Be Excellent To Each Other

Hooray. :)

Is it a good game? It's one I never got round to playing, nor the sequel (Dark Chronicle?)

I've never heard of either of them. What kind of games are they?

They's an RPG.

Your character wanders around a samey looking random dungeon, and keeps heading down floors until you reach the boss, and then you kill it. You can switch to another character at any time, if the bad guys are out of range or busting your weapons.

Some say it looks like Zelda, but it's nowhere near as complicated. It's more like TimeStalkers, but it's REALLY nowhere near as confusing.

But you build towns, too.

Isn't there some element of altering the landscape too, populous-style?

Kinda.

Each dungeon has an associated destroyed town to go with it. As you progress, you pick up the pieces of the town and they go in your inventory. When you return to the town screen, you can reconstruct the town however you like. To get a special move for your main guy and enhanced weapons for everyone else, you can go inside the houses and ask the people how they want their town to be made. They'll explain it to you as best they can (which isn't very well), and then you can call up a rating from the pause menu to tell you how you're doing.

Anybody who's told you it's like Populous or Sim City is wrong: beyond solving the riddles of placing all the pieces back, there's no checking of the town's status or expanding.