Little known/obscure PS2(and one) game

[BrawlMan]

Oni - 3rd person brawler/shooter with some stealth elements as well; it's basically Bungie's take on Ghost in the Shell

I still have the PC version. I got the disc and CD Jewel case. I don't have the original cardboard packaging box anymore though. I wish I kept that. I have not touched that game in years, and my God was it tough getting through that game. I really don't see myself playing it again. I keep it around just as a momento. I could install it on my laptop with no problem, but I don't think I'm going to do that. Plus, the game is not aged well in trouble ways I mainly talking to my gameplay standpoint. If there's any game that can use a reboot or remake, Oni would be one of them.

 

[Chimpzy]

Katamari: not going to explain this because you have played it. You have played it, right?
Sword of Etheria: action rpg with aesthetic thats part Castlevania, part Wizard of Oz. JP and EU only, unfortunately
Disaster Report: a survival with natural disasters instead of the usual horror fare
Frequency/Amplitude: music rhythm hames from before Guitar Hero was a thing.
Darkwatch: solid fps with a gothic wild west aesthetic
Project Eden: sci-fi Tomb Raider like game with 4 protags with different skill sets
The Thing: surprisingly decent survival horror game based on the eponymous movie
Blood Wil Tell: Devil May Cry clone based on the Dororo manga
GrimGrimoire: quirky real time strategy by Vanillaware
Dog's Life: game where you're a dog trying to save another dog from dog catchers
Chulip: really weird adventure game about getting people to kiss you

Too expensive to buy but worth mentioning:
Haunting Ground
Kuon

 

[meiam]

Katamari: not going to explain this because you have played it. You have played it, right?
Sword of Etheria: action rpg with aesthetic thats part Castlevania, part Wizard of Oz. JP and EU only, unfortunately
Disaster Report: a survival with natural disasters instead of the usual horror fare
Frequency/Amplitude: music rhythm hames from before Guitar Hero was a thing.
Darkwatch: solid fps with a gothic wild west aesthetic
Project Eden: sci-fi Tomb Raider like game with 4 protags with different skill sets
The Thing: surprisingly decent survival horror game based on the eponymous movie
Blood Wil Tell: Devil May Cry clone based on the Dororo manga
GrimGrimoire: quirky real time strategy by Vanillaware
Dog's Life: game where you're a dog trying to save another dog from dog catchers
Chulip: really weird adventure game about getting people to kiss you

Too expensive to buy but worth mentioning:
Haunting Ground
Kuon

-Played katamari (thanks now I have the song stuck in my head on loop), kinda suprised they haven't made a new one recently. Also, did they ever try to make a wii version of it, would totally work with the wii remote to push the ball.
-Sword of etheria looks neat, always weird when game get ported to pal region but not US, you already went trough the trouble of translating and everything, why not release oversea?
-I could never figure out what disaster report actually is, every video of it I see make it seem like there's not much gameplay and its more of a visual novel
-before playing those music game I need to finally play Rez, won't bother tracking down the vibrator though
-darkwatch looks decent, evil west 0.1
-project eden came up before, looks good
-played that, shocking that a movie tie in is good but must have helped that it was long after, shame its far better than the remake too (fun fact about the thing remake, they started making it with practical effect and then the producer decided to redo it all but with CG instead, the movie has since never been watched)
-Oh neat, they made a video game of dororo long before the anime adaptation
-I tried grim grimoire but I could never get over the frustration of not having a mouse and keyboard, I think they're making a PC port soon?
-Dog's life is another game I know only because the soundtrack is surprisingly decent
-You weren't kidding about the really weird aspect of chulip, one of the first image I see is some guy bound in some creepy basement

Shame, Kuon looks really neat

 

[Chimpzy]

-Played katamari (thanks now I have the song stuck in my head on loop), kinda suprised they haven't made a new one recently. Also, did they ever try to make a wii version of it, would totally work with the wii remote to push the ball.

Yeah, that does seem like it would've been a no brainer. Namco really didn't seem to know what to do with that ip after the PS2 era.

-I could never figure out what disaster report actually is, every video of it I see make it seem like there's not much gameplay and its more of a visual novel

Think of it as survival horror, but with natural disasters. So you have your puzzles and inventory management, but most of the danger comes from your environment instead of things that go bonk in the night.

