When playing games, I like to think about why they were designed the way they were. Is a feature intentional, or did the developers run out of time? One of the games I have been thinking about lately is Dark Cloud for the PS2. The game is a dungeon crawling RPG with a deep weapon building system. It has the player going into dungeons to recover “Alta”. You can then use the Alta to recreate the world and customize it to your design.
The feature I’ve been thinking about is the allies in Dark Cloud. When you start the game, you can only play as Toan, a dagger wielding kid who has a 5 hit attack combo that stuns enemies for a while. Eventually the player will unlock Xiao , Goro, & three other allies. At first, it seems like a good thing to have more allies. More options & more power, right?
Every ally starts with low health,low thirst meter, and low weapon damage. It takes some serious grinding to make the allies a viable alternative to the main character. Also, these allies have a one hit combo, which is often slow and leaves the player vulnerable to attacks. Worse yet, the game has dungeon floors called “Limited Zones” which force the player to use a particular ally. Even if the player is not in one of these zones, he can still come across doors that can only be opened by a particular ally.
So in the end, the player is given what equates to a rubber sword and is then told to sharpen it. If they don’t, they will be punished when they are forced to use an ally. Dark Cloud is a wonderful game, but it ends up severely hindered by the uselessness of the allies. So, why did the developers make the allies the way they were? Maybe they wanted to force the player to have a balanced team. It is hard to figure out the meaning behind this design choice, but it’s fun to think about it.