On September 4th 2024, the PlayStation 2 was added to Japan’s ‘Future Technology Heritage Registry’ because of the cultural significance of the console. It is the very first video game console to be added to the list ever since it was established back in 2008, and while it might seem a bit surprising that it took this long for a video game console to be added to the list of technological achievements, the PlayStation 2 is definitely a console that deserves it.

The PlayStation 2 is arguably the most successful console ever made. To this day, it is still the highest-selling console by unit count at just over 155 million units sold and it has one of the longest lifespans of any console ever with an astonishing 13 years of production! To blow your mind of how the timeline of that looks, the original PlayStation was still in production when the PlayStation 2 launched and the final PlayStation 2 game was released in the same month as PlayStation 4!

And there are several reasons as to why the second machine of this lineup was still alive and kicking into the 2010s even with the release of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 a few years before and one of the biggest reasons for that is the fact that the PlayStation 2 released some of the best video games ever made. In this article, we’re going to talk about our favorite games for the PlayStation 2 and why the console means as much to us as it does.

Thumbnail made by a reddit user by the name of "adamlbiscuit". Adam, if by some miracle, you come across this article, congratulations! Your PS2 wallpaper is now immortalized onto our website.

Fluxflashor

Oh the PlayStation 2. Growing up we didn’t have a ton of games or every console out there, and being a Nintendo household, the PlayStation was notably absent from our options. Playing PS1 at friends houses was alright but never really felt required, PlayStation 2 though, damn that was a massive leap forward for games.

We were lucky enough to do a temporary console swap with a family friend, the GameCube for the PS2. With it, a trove of amazing games that to this day still shape the type of games I like to play. Plugging it in for the first time, grabbing a controller, pushing in the memory card effortlessly, and pressing that tactile power button with the green LED to boot up the system to one of the most iconic console boot sounds of all time. Absolute magic. “Sony Computer Entertainment” with an incredible aural melody shifting into the white noise as it dives into the animation. A brief moment we wait as the game loads. “PlayStation (R) 2”. The crowd goes wild, that short burst of sound telling you it was about to get real.

Absolutely iconic.

One of the first games I got to give a go was Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. What a mouthful of a title. The art style was incredible, sneaking around was so much fun, and finding everything to collect made the game a favourite.

Luckily, we did later get our own PlayStation 2, the first slim model, so borrowing it after starting to acquire games wasn’t a requirement anymore.

Need for Speed Underground 2, Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and the massive San Andreas, Crash Bandicoot, Gran Turismo 4, Metal Gear Solid, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, Twisted Metal: Black, Spider-Man, The Simpsons: Hit & Run, The Lord of the Rings series, Dynasty Warriors, YuGiOh, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, Harry Potter. There were so many good games that I played during the PlayStation 2’s lifespan across so many different genres.

As I’ve grown older, I have been less interested in hopping across genres of games constantly. Maybe its a lack of time, maybe its having an attachment to games as a service as good or bad as that may be, or maybe its just the less creative aspects of modern AAA games that we see and how you’re unwilling to dive into something new because you just expect to be disappointed with micro transactions, no cheats, and a copy paste formula that just tries to keep you in game for longer periods of time without just being fun. Oh to be a kid again.

I have Gran Turismo to thank for my love of racing simulations. Grand Theft Auto for satisfying that primal urge to blow shit up with no consequences, and Need for Speed Underground 2 for my fascination with mint green underlighting which evolved into the cold cathode tube lighting in my early PC builds and later the desire for all the RGB in the world.

Nirast - Card Games with the Lancasters and Brick Building on Tropical Islands

So, fun fact about me: While the PS5 is my first PlayStation console, I actually got to play on almost every PS console. My cousin had a PS4 Pro, I borrowed a PS3 from a friend, another let me play on his PSP, and my mother's cousin had a PS2. I didn't have the console as a kid (my parents had an actual DVD player instead, I'm kinda salty about it), so I can't exactly wax nostalgic about much aside from GTA Vice City, and even that I mostly played on PC after my mom's cousin introduced me to it.

That said, there is one game on that console with a premise so insane, it's hard to believe some made it into the game. First, let's set the stage: The War of the Roses is a very bloody conflict in the history of England, between the Houses of Lancaster and York, which lasted between 109 years later, on the other side of the planet, Kazuki Takahashi published Yu-Gi-Oh!, a manga focused on a young boy getting possessed by the spirit of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh and solving conflicts through various twisted games. Later on, the series would shift focus on the card game Duel Monster, which would spawn the Yu-Gi-Oh anime and trading card game.

