Dark Cloud 2

The camera is the strangest tool in any PS2 role-playing game. Max photographs a windmill, a cog, a stray cat, and somewhere in the combination of three unrelated pictures the game finds an Idea, which becomes a schematic, which becomes a real object you can build. It reframes the whole world as raw material. You stop looking at scenery and start inventorying it, and that habit never quite switches off.

Level-5's follow-up to Dark Cloud kept the dungeon-crawling spine and rebuilt everything around it. Floors are still assembled from random pieces, still cleared by finding the exit and killing what stands in the way, but the fighting now supports two characters with genuinely different toolkits: Max with his wrench and his slow-firing Ridepod mech, Monica with a sword and the ability to wear a monster's form. Weapons do not level with you so much as they are fed. You pour absorbed materials into them, watch stats creep, then synthesise them into something with a new name and a new shape. It is fiddly and it is deeply satisfying, and it means an early wrench can, with enough patience, still be the thing you carry at the end.

Then there is Georama, which is where the game becomes something else entirely. Dungeon runs yield the parts and the villagers for building settlements in the past, and the towns you assemble determine what the future looks like when you travel forward to see it. Place a house wrong, hire the wrong resident, and the future version of that place is poorer for it. Few games of the era tied their construction sandbox so directly to consequence rather than decoration.

It is also generous to the point of distraction. Fishing, fish racing, a golf-like game called Spheda played in cleared dungeons with a warped club and a coloured ball, invention chains that stretch across dozens of hours. Some of it is filler. Some of it is the best part of an evening.

What holds up hardest is the look. The cel-shaded art, painted textures and thick outlines, sidestepped the sixth generation's obsession with polygon realism and has barely aged as a result. Dark Chronicle in Europe, Dark Cloud 2 in America, either way the same rare thing: a long, cluttered, patient game that rewards a player willing to treat a photograph of a lamppost as a serious investment.