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Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - It Was A Very Spoopy PlayStation 2 Anniversary
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Handyman 68
Posts: 37 |
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Twitch went to hell the moment it allowed non-video game content. I'm glad I only stick to a small, close-knit circle of retro game players on there. IRL/Politics just ruined the site for everyone including streamers I use to watch who played games but devolved into more and more IRL content because it was more profitable.
The Yakuza comment seems like a bit of a whitewash of the series. I remember when game outlets insisted the Yakuza series was a bro-fest that treated women horribly and Toshihiro Nagoshi was a bad man for wanting the series to always be "a game for Japanese men" and had zero interest in appealing to women. Maybe that's changed since he departed SEGA and they started releasing all the censored remasters and remakes to try to re-write his history but the original, true message of the series remains in the original releases for us to see. I mean, in 4 Akiyama throws a woman out on the street and denies her a loan because she refused to sell her body for him which according to him proved she didn't really need the money that badly if she wasn't willing to do that. He also jokes that his overweight assistant couldn't possibly be raped because who would want to rape a fat woman? Kiryu himself has scolded women who judged men for being perverts and pedophiles, including a middle school student right to her face telling her she had no right to call adult men who like underage girls bad people. Not sure this is the series to hold up as a champion of women's rights. From the sounds of it it's only a small part of the English fandom that has an issue with the actor if the Japan side isnt making a stink. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 19136 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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The comment in the article "many in Japan found Kagawa's apology (and desire to wash his hands of the matter) distasteful" would seem to suggest that it's not just English fandom which has an issue with this. |
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Greed1914
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True. The recasting decisions for Kiwami 3 don't seem to make a lot of sense. For some of the prior Kiwami changes, the model was now the actor who already played the character, so it's consistent. Recasting these particular actors, but having them do the existing scenes the same way while surrounded by pre-recorded audio for other characters makes me wonder what the point was. Are they big enough celebrities to for that? And I know there are additional scenes, but if the past actors weren't available for whatever reason, it's not like casting soundalikes is a new thing. Plus, spoiler[ Hamazaki is also in Yakuza 4, so now it isn't even consistent.] |
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FishLion
 Crazy Fangirl Posts: 856 |
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You can always tell someone has a preexisting ideas in their head they want reality to conform to when they jump to assuming the English speaking fandom is at fault without even noticing the article's passage is about Japanese fans.
Anyway great to have you back, I'm glad you got to have a vacation, that Izuna cover is so gorgeous and I'm glad they have such an impressive set coming out. I would have to start a vinyl collection if my blorbo got a set that pretty (assuming you don't already). |
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b-dragon
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PS2 was definitely my favorite time as a gamer- so many good RPGs stretched across the ps1-2 libraries (I'll add the Shadow Hearts games onto the ones you mentioned- and am glad someone else remembers Growlanser). It was an embarrassment of riches that made the following generation feel drier than it already was for RPGs.
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AiddonValentine
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-Yakuza: Eeeeeyeah, bad move on Sega's part. If you're canning people for drug possession then keeping an abuser is a no go, especially in a series that classifies abusers of women as absolute scum. Also, did they expect no one to found out?
-PS2: Ah, definitely the last generation where it felt like anyone could make a decently successful game no matter how oddball. Sony dropping the ball on the PS3's architecture, thus locking out literal decades of history is borderline historic arson. And looking back at it, Sony doesn't really bring up its history much. It's that whole "Why are you interested in old stuff, we have the new stuff right here!" idea which massively misses the point Last edited by AiddonValentine on Fri Oct 31, 2025 5:41 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Kicksville
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This is a good PS2 retrospective, which I want to note before I go into something admittedly more to do with thoughts I've had kicking around due to what is (or isn't) said elsewhere.
Something about PS2 era reminisces that bothers me is how the frustrations of the era never seem to get talked about anymore. The lingering one, at least, is the sadness from its hastening the Dreamcast's death. The Dreamcast still embraced arcade and 2D games and had them in abundance, while Sony seemed to specifically make it difficult to release anything of the sort in the US for most of the PS2's life (see the forced bundling SNK and Working Design games to get them released at all, the former leading to SNK and Xbox being best friends for a while). Meanwhile we knew Japan still got these to some extent, which was extra annoying. It's very easy to look at the PS2 library decades later and see nothing but the good stuff. At the time, though, it was pretty typical to walk into the store, see nothing but identically grey and brown attempted gritty GTA knockoffs, crappy licensed games, and the small corner of interesting stuff you probably already had. This varied, of course, which is another factor - the PS2 in 2002 was very different from the PS2 in 2008. Yeah yeah, I know, I don't want to be too much of a bummer, since yes, the PS2 DOES have a lot of great games - I still come back to mine fairly regularly - but, the way people talk about it you'd think everything was sunshine and roses all the time when I distinctly remember how many thought it was the dark ages from a lack of choices. I suppose we remember the good stuff we lost over the bad stuff we don't want to think about. That, and so much of the internet from that time is just straight up gone... A surviving fragment is the BLUE SKY IN GAMES campaign. Yes, this was from a parody site, but I still remember it being passed around by frustrated players with total seriousness. |
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BadNewsBlues
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Even if they do some crazy stuff like try to blackmail people before almost being attacked by one of the people they tried to ruin. Or having a profound conversation (with no ass kicking) with the female leader of a gang who tried to collect a bounty on his head after beating up her boyfriend and her follow gang members. 
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kikuzinho
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talking about square enix's FF12 as opposed to square's FF10 was certainly a choice
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
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For real. I went from feasting on RPGs on the PS2 to starving for them when the next generation rolled around. It's part of why I loved the DS and 3DS so much--it was the only other place I could get weird RPGs like what we had on PS2! I didn't care about GTA4, I wanted more Odin Sphere! 