-before playing those music game I need to finally play Rez, won't bother tracking down the vibrator though

It's not required, but I would recommend playing Rez alone in a dark room through a good sound system and loud enough that you can feel the bass.

-You weren't kidding about the really weird aspect of chulip, one of the first image I see is some guy bound in some creepy basement

Sigh, I miss that era of really quirky and unique games from major Japanese publishers. Shame that pretty much died with 7th gen.

Shame, Kuon looks really neat

It is, survival horror with Japanese folklore. Always fun. Also, to add the the list of PS2 survival horror too expensive to buy:
Rule of Rose

 

[wings012]

-I tried grim grimoire but I could never get over the frustration of not having a mouse and keyboard, I think they're making a PC port soon?

There's the Switch/PS4/PS5 remaster that's coming out, don't think it's coming out on PC. I really want some Vanillaware stuff on Steam. Would love to revisit Odin Sphere with Leifthrasir.

Anyway I played it on the PS2 and thought the controls would be awkward, but I acclimated pretty quickly. It's really not that bad, and it's not like you require intense Starcraft level micro to do well. I think a lot of my late mission strategies amounted to the game's equivalent of mass Battlecruiser/Carrier, only I used the Chimera. The Alchemy ultimate unit. It's life drains over time but is a massive chonker with big AOE damage, and it also moves very very fast. So I can just attack move a bunch into the enemy base, quickly reinforce due to its high movement speed.

 

[Chupathingy]

Too expensive to buy but worth mentioning:
Haunting Ground
Kuon

It's crazy how some games become hot collector's items almost overnight. I bought a copy of Haunting Ground in 2019 for about $20. Less than a year later people are selling it for an average of like $200.

Also I played Rule of Rose not long ago and I don't get the criticisms it received (not the dumb politician stuff, I mean from game critics). Pretty much all of the game's problems like back tracking and wonky combat can be found in every other survival horror game (including the giants like RE and SH), yet apparently it's only a problem when an obscure game does it.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Klonoa I never played either, could give it a shoot, although I might have them on steam?

 

[Drathnoxis]

Chulip: really weird adventure game about getting people to kiss you

Also from the same director/writer: Moon. I watched SGF play the game and it was a really charming adventure game about helping people and gathering love.

I'll also recommend the Echo Night series, made by FromSoftware. They are pretty slow, but are also pretty neat. It's mainly an adventure game about helping ghosts move on. It kind of has a gloomy atmosphere, but it's also feels a little cozy to me for some reason.

 

[Jarrito3002]

The only RPG recommendations I can make is any one of the Shadow Hearts series but good luck finding them for a sensible price.

Rogue Galaxy is one of my favorite PS2 games and is never mentioned in any Greatest RPG lists and it makes me sad because the game is wonderful.

Rogue Galaxy is a imperfect diamond that I think should be on peoples list especially PS2 era. Level 5 was up there with Square for me during that PS2 era. I love me some Rogue Galaxy but even I can admit that grind was grinding and I play Disgaea before QoL in the sequels. Plus thoses LOOOOOOONNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGG dungeons. But I would still hope people check it out cause Level 5 left it all on the table for their last PS2 game.

 

[meiam]

The only RPG recommendations I can make is any one of the Shadow Hearts series but good luck finding them for a sensible price.

Thankfully I already own two of them, but I do need to track down the first one some day

 

[BrawlMan]

Sword of Etheria

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[Johnny Novgorod]

It's crazy how some games become hot collector's items almost overnight. I bought a copy of Haunting Ground in 2019 for about $20. Less than a year later people are selling it for an average of like $200.

Also I played Rule of Rose not long ago and I don't get the criticisms it received (not the dumb politician stuff, I mean from game critics). Pretty much all of the game's problems like back tracking and wonky combat can be found in every other survival horror game (including the giants like RE and SH), yet apparently it's only a problem when an obscure game does it.