"Nirast, how the hell are these two things related", I hear you ask. The answer is Yu-Gi-Oh: The Duelists of the Roses, a PS2-only game where the player is summoned back in time to take part in the War of the Roses. Except all the historical figures are replaced by Yu-Gi-Oh characters from the original manga and anime. Oh, and it's a tactics game.

As mentioned, the plot of the game sees the player being summed to 1485 by a druid of the house of Lancaster in order to fight the Yorkist forces. However, the player is presented with a choice at the start of the game between siding with either house, which will determine who you're going to fight against.

The purpose of the game is to get 8 powerful Rose Cards from the other house, so that one side can be in control of all 16 and be able to send you home. Yu-Gi-Oh characters replace the historical figures fully, with Yugi Moto as Henry Tudor, Seto Kaiba as Christian Rosenkreuz, and other characters like Joey Wheeler, Téa Gardner, and Maximillion Pegasus taking on various other roles.

Gameplay-wise, we're dealing with a tactics game, set on a chess-board grid. The game has a fairly steep difficulty curve, making it quite a challenge to see the end. This is a bit of a baffling decision, seeing as Yu-Gi-Oh is known for being a card game. However, Takahashi did try several times to spin-off the series into other game genres, so the shift in gameplay shouldn't be that surprising.

Yu-Gi-Oh: The Duelists of the Roses was never released on platforms other than the PS2. With Konami's recent decision to either port or remaster some of their older library, and with Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection hitting the shelves (hopefully) soon, maybe we'll see this game on modern platforms as well. It's just too bizarre a title to be lost to the annals of time.455 and 1487 and resulted in the end of the Lancaster line, and the formation of the Tudor dynasty.

One series that really found its footing during this console era are the LEGO games, with LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game. Sure, there were other LEGO Games before it, but this one from Traveller's Tales would solidify the most well known aspects of the series, like mission-based levels, huge casts of characters, and telling the story with 0 dialogue and only pantomiming, something that was dropped during the series' lifespan (damn you, Batman!).

These days, there's LEGO games for pretty much any franchise that got a set. They were coming out at a yearly pace, like FIFA, CoD, or AC (no, not that one... or the other 5), and they started to blend together after a while. They started to slow down recently, with TT's latest game being LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga in 2022, which plays a little differently from the classic formula, and other LEGO games that came out since being from different developers.

But the one LEGO game I want to talk about is very different from the typical formula. Gathered friends, listen again to our legends of the Bionicle. In the time before time, on the mysterious island of Mata Nui, six canis- yeah, I'm not doing the whole thing, otherwise this article would be 5 times as long.

Here's the gist of it: Bionicle is a series that LEGO launched in 2001 as part of their technic line. They're very different from their usual lines, focusing on biomechanical beings living on islands inspired by Maoli culture (to the point where LEGO got in trouble with the Hawaiian government for using words from their language all willy-nilly).

Bionicle HEROES is a game that was released to coincide with the 2006 sets, but it actually features characters from throughout the series entire history, mostly as mobs and bosses. The game itself plays as a third person shooter where you can swap between up to 7 characters, including the bosses once you defeated them. It's... a fine game, with the biggest gripes being the very easy difficulty, repetitive music, and need to play the same levels several times to complete the game.

Which didn't stop me from playing it a lot as a kid. It's one of the few games I actually completed several times, which is something I just don't do, because I was enjoying the world so much. It has 19 bosses spread across 25 levels and 6 biomes (plus the final boss), and they were all fairly unique from each other. The game is also the best way to see detailed 3D models of the sets that were released up until that point. And while the music was repeated a lot, the soundtrack itself is amazing and still holds up today.

Demonxz95 - Gran Turismo, The Real Driving King-ulator

The PS2's line-up of racing games goes underappreciated. Sure, some of them are pretty highly regarded, but I don't hear it spoken out as a highlight of the system. There are a lot of racing games on the system that are absolute bangers from the Burnout games, Enthusia, Midnight Club 3, most of the Need for Speed games on the system (keyword being most), to Crash Nitro Kart to several others. It was a glorious time for the genre and if you got any racing game for the PS2, there was a pretty good chance that it was at least sort of decent (except Driving Emotion Type-S or GT Racers, avoid both of those games like the bubonic plague!). Despite the PlayStation's list of incredible racers though, none of them quite reach the pedestal that Gran Turismo does.

Gran Turismo is my favorite video game franchise ever and contains some of the best games ever made. They completely changed not only the way racing games were made, but car culture in general was massively shaped by these games. Gran Turismo has always been the pinnacle of realistic driving games, celebrating both the historic racing machines of the era, as well as all of the mundane passenger cars you'd see every day on your way to work. Additionally, they also represented the potential of the PlayStation across every console. The first two games on the PS1 were revolutionary for the system, and the two games on the PS2 are exactly that as well. Gran Turismo 3 is one of the absolute best-looking games for the system and considering the PS2 was only nine months old when the game was released, it makes the game's graphics feel even more insane than it did before. To this day, it still blows my mind how much of a leap it made over its PS1 predecessors in such a short amount of time.

