Five PS2 JRPGs You Probably Missed

Atlus quietly published this isometric tactical RPG in 2004 and almost no one noticed. The art is by Shigenori Soejima of Persona fame, the score is by Hitoshi Sakimoto of Final Fantasy Tactics, and the combat is a clean, slightly austere take on the grid-based tactical genre. The story is about a world being slowly consumed by a corrupting mist and a band of would-be saviours who cannot agree on whether to fight it or accept it.

It does almost nothing flashy. It just gets every fundamental right.

The first Shadow Hearts was already a strange thing. The sequel turns the dial all the way over. Set in post-WWI Europe, you play a man who can transform into demons by absorbing souls, and the combat hinges on a real-time "Judgment Ring" that turns every attack into a small skill check. The supporting cast includes a vampire, a flamboyant wrestler, and a woman whose special attack is calling in an air strike.

This is the high-water mark for "weird PS2 horror RPG with a sense of humour." Nothing else in the era compares.

By 2002 the Wild Arms series was no longer a flagship. Capcom and Square were vacuuming up the JRPG audience, and Media.Vision had to deliver a smaller, more focused game. They responded by making a cel-shaded western, set in a desert world that is actively dying, with a cast of four bounty hunters and a battle system built around equippable mediums.

The atmosphere is unlike anything else in the era. If you have ever wanted a Sergio Leone JRPG, this is the closest the genre has gotten.

Level-5 made Rogue Galaxy after Dark Cloud 2 and before Ni no Kuni, and it sits uncomfortably between the two. The combat is real-time and a little messy. The crafting system has an entire mini-game economy bolted on. The cast is a pirate crew including a cat-girl, a frog scientist, and an actual robot.

What it has is ambition and scale. The planets are genuinely distinct. The art direction is loud and confident. It is the most "PS2" a PS2 RPG can be, and that is meant as a compliment.

Capcom took the series, threw out the formula, and made a survival-tinged dungeon crawler with a permadeath-adjacent restart system. The fanbase reacted by lighting torches and marching on the studio. Twenty years later, retrospectives have come around: Dragon Quarter is the most interesting Breath of Fire by a wide margin.

You manage a dragon transformation gauge that counts up forever and ends the game when it hits 100 percent. Every encounter is a real decision. There is nothing else in the franchise like it, which is exactly the point.