#oneaday Day 469: The "Greats"

Among gamers of a certain age, I feel like the PS2 is a greatly beloved system… but strangely, I also feel like there are a lot of specific games for that platform that don't get talked about with the same fondness as similar titles from the PS1 era.

I'm particularly thinking of RPGs here. Speak to anyone who grew up with the PS1 and at least one of them will wax lyrical about how much they loved stuff like Grandia, the Final Fantasies (including Tactics), Legend of Dragoon, Lunar and all manner of others. But speak to that same person about the PS2 and, despite the fact that PS2 plays host to some amazing games, you're unlikely to hear much about anything other than FFX (certainly not FFX-2) and maybe FFXII now everyone's admitted it's actually good.

I wonder why that is? Stuff like the Atelier Iris games and Ar Tonelico appear to be the nichest of niche-interest, while I feel like they would have been celebrated as all-time greats if something roughly equivalent had come out back in the PS1 era.

I did wonder if it was to do with the fact that the PS2's library is vast, and thus a lot of things simply fell between the cracks, never to be seen again. But the PS2's North American library (according to Google) is 1,850 titles strong, compared to 1,300 for PS1; that's a reasonable difference, but not huge.

Perhaps it's to do with changes in gaming culture. But then the PS1 was when Sony started its big push to make gaming "cool" with stuff like Wipeout and its appearances at the Ministry of Sound and suchlike, so I feel like it's not that either.

Was it the shift to "triple-A"? I don't think so, because I don't feel like what we know today as "triple-A" really established itself until the following generation with the Xbox 360 and PS3.

What, then? I do wonder. Still, at least it means there's a huge amount of overlooked and underappreciated stuff to explore, even 20 years after the console first showed its face. And that's 100% fine with me!