent a new idea, and then you find the materials to build the invention.

i really wanted this game but never found a copy

did you build your own cities and shit?

There's 4 areas where you have to build a village that I remember, and 1 at the end where you build a garden (although that's kind of boring because you have to build it to exact specifications). You get general instructions like "This person wants a fence", "This person wants a green house", "This person wants to live by a river" and so on, and you just put together a little village.

The main reason to replay the game is to build them differently each time. That's why I played it twice ages ago.

One thing I forgot about the dungeon floors is that each one has a set of goals to accomplish, and if you do you get a medal, which I assume can be traded for cool stuff later on (can't remember).

I've been tasked with inventing a new fuel pack for Steve. I need pictures of some milk cans, pipes, and a belt. I see now that this is just a more complicated version of the alchemy pot really, but I prefer it.

The graphics are quite as good as DQ8's, especially when it comes to the generic NPCs. The important characters look good.

There's no load times between all the menus either, which is lovely.

Haha! Take that circus elephant!

I remember loving Steve the first time I played the game. I didn't spend any time on Max at all and just built up Steve for the whole game. Not the smartest thing to do.

Man, I forgot all about the scoops. Donny asks you to photograph specific things, and I assume he gives you some kind of reward, although I can't remember what. I've already missed one permanently, since it was a photo of that elephant.

This game also goes with building up your weapons, rather than building up your character, which I vastly prefer. A weapon gets exp when it's used to kill something, and when a weapons gains level it gets Synth Points.

These are used to build the weapons stats, since you can spectrumise just about any item or weapon in the game and bond it to a weapon, which costs Synth Points. You get fire crystals, ice crystals, etc, that are just for building up weapons, but most other items can be used too if you're in a pinch for crystals.

Each weapon can also be built up into other weapons, when you meet certain stat requirements. For example, a weapon might need a higher Flame stat before you can upgrade it, so you would need to use the weapon so it gained a some levels and got synth points, then spectrumise something that had the flame element, bond it to the weapon and then build it up.

Well, fought the big robot clown and finished the sewer dungeon. Meanwhile, Cedric had convinced the Mayor to open the railroad again so we could see what was going on outside. Turns out that 15 years ago the whole world was trashed by some guy called Emperor Griffon, apart from Max's town (Palm Brinks). That was spared because Emperor Griffon wanted the stone that was there.

So I'm on the train, and Flotsam attacks in some clown car. He leaps onto the train with bombs strapped to himself. What to do?! But that kid who stole my circus ticket shows up again somehow. What can he do? Oh wait, it's just a disguise! That kid is Monica, the girl from the start of the game (you know, in the castle). She kicks Flotsam's ass, the train reaches a big pile of rocks and can;t go any further, and Monica begins a massive monologue.

You see, Monica is from the future. Turns out Griffon is from the future too. He wants to destroy the world it seems, but unlike your average bad guy, he hasn't just set about killing those who oppose him. Oh no. He's sent people to the past to make sure the people who oppose never exist in the first place. He's a thorough guy. So our job now is to restore the "origin points" of things in this time period, so that they exist in the future again.

And thus the incredibly flimsy time travel plot is established.

So we come to Sindain, the first georama area. Can't build anything yet though. There's a house with 3 dwarfs in it, and they have the power to build stuff, but they're missing some of their group. Apparently some woman they lived with has gone missing, and 4 of them went of to look for and haven't c... Wait. A woman living with seven dwarfs? WHERE DOES JAPAN GET THESE CRAZY IDEAS?

Any, they wandered off into Rainbow Butterfly Wood to find her, and now I have to find them. Looks like this is the next dungeon. So called because apparently there's a magic butterfly that lives in it, and if you see it, you never leave the wood ever again.

Well I found the other four dwarfs in some clearing. Three of them have decided they want to live there forever for some reason, and the other one was just fishing to pass the time. He gave me his rod. FIRST MINI-GAME! FISHING!

Turns out some holy fish is responsible for messing up the dwarfs. And I'll be damned if it's not the gayest fish I've ever seen.

A whole bunch of shit just happened. Since the dwarfs are all better now, they'll help me build stuff. So I can start the georama proper, once I've got materials and some guidelines. Also a time gate just appeared, so I can go to the future and check out the effects of rebuilding stuff in the past.

There's some guy called Jurak that I have to revive, by rebuilding Sindain, or something. The more you build up the place in the present, the more it builds up in the future, and so on. Which always annoyed me, because it's the future. Shouldn't it be fully built up to begin with, since I going to rebuild it?

Now that I can build shit, I have to start getting people to live in these new villages. Which means getting people from Palm Brinks to move. I had forgotten about that part of the game. Like, I need someone who knows about trees to live in Sindain, so I have to get Max's gardener to move. But he'll have a request for me to do before he'll go probably, as will every other character that I have to move out of Palm Brinks. And I can tell which ones I'll have to do that with, because they're rendered better than the generic townsfolk.

Well, the forest dungeon splits into two paths, and I can't go down one of them yet. The end of the first path is a boss arena, but I can't fight the boss yet either. So I built up the georama a bit and developed the future, reviving Jurak. In the future Jurak gave me a seed for a flower than the Rainbow Butterly likes. So I have to plant the seed in the boss arena in the past to get the boss to show up.

BUT the flower grows pretty slowly, so I need some Sun Drops to make it bloom early. To get these I need to talk to a specific kind of monster in the forest. This introduces Monica's secondary character thing. Her equivalent to Steve basically, which is monster badges. You can buy monster badges which let you transform into the monsters, and level up through their various grades. I never even touched this ability beyond the story requirements in either of my two previous play throughs of this game, because it seemed completely unnecessary. Steve is useful because some enemies are too big and tough for normal weapons, but the monster thing does fuck all.

Oh, but to get the first monster badge you need to get the Sun Drops, you have to buy them in the future. From a mall that doesn't exist yet. So it's down to grinding for materials to build the georama some more, which I don't mind at all actually since I like building it, and the real time combat keeps my attention.

You can buy all the materials too, if you have the cash. Plus, each person you move from Sindain to the georama has some conditions to meet before they'll move in. Gordon wanted some plants and stuff, since he's a gardener, so he wouldn't move in until I had planted some trees around.

There's other conditions to meet for bringing the future back as well. Such and such being near a river, X number of things built, etc.

Just defeated the Rainbow Butterfly, and it turns out the butterfly was Holly. Yeah, remember Holly? That girl the dwarfs wanted you to find? She was the Rainbow Butterfly. She turned herself into a human to thank them because they set her free form a spider web when she was smaller. Then she vanished because some dark force came over her or something.

Man, this just gets more and more confusing. Jurak remembered some stuff about Griffon, and it turns out he's not from Monica's time, but from the ancient past. In fact, he's still in the past, and he's controlling things from there, somehow.

So we have one hero, Max, from the "present". Another, Monica, from 100 years in the future. And the main villain is thousands of years in the past.

Anyway, that's the Rainbow Forest dungeon completed, for now. There's still the other pathway, but I can't access it yet, which means I can't complete the georama yet either. Each dungeon floor has a geostone on it, and the geostone's let you build more parts and tell you what conditions you need to complete and stuff.

Now I'm off to Balance Valley, to restore the origin point of some dude called Crest, who's apparently a great sage.