You basically hit the nail on the head; out of necessity, I had to cut out a lot of the downsides from the era. I touched on it some (I maintain that the PS2 was the beginning of the end for consoles and part of why all our modern consoles are "entertainment platforms" and not, y'know, for playing video games). But you're also absolutely right in how disastrous the era of GTA-chasers was. For all the bluster people make about games today, the worst game out right now is head and shoulders above some of the crap that would come out on PS2. People caterwaul about Dustborn or Avowed, but I remember 187 Ride or Die and True Crime: New York City and Driv3r. And we can't forget the glut of horrible licensed games that still came out in that era, like the infamous Charlie's Angels game. People today wouldn't know a bad game if it they saw one. I do have to wonder if a bunch of PS2 titles would get reevaluated for the better in today's day and age, though. Americans have finally wrapped their heads around Rogue-likes, so I have to wonder if folks would be warmer towards the likes of Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter or Crimson Tears. (I've had Crimson Tears on the brain a lot lately.)
Because I was talking about graphics, I went with FF12 ; it released at the end of the PS2's lifespan--and it's a gorgeous game that reflects how well Square Enix could animate the CRAP out of a title on PS2. Yeah, FFX is still a stunner too. It's setting based off of Okinawa was inspired and it (like many games on the Dreamcast) really flexed the PS2's power what with all the water rendering. (And that's why there are so many beaches in Sonic Adventure and FFX!) The recent HD remaster doesn't do FFX justice, but those few years between X and XII make a load of difference. XII just makes Ivalice's architecture and world just sing Also, for all of FF12's flaws, I was right there for the entirety of FFX getting lambasted in the '00s. The writing, the character design, the performances... I will not pretend FFX was an unmitigated classic (even though I disagree with the criticism) because I was there, dude, and FFX was contentious. You couldn't say a good thing about Tidus or Yuna. (Heck, people still don't let it live down the damned laugh scene.) And people were worse towards X-2--which is a pity, because X-2 was also a stunning game and from what I hear, the Dressphere system was amazing. |
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2945 |
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RPGs going from the big, splashy spectacle showpieces on the PS1 and PS2 to the workaday, mechanically crunchy games on handhelds sure was whiplash. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 921 |
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I'm taking out of my elbows with this, but I feel like part of it was how RPGs used to be a prestige genre due to their nature; because of the limitations of older consoles, an RPG could be a sweeping epic. You'd have the grandiose story, the high-fidelity cutscenes, all intricacies (mechanical and graphical) in battle systems... by the time the PS2 came around and games didn't need to rely on all of those shortcuts to tell a "cinematic" story, plus gamers looking for more immediately-visceral experiences like action games or FPS games, RPGs just lost a lot of their appeal to a mainstream audience. Plus, people don't like reading I remember folks in EGM talking about folks returning copies of FF7 back in the day because "they didn't know there would be reading involved."
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Top Gun
 Posts: 5292 |
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As a non-RPG fan I think you're on to something here. I honestly wasn't really familiar with FF7 at all back in the PS1 days; I may have seen an ad or store display for it at some point, but no one I knew owned it, so I had no real concept of its impact then. Looking back I can see how it would have been a revolutionary experience to gamers at the time, when those cutscenes looked far and away better than anything possible in real-time then, and the long-form storytelling was something that most other genres weren't pushing for. But by the time you get to the PS2's generation, 3D movement and combat have truly come into their own after the previous generation's experiments, and the increased storage space and power allowed for much more grandiose real-time time worlds to explore. At some point a lot of gamers were going to stop and think, "Why am I watching cinematics of epic battles or cutscenes of my character swinging his sword when I could be playing those parts myself?" Couple that with FPSes becoming fully viable on consoles in a post-Halo world, and GTA's groundbreaking open-world model, and it was probably inevitable that there'd be a shift away from traditional RPGs at that time. I think I instantly aged another decade when I realized that the PS2 is 25 years old now. For my part it was the console of Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, a smattering of Madden, and who knows how many hours of Guitar Hero. And yes, it was our family's only DVD player for a couple of years. I even got the official remote with the infrared receiver that plugged into a controller port to make life easier.
I hadn't heard about the TwitchCon stuff since I don't live in the streaming world, but wow, that is...really not good. |
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4660 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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I'm just glad that I have a PC with an optical drive that can run PCSX2 v2.0 at 60fps so that I can just play all of my favourite Playstation 2 racing games (I have a couple dozen of them) that will never be re-licensed for Playstation Plus Classics since the cost of having to relicense all of the car manufacturers, race circuits, logos, and music (for games with licensed soundtracks) make most PS2 racing games "unobtanium" for re-release on online storefronts.
Another thing I love about Playstation 2, Singstar! (And also Karaoke Revolution but Singstar just licenses the original versions of the songs from the original artists, and the original music videos when applicable, while Karaoke Revolution is all covers.) Last year, for my birthday, I asked for and received a new set of Singstar microphones with the adaptor because the USB adaptor box on my old Singstar mics was failing and now I can belt out all of ABBA's hits again (except for "Lay All Your Love on Me" which was probably left off of Singstar ABBA because of a lack of a music video) and they can also double as a perfectly cromulent PC mic. I know singalong/karaoke "games" are generally not what people get nostalgic for from the Playstation 2 but they were a big part of the PS2 experience for me and I have gotten much more confident at singing (a few specific songs) thanks to them. |
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lufia2rocks
Posts: 63 |
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My parents threw out most of my old games when I moved years ago so I can't play the originals but thanks to emulation and how easy it is you don't need them anyway. The PS2 library is probably objectively one of if not the best out there. I'm more partial to PSX though due to all the JRPGs though. PS2 had lots of good ones too but I feel like PSX was just the king of JRPGs
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