Obscure Playstation Gems

What are some psx games that I might have overlooked? Cult classic, limited releases, or games that had poor marketing and never quite got the recognition it deserved. Playstation is my favorite console and I was hoping there might be some games out there I don't know about, but would love to play.

Let's seeeee, off the top of my head...

Alundra isn't terribly obscure, but it's definitely worth bringing up. Basically, it's a rather well-made old school Zelda style game with some pretty unique story ideas, such as the main character's ability to enter the dreams/nightmares of others.

Incredible Crisis is a collection of super bizarre minigames centred around an insane day in the life of a Japanese family. My love for this game is shared by the crew and thus there is actually a video on the site. From memory, I don't know if they actually progress terribly far, because the game was designed for lagless CRT tvs and is totally unforgiving of their laggy capture setup.

The Tomba! series (aka Tombi in some regions, I believe) are really cute, well-made platformers that are quite decent. I'd also put Klonoa in the same basket.

Einhander, man.

Valkyrie Profile, One, maybe some Rogue Trip or Critical Depth?

Einhander is the first thing that comes to mind for me.

Tomba! and Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return are fantastic and unique platformers.

Brave Fencer Musashi is a pretty funny action RPG. It might be a bit too dated for some, though.

Azure Dreams is a decent roguelike I don't see mentioned very often.

Jade Cocoon: Story of the Tamamayu is an RPG that has the capture, train, and evolve mechanics like Pokemon. It's not bad.

Those are just some off the top of my head. The PS1 is loaded with obscure overlooked great games.

Vagrant Story isn't particularly well known despite being the best game ever made.

It really depends on how you define obscure. Team Buddies is fucking incredible and Hogs of War is not bad either.

This. Despite the PSP remake and two sequels, it's still really obscure.

I remember really liking T'ai Fu: Wrath of the Tiger. Man, I played the hell out of that game when I rented it from Blockbuster.

I want to play this game so bad, wish it was available digitally.

Tail of the Sun

Tail of the Sun all the way.

Hear, hear.

Also, not sure how obscure they are but the two Lunar games are good.

I really liked Ninja: Shadow of Darkness. It was my first PS1 game and I played a whole bunch of it.

I dunno if it was ever really good, but I enjoyed it.

I haven't played it in a loooong time so I can't really say if it still holds up, but I have fond memories of Silent Bomber.

Dragon Valor was a game was I was pretty obsessed with for a while when I rented it as a kid. I remember it being incredibly fun.

I have a lot of good memories of Azure Dreams, although the game boy version of the game is actually the better version I think. It's pretty much like a pokemon game with a light roguelike element to it, (before that was cool.)

Edit: Seems that it was already mentioned, so I'll just second it!

Suikoden, Wild Arms, Legend of Legaia, and Front Mission 3 are my usual PS Picks when a thread like this comes along. Also, I'll throw in some Vigilante 8 love.

Don't know how obscure it is, but Front Mission 3 is amazing to this day and on psn, if you like SRPG's I would definately check it out.

The original Warhawk was a launch title that more or less immediately fell in love with. Give it a whirl if you can find it! Think we played it on UPF not too long ago.

Oh, I actually thought it was. PSP version is fairly cheap these days but I do wish for a rerelease. That, and an HD upgrade to Odin Sphere (not PS1, but still).

Back in the day, I was able to grab one RPG in August of 2000. I got Chrono Cross over VP. And while I loved Chrono Cross, boy it was hard to find VP after a year or so. Luckily, Silmeria eventually came out and blew me away. I still have that Artifact Box sitting in my closet (because it's for cool guys).

The thing about Einhander is that it costs $1 Billion Dollars.

Depending on your state of mind LSD Dream Emulator is certainly a interesting game.

Rising Zan: The Samurai Gunman is a weird third person action game with a super cheesy intro song that was developed by guys usually known for snowboarding games.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 is hardly obscure, but the World Tour mode that was only included on the PS1 port definitely is. It's a completely different, completely broken Street Fighter that's a whole fucking lot of fun and Capcom totally shouldn't have abandoned it entirely. A friend of mine decked out his Blanka so he could take 80% of your health chip damage from his super combo. You had to actually block his Super Combo for it to do that much damage! He kicked my ass so bad so many times with that build. Somehow through all the crazy stat mangling, it was safer to just not block if he had the meter. It was a completely different way to play the game. It was amazing the crazy shit they let you get away with. It really makes me miss a less serious, more fun-focused Capcom. No fighting game has really done anything like it since, but they definitely should!

I don't know if these games are what you mean when you say obscure, but Legend of Legaia has an awesome battle system, the Breath of Fire games are great, and Vagrant Story is the best game ever made.

@babychoochoo said:

It wasn't. It really, really wasn't.

Descent was pretty good but I'm not sure if its obscure or not.

Power Move Pro Wrestling was really obscure but easily the best local co-op wrestling game ever made.

Galerians and Koudelka. Despite the unfavorable view it got on a recent demo derby, I had a great time with Legend of Legaia back in the day. And if you haven't played Wild ARMs, then what's the matter with you?

I can forgive anyone for passing up Wild ARMs on first glance, though. That game's visuals... woof. Let's just say they haven't aged well.

Great game! That fight in the church where you had to hold off the vampires until sunrise blew my mind. I think this is the first game I played with a day/night cycle, and to have them use it in such an interesting way was really amazing! The collectibles in this game were also super cute. You would buy action figures of major characters, and then could look at them through a model viewer. The twist is that you didn't have to unbox them, so a thing I would do after buying a collectible was twirl the camera around it's case and make a big show of the "unboxing". When you took the figure out of the box you could click through pre-set poses, and also make them say a few of their stock phrases (catch phrases for the villains, attack SFX for monsters, etc). My only gripe was that you couldn't play with two figures at once, so I never got a chance to make the elaborate multi-character skits I wanted to.

I had a lot of friends as a kid, honest.