Dark Cloud 2 follows multiple storylines, mostly dealing with Max and Monica. Max is a young boy who's lost his mother, and is now working as a junior handyman in a local shop. Max yearns to see the world, but his hometown has been forcibly cut off from the world. Monica is a young girl from the future, who's come back in time to...well, I don't want to spoil the surprise for you.

In the first levels, you'll be playing solely as Max as he ventures into the city sewers to find his way out into the outside world. His first adventure is basically a dungeon crawl through the sewers to the outside world. At various points throughout the level, you'll receive tips on how to play the game, including using the most original concept I've seen in a long time: the invention camera.

As Max sallies forth into the dungeons and towns, he is equipped with a very special camera. With this camera, Max can take pictures of objects throughout the game. At any given point, you can pull up the camera menu, and try to combine any three photos to generate an invention. If you've taken the right photos and mixed them together properly, you could earn a new weapon, vehicle or other power up. Take the wrong pictures, and well, you just feel like an idiot with a useless photo album. The nice thing about Dark Cloud 2's invention system is that it gives you plenty of hints and help along the way. Sometimes, for example, you'll find a note lying on a desk that might say "try a belt, a box and a rock". Obviously, it doesn't tell you what those photos will create, but it's certainly better than shooting randomly and hoping for the best (though that can be fun). You can also pull up your photo album and hit "delete useless photos" and the system will purge any photos it knows will never be a useful invention for you automatically. Lastly, the more photos you take, the better the photographer you become, and the game rewards you with photographer points. Just guess what those photographer points do to your ability to invent new items?

I've jumped the gun somewhat by mentioning the camera invention system first, and I apologize, but it's the most original thing I've seen in a game in a long time. So, let's now turn to the basic elements of the game. First and foremost, Max is an adventurer, and as such, he comes armed and ready to go. When you start the sewer levels, you'll be carrying a simple wrench and an old pistol, which serve as your melee and ranged weapons. Through an ingenious mix of button and trigger controls, you can quickly lock onto targets, ensuring you'll actually hit them and do some heavy damage. As I've already said, the early levels are a simple dungeon crawl, with Max beating up monsters and finding treasure chests. It's pretty straightforward stuff, but it's a lot of fun and a great introduction to a deep and relatively complex game.

As you play through the game, you'll earn experience points, which increase Max's overall skill levels. Not only can you gain in levels, but so can your weapons. By "spectrurmizing" items you find, you create an energy that you can then "synthesize" into your weapons. The more synthesis that you perform on a weapon, the more powerful it becomes, finally becoming so powerful, it becomes something altogether new. It can get a bit confusing, the whole spectrumize/synthesize system, but it adds a great level of depth to the game. It's important to note that weapons, just like the characters in Dark Cloud 2, take damage, and will break if they're used too frequently without any repair. Luckily for Max (and you), there are plenty of repair elements hidden within crates and treasure chests spread throughout the levels.

Next up, there's the Georama system, which lets you build towns and cities. That's right, there are parts of this game that require you to build your own towns! What's more, as you jump ahead in the game's timeline, the towns will age respectively, becoming more futuristic as you jump through the timeline. The Georama system is easy enough to pick up, but provides another unique layer of gameplay to Dark Cloud 2.

As if all that wasn't enough, there are some mini-games (for lack of a better term) to keep you entertained as you play the game. You can go fishing, and you can use those captured fish to create a custom aquarium. Your custom aquarium grows different varieties of fish, which you must race against other fish later in the game. Sounds bizarre, I must admit, but it's really good fun and makes this game so different from anything else, you'll go fishing and never question why.

Lastly, there's the golf game, which is called "Spheda". The idea behind Spheda is to hit the energy balls (golf balls) into the time distortions (essentially golf holes) using the magic rods (AKA, golf clubs). There's not much I can say about Spheda other than it being an interesting and fun little diversion.

Words cannot convey how luscious the world of Dark Cloud 2 is. Backgrounds, characters, monsters, buildings, you name it, they are all stunningly well-rendered in 3D cel-shading. Add to that zero clipping and consistently fluid animation and you have some of the best graphics the PS2 has ever seen, and quite possibly may ever see. There are plenty of little details you'll enjoy about this game, such as leaves moving in the breeze, Max's medallion swinging as he runs and characters with realistic expressions on their faces. Many a time I found myself just staring at the characters and backgrounds, taking in their flawless detail, unique designs and bold colors. Dark Cloud 2 is eye-candy at its finest.

The musical score in Dark Cloud 2 is top-notch and unrivaled by anything I've heard in a game in quite some time (except for maybe Halo's soundtrack). Sure it's cartoony and oftentimes campy, but it always fits the mood of the game, from silly circus tunes to the foreboding beat of an approaching enemy.

What really impressed me about the sound was the voice acting, which is near flawless. Every voice is perfectly matched to the character, from young Max to the insane clown leader, they all are right on the money. The voice actors obviously had some professional direction and they easily convey stress, strain, joy and pain in the characters' voices.

Sound effects, as you can imagine, are just as good as the score and voices. Trains chug, cars screech, weapons clank and water splashes perfectly. It seems as if the developers felt no sound was too minor to have some attention paid to it. The sound effects are just one more component of Dark Cloud 2 that lend to its immersive nature.

Being an RPG, you would expect one play through Dark Cloud 2 to be enough, but I assure you, this is not the case. Once you finally sink enough time into this game to finish it, you will find yourself ready to play through it again, to find that one elusive treasure, to build that one magical invention or to find that one hidden area you missed the first time. With the flexibility offered by the Georama and Invention systems, you'll find the game can become something completely different every time you play it.

As I'm sure you can tell by now, I can't say enough good things about Dark Cloud 2. Over the past six months or so, Sony has proven time and again they know how to put together winning titles, and this game is no exception to that winning streak. While I'm trying to avoid sounding like a Sony shill, I can't begin to stress how good this game really is. While there are some weak points in this game such as the overly complicated spectrumize/synthesize system and an all-too simplistic battle system, as a whole, this is a game every adventure/RPG fan will enjoy for many months.