These games are simply a work of art across every angle, from the iconic original tracks, to the way all the cars look, to the way multiple genres of music perfectly blend together for an amazing vibe. Everything got you in the mood to buy a new car and you'd start with a standard every-car you would've seen outside your window around that time, and later your heart starts pumping when you've entered those super-long races with those extremely fast race cars. Gran Turismo has always celebrated every car and where you can go with them.

I first played Gran Turismo on a European demo disc back when I was 5 years old and the game was basically love at first sight, or I guess... first play? Same demo disc is also what introduced my to Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, so it's easy to see that the disc had a very prominent effect on me. No gaming franchise has held quite the same amount of value to me as Gran Turismo does (the closest contender would probably be Crash Bandicoot), and although Gran Turismo 7 is by no means perfect, it warms my heart to see the franchise is still kicking and the Polyphony Digital still has it in them.

Linkblade91 - Keyblades, Chain-Blades, and Wrenches, Oh My!

When I reflect on games from the past that I hold as being special to me, especially during my formative years, it often gets framed based on which titles influenced my psyche and/or taught me valuable life lessons. In this regard, of my experience with the PS2, I would say Kingdom Hearts, Ratchet & Clank, and God of War were all important to my upbringing. Games can be more than "ooh I remember that cool boss fight" or what-have-you, and much like I did with my piece about Lunar: Silver Star Story on the PS1, I shall regale you with deeper dives into my personal story.

I was about 11 when I bought Kingdom Hearts with my own money, one of the first times I could say that. I didn't earn it - the cash came from a birthday card - but still. At this point I was fully on the Final Fantasy RPG Train, being enthralled with Final Fantasy VIII early on in my life, and having played X just the year previous. And yet, part of me hesitated still to get Kingdom Hearts: I feel kinda depressed to think about it now, but it was the complicated feelings I had for the Disney side of the game.

Societal factors were attempting to drill into my brain that boys shouldn't care about Disney Princesses, Winnie the Pooh, and stuff like that. "That's girl stuff," some might say, or "That's for little children." I couldn't understand why my brain rebelled at such a notion, couldn't understand why I felt different. So I took my money and bought Kingdom Hearts anyway, somewhat out of spite. It would take time - and therapy - to learn that I am who I am...and that's okay.

Come the year's end, I received Ratchet & Clank as a Christmas gift, and woah was I excited. It looked so fun (spoiler: it was), and being a fairly lonely individual, I yearned to have a friendship like the one the two titular characters seemed to have. This attitude was immediately complicated when I played the game: in their first adventure, Ratchet is...kind of a jerk. He brushes off Clank's ideas, is quick to anger, and develops a single-minded notion of revenge for being tricked/betrayed by his hero, Captain Qwark.

Only after Ratchet defeats Qwark - almost at the expense of his and Clank's lives - does he begin to understand what he did was wrong, and that his true friend was the one literally on his back the whole time. That hit me like a truck, the notion that they weren't really friends until Ratchet apologized and owned up to his failings. Clank was doing all the work in the relationship, while Ratchet was being an immature brat.

Fast-forward a few years, and God of War comes out. I was living in a post-parent's divorce world, and my mother gave a hard "No" to playing the game (despite her boyfriend owning it), while my dad was more lax on the topic. I did my part and kept my mouth shut in front of my mom about my access to the game outside of her house, thoroughly enjoying the cool combat and story. And while I can concede that perhaps she was being the reasonable one at the time, keeping me from an M-rated game at 14, this is when the rift between my parents opened wider, leading me down a path wherein I could take off the blinders and glean that my mom was/is not necessarily a good person worthy of my respect. This in turn gave me a better understanding of my father and what *he* went through in their relationship, realizing he wasn't the story's villain.

On a more inward-level, God of War also taught me the separation between violence in a game and actually being a violent person. It didn't automatically make me a bad kid for liking God of War; if anything, my developing ability to compartmentalize and shift aggression toward gaming kept me from lashing out as a teenager. I could vent my frustrations on a digital enemy, get it out of my system, and come out the other side level-headed and disciplined.

I can hear the music starting up, playing me off the stage, so I'll wrap it up by summarizing thusly: games had a profound effect on my life, they helped shape who I am today, and the PS2 certainly played its part in this foundational craftsmanship. Something something we are the culmination of our experiences, and I for one am grateful to have experienced the PlayStation's golden age.