So let's say you have played all the Final Fantasy games you can get your hands on; you have beaten Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts and finished Jiminy's diary (that cricket hates you, doesn't he?) and your PS2 is suffering from neglect. Or replays.

And you know, there are a lot of other ways to make that machine work for its money. Below this cut is a partial list of PS2 RPGs that I've played at least part of and enjoyed. These are not critical reviews: my goal here is to convince you that one or more of these things would be fun to play, and then maybe even write/draw for. (I will be writing for at least three of them in kink_bingo, I expect.) So I will be focusing on the positive. You can always feel free to ask me if you want to know what a game's weak points are. ...And you can also feel free to leave recs of your own; there are games that we own that I haven't listed here because I just haven't played enough of them, and there are plenty of games out there I haven't had a chance to play at all. And hey, there are games I didn't like that somebody else might want to pick up on the strength of your rec. I will be trying to keep spoilers to a minimum here, and I ask that you do also. :3


I'm going to start with a few things I don't feel all that comfortable recommending, because I haven't played as much of them as I want to, but they seem too cool to leave off:

Eternal Poison
I picked this one up on the strength of pre-release advertising, because it looked like a strategy RPG gone spooky. Which it is, if one needs a very shallow description. It also looks like it has immense replay value, since you can play the game from the side of any of a number of competitors for the same prize (and some of those sides can only be unlocked after you've played it enough). I was hooked instantly on the first characters the game introduces: a heartless loligoth witch, her talking wolf companion (not cuddly and doofy the way companion animals often are, but dangerous and deep-voiced, pinging me in my doggystyle places), and a boy she enslaves. Yes. Magic kink, bestiality, noncon D/s in the first five minutes. Also it's really pretty. I need to go back to this one. The strategy battle system is really what hampered it around here; strategy combats take a while, so there were big blocks of slowdown in between story parts that...hmm, make it hard for us to play the game together? But it was awesome all the same.

Magna Carta: Tears of Blood
The other one I need to go back and finish someday. What hooked me on MC was the shape of the political conflict: the player characters are humans, and humans are a relatively recent arrival on this continent, but they've been at war with the demihuman race that inhabited the area first. The characters seem pretty sure that they're in the right, but the game leaves it ambiguous enough for there to be places to question that, which I love. And there are some wonderful interpersonal relationships, including the crush-on-my-savior type and the friends-through-adversity type. And at the point we'd gotten to, it really seemed like the plot was going fascinating places.

And then we have games that I have seen endings for:

Shadow Hearts
There are three games in this series; I haven't played the third one, From the New World, so I am talking here about the first two: Shadow Hearts and Shadow Hearts: Covenant. Both of these games center around Yuri Hyuga, a young man with the unusual ability to fuse with the souls of monsters he's defeated, taking different demonic forms in battle. (You can hear my xeno ping go off from there, can't you?) Unlike standard RPG fantasyland settings, SH games take place in an AU version of the real world, in the first quarter of the 20th century. They have a pretty unique flavor -- the first one is darker, with sidequests into rooms splattered with survival-horror quantities of blood, and the second one plays up the cracky weirdness (there is an elephant-sized purple persian kitten boss fight, okay), but both do cool things with themes of accepting one's own darkness. Also, I may have mentioned, demon sex.

Suikoden series
Aaaaah Suikoden. If I could live in a video game world, it would be this one. All of the games in the main Suikoden series (that's the numbered ones and Tactics) take place in the same world, in different regions and at different crucial points in history. (Which is to say: world building dorks, take note.) The first two are PS1 games, hard to find and usually really expensive when you can track them down; III, IV, Tactics, and V are all for the PS2 and should be easier to get hold of. Because they take place in different places/times, you can play any of them distinct from the others (though of course they reference each other, and III in particular has a lot of references to I and II, which are fun to pick up).
The stories in Suikoden games tend to be more about political conflict and less about The One Shiny Rock That Saves The World (though there are definitely still some important shiny rocks). These are not games where a pack of three heroes are the only thing standing between us and destruction: you recruit armies, fight major battles, and fill up your base not only with the soldiers who will fight in your parties but also with the blacksmith and the minigame mahjong player and the guy whose only job is to change the look of your menus. Each game, to get the best possible ending, requires you to recruit all 108 of the Stars of Destiny to your side, because it's the combination of all your strengths that will get you through the conflict. Needless to say, teamwork and competence are big huge draws here. This series is also an awesome one for anybody looking for COOL FEMALE CHARACTERS: there are a lot of them, often in positions of power, and they're interesting and varied in their strengths. I ship an awful lot of het in Suikoden games, because the romances are often quiet and subtle and the women are good characters with roles of their own beyond Love Interest.

Tales of the Abyss
I am not qualified to talk much about the Tales series as whole, which has about a million games in it on about half a million systems. We haven't played nearly enough of them (yet!) to be really informed about the whole group. But from what I've seen, the series has a few overarching strengths: most notably, starting with characters who seem like pretty standard types and then telling stories where they grow and change a lot and make you root for them. ...Also, they are good at doofy, fun fanservice, the kind where your characters tease each other for having favorite attacking skills or where your reward for a complicated sidequest is the chance to put all of your party in bathing suits (and then watch them talk to each other about *that*).
Abyss in particular is a little bit of a tricky sell at the beginning, because the main character, Luke, has a lot of growing up to do. There are a few points where his attitude is maddening. But unlike a lot of game characters, he does grow, and learn from his mistakes, and by the end of the story he was one of my favorite game heroes. And the story revolves a lot around themes of predetermination vs. free will, whether the safety of knowing the future is worth the trade-off of losing choices, whether the sacrifice of one can secure the prosperity of others. It's much deeper, in short, than the bright colors and cute skits make it seem.

Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria
Man, where to start? Silmeria is the sequel(ish) to the first Valkyrie Profile game, which came out on the PS1 and was then re-released for PSP. And which I have not played. So Silmeria is entirely playable on its own, though I suspect that there are a few characters I'd have reacted to differently when they first showed up if I'd had the previous game to inform me. The title valkyrie is missing from Asgard; she had been banished as punishment for rebellious behavior and is now inhabiting a human body. ...Which she shares with the body's rightful owner, Alicia, a sweet young princess whose life has been complicated pretty severely by the way this alien presence talks through her. And that's before Silmeria's elder sister shows up to bring her home by force. Seriously, I was sold on this game in the first scene, when Silmeria and Alicia fight for control of the body. And the character design slays me; I could write a love letter to Alicia's thighs alone.
Over the course of the game, you wind up using your valkyrie powers to recruit the souls of a number of dead heroes, male and female, to fight alongside you. Allegiances shift, there's amazing powerplay, and there's at least one romantic relationship whose woobie fail slays me.

I wasn't sure about including these next few, though I love them -- but then I figured, okay, a lot of people have picked up the new Persona games but not as many people seem to have gotten into the other parts of the megaten series, so it might not hurt to mention them.

Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army
(There is a sequel to this one out now -- vs. King Abbadon -- but I haven't played it yet. please no spoilers!) I love this game for its style. So much. So, so much. You play a teenage demon-summoning detective in 1930s Tokyo. How cool is that, seriously? ...Not enough? You want more fun weird stuff? We got mad scientists. We got rockets to the moon. We got demon-possessed schoolgirls. We got naked Yakuza bathhouse fights. We got some seriously sexy demons at Raidou's command. We got a charming translation with a lot of period flavor. There are a lot of really lovable things about this game.
...and it's a good thing, too, because I feel like I have to mention the caveat: this game has a real-time battle system that is...not Atlus's forte. It can be beaten, but the system is clumsy and tough to control. I think it's worth playing for everything else around it, or it wouldn't be on this list, but I do really hope that the rumors of an improved battle system in the new one are accurate.

Digital Devil Saga
My buttons, let Atlus push them. Oh man. Spoilers for the first five minutes, because I cannot think of a better way to explain what you're in for here: at the beginning of DDS, your characters are beginning a battle on a post-apocalyptic wasteland: your team vs. another group of mercenaries. Catastrophe strikes the battlefield, and everyone present is infected with a virus that turns them into cannibal demons. A voice in your head exhorts you to rend, slaughter, devour your enemies! Then the game starts. If you like dystopia, xeno, vore, moral crises, debating the nature of humanity, teamwork, Hindu mythology, gender bending, mercilessly exploiting enemy weaknesses in combat, level grinding, or any combination of the above, play these games.
...If you can find them. That's the caveat here: the first part ends on a very "please insert disc 2 to continue" note, and the second part has apparently not been reprinted (yet?), so it is appallingly expensive. But if you can get your hands on both halves, play them. unf.

Nocturne
I adore Nocturne to within an inch of its tattooed demon-possessed life. But I always hesitate to recommend it to other people, because I know that it is not going to be everybody's speed. Not for thematic reasons -- I think DDS wins the prize there, with the cannibalism thing, and I always have to roll my eyes a little at "too hardcore for you" posturing anyway. What makes Nocturne a tough sell is the minimalism. You have to want to dungeoncrawl to like this game. You cannot treat the dungeoncrawl as that thing you get out of the way between cut scenes. 98% of the game is spent either in dungeons or fusing new allies to help you survive dungeons. Story sequences don't last more than a few minutes at a time, and the story is very minimalist, very skeletal -- for good reason, because you can earn any of six different endings, depending on your moral choices, but it's a very different kind of storytelling from, say, a recent Final Fantasy. I find the minimalism really welcoming and cool, a blank slate I can draw on, but I also love the press turn battle system in ways that would make this post not worksafe. So. It suits me, but probably not everyone!
...Oh right, and the story: a millennial cult is trying to destroy the world. You...do not stop them. They do destroy the world. You are fortunate (?) enough to be endowed with the power of the demi-fiend, and must make your way across the ruins of Tokyo amassing enough power to make your case before the distant light of heaven: to present a Reason for the world to be re-made. There are factions seeking to advance their own Reasons; you can ally yourself with them, or take your own path. Every choice you make, every conversation you have when you attempt to recruit some petty demon into your army, affects how the others see you and whether they'll be willing to accept your help in the first place. It's stark and unforgiving and I love it. I love it to death.


...I could keep going. There are other games I wish I'd gotten around to here (ask me about Okami, or about Psychonauts). But I have barely done any work at all this morning, and this is more than enough for now. Right? ...No, probably not. Somebody rec me something cool.