Dark Cloud succeeds because it has so much to do, and all of it, while not necessary, is interesting, and improves your character.
So it’s like Animal Crossing, but with actual gameplay? That’s dope.
Hehe, not really anything like Animal Crossing… though it has a few elements of it.
More like it has an overabundance of mini games. Most games have them, but are either incredibly tedious, or have too little reward for the effort. For example, getting some of the extra weapons in FFX. One of them called for dodging 100 lightning blasts in an area. The item for doing that was a piece of armor.
Dark Cloud two has a lot of minigames, but they are different in several ways:
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They have very linear time/reward curves. Screwing around with the weapon system for awhile will result in better weapons. Screwing around with the georama will result in more items in the future. Screwing around with inventions will yeild better items as well.
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They aren’t necessary for the game to progress(Most of the time) With every system, you will have to do it at least once. You can generally ignore it, for the most part, after. You will always have to mess with the Georama, just to forward the plot. You can tell the rest to go hang.
Dark Cloud 2 is a dungeon crawl. If not done well, these can be incredibly boring. Dark Cloud manages to have a multitude of things to do, so that any one part never becomes boring.