Ok, it's been about 10 years since I played Rule of Rose but I remember the combat as being especially egregious even by survival horror standards. I played Obscure (anybody remember that one?), Echo Night, Alone in the Dark, Fatal Frame, Kuon, Haunting Ground and every PS1/2 era SH and RE. Rule of Rose had the worst combat of those by a mile. You did puny damage and every attack was slow as fuck, leaving you wide open for enemy attacks every time. Also you had to play the "month" chapters in a specific, fuck you we're not telling you why, order or you wouldn't get the ultimate weapon in the game.

You had to visit every room in every level several times within a level whenever a new invisible flag was activated just to see if your dog would pick up anything new in there, which is the worst kind of backtracking. I don't mind backtracking per se - I love survival horror and metroidvanias - but not knowing when you're done with an area, whether the map tells you or you can surmise for yourself, turns it into a pain.

You also had to give the gun to the final boss of the game so it'd kill itself instead of actually fighting it to get the """""good""""" ending. The game was rife with these obscure "solutions" to problems you didn't even know existed and made zero sense from a story or gameplay perspective.

Say what you will about SH combat in the first one but 2 onwards I never had a problem with it.

 

[BrawlMan]

You did puny damage and every attack was slow as fuck, leaving you wide open for enemy attacks every time. Also you had to play the "month" chapters in a specific, fuck you we're not telling you why, order or you wouldn't get the ultimate weapon in the game.

You had to visit every room in every level several times within a level whenever a new invisible flag was activated just to see if your dog would pick up anything new in there, which is the worst kind of backtracking. I don't mind backtracking per se - I love survival horror and metroidvanias - but not knowing when you're done with an area, whether the map tells you or you can surmise for yourself, turns it into a pain.

You also had to give the gun to the final boss of the game so it'd kill itself instead of actually fighting it to get the """""good""""" ending. The game was rife with these obscure "solutions" to problems you didn't even know existed and made zero sense from a story or gameplay perspective.

I knew a guy from the DMC forums that tried to defend nearly every aspect of that game, and wanted the "return" of old style survival horror. Obscure and obtuse puzzle design, camera angles, etc. He technically got his wish with the indie games doing this now, but it's not enough for him. But no sane studio, be they indie, AA, or AAA are insane or stupid enough to pull off what Rule of the Rose did. There's a reason why games like it, don't exist much in the first place.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Speaking of PS2 era survival horror, here's a game I'd completely forgotten about: Cold Fear.



This was basically poor man's Resident Evil 4, releasing just 2 months afterwards on Xbox/PS2. It kinda looked like RE4 (main dude, zombies) and if kinda played like RE4 (laser sight gun) but that was about it. It was very short, dark, kinda ugly looking and repetitive without a real sense for story or personality. Just a generally anonymous feeling game. The big selling point was that you spent the whole game on a more or less seamless-feeling ship that would "realistically" move and rock among the waves, affecting the camera and anything that wasn't fixed to the floor.

The only other thing that I remember was an annoying checkpoint system. Every door on the ship would autosave the game the first time you entered it, and never again afterwards. But because you had the whole ship to explore and the game wasn't super strict about it, you might find yourself burning through saves you didn't know if you could spare or not simply by exploring the ship. That got annoying towards the end.

I think I replayed it a few times so maybe there was something to unlock for it.

 

[BrawlMan]

I think I replayed it a few times so maybe there was something to unlock for it.

There's some artwork you can unlock, but that's about it. Nothing else, so there's not much replay value afterward. It's ironic that Cold Fear was copying RE4, because Resident Evil Revelations would have a similar premise, except you're on a cruise ship. You even face invisible enemies, but those are in flashback chapters.

 

[BrawlMan]

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[BrawlMan]

Street Sk8er was a semi-obscure game I use to own back in the PS1 days.

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[BrawlMan]

@meiam, here's an example of GameCube games. Some PS2 stuff is time stamped in the second video.

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[meiam]

@meiam, here's an example of GameCube games. Some PS2 stuff is time stamped in the second video.

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Oh neat, I got a GC but much after release so I didn't play much of it, I did know of lost kingdom, never played but I really should get around to it. Eternal darkness/geist are also pretty well known and I think I played one of them but I can't remember which. I rented battalion war at some point expecting a console advance war, was pretty disappointed but maybe there's something there.