Something went wrong. Try again later

Mento

Check out Mentonomicon dot Blogspot dot com for a ginormous inventory of all my Giant Bomb blogz.

4958 551063 219 897
Forum Posts Wiki Points Following Followers

The Top Shelf: Case Files 001-005: "From Small Beginnings"

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done, five games at a time. Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

Case File 001: FromSoftware's Eternal Ring

No Caption Provided
  • Original Release (JP): 03/04/2000.
  • PS2 Exclusive.

The "From Small Beginnings" subtitle is me being cute, because there's actually two games in this first batch of five that were developed by FromSoftware: the company behind everyone's favorite masochism simulators, Souls. The first of these two games, and the oldest PS2 title I own, is Eternal Ring.

Eternal Ring feels like a streamlined variant of From's "King's Field"; a series of first-person dungeon crawlers with a real-time combat system and a whole lot of animation priority to get used to. Of note is Eternal Ring's magic and stat progression systems, which rely on an immense number of rings that the player can find and equip. Ring effects run the gamut of fireball spells and the like to various passive stat boosts. Many of the rings need to be crafted first, combining blank rings with elemental gems you acquire from enemies and chests.

Of the many pre-Souls From RPGs, Eternal Ring's one of the more accessible. It's short and not particularly complex - the suspicion is that FromSoftware built it as a tech demo for future projects, and rushed it out of the door as a Japanese PS2 launch title - but it's not plagued by the horrific difficulty, lack of explanation or intensely slow pace that inflicts some of From's other early games. I have some affection for it, as a slightly strange and unconventional RPG that hinted at From's future brilliance in that (king's) field, but it doesn't hang with the many more competent games in my PS2 library. Eliminated.

I might've been lying about the
I might've been lying about the "very slow" part.

Case File 002: Sony Computer Entertainment Japan's Fantavision

No Caption Provided
  • Original Release (JP): 03/09/2000
  • PS2 Exclusive.

Of course, if we're talking about the king of PS2 tech demos sold as retail games, we have to give that accolade to the firework-popping Fantavision. Fantavision, like Rez or Star Fox 64, is a high score-chasing shoot 'em up that relies a lot on marking several targets in quick succession and detonating them simultaneously, creating chains of combos. It's easy enough to start playing the game, using the then-unfamiliar analog stick to cycle the cursor around clockwise or anticlockwise to the next available target and triggering a series of colorful explosions, but it takes a little while longer to used to the game's pace and the way its scoring system racks up multipliers.

That said, Fantavision is incredibly short and, while a chill-ass game to unwind with, is the traditional underwhelming launch game that really only exists to get people in game stores to marvel at its graphics and sound quality and convince them to invest in the new platform. It's showy and brief, much like the fireworks it features. Eliminated.

Man, that weird intro with the nuclear family sitting around the ol' radiation box to play Fantavision. The game had a look.
Man, that weird intro with the nuclear family sitting around the ol' radiation box to play Fantavision. The game had a look.

Case File 003: Team Ninja's Dead or Alive 2

No Caption Provided
  • Original Release (JP): 03/30/2000.

Relying on tactics that helped launch the original PlayStation, the PS2 launched with a couple of fighter games that would show off the tech and give players something to hammer away at until the more substantial games showed up. No disrespect to the genre, of course: at this time it was well into its heyday, and the Dead or Alive series in particular has plenty of fans. I just don't even remember where I picked this up. I've never been much of a fighter guy - they require a certain amount of dedication and memorization, and I got enough of that in school.

I will say that DOA2 still looks great, even now. PS2 games can look a bit rough these days because they weren't in that process of finding their way in a brand new polygonal world, like many PS1 games were during that generation. Instead, most PS2 games just kind of look like PS3 and PS4 games, only way worse. None of that awkward charm, let's say. There are exceptions though, should the player find some way to up-rez them, and DOA2 is among those. Yet, we are talking about a game that looked just as good on the Dreamcast (debatably) and looked even better in the Arcade and in DOA: Ultimate for the OG Xbox, the latter of which cheated a little by remaking the game in the DOA3 engine. Even if I held a lot of affection for this particular entry in Itagaki's long-running showcase of state-of-the-art boob tech, there are better versions out there. Eliminated.

Something sinister about making underdressed women fight in the snow. Also, the real thing isn't this blurry, I'm just getting hella motion blur on these screenshots.
Something sinister about making underdressed women fight in the snow. Also, the real thing isn't this blurry, I'm just getting hella motion blur on these screenshots.

Case File 004: Namco's Tekken Tag Tournament

No Caption Provided
  • Original Release (JP): 03/30/2000.

Likewise, Tekken Tag was one of those tentpoles meant to support the rest of the PS2 launch library. If none of the new properties failed to ignite a spark, then a high-quality arcade conversion of the most recent Tekken would suffice. It introduces two-on-two combat, usually a SNK staple, and the ridiculous "Tekken Bowling" mode.

I care even less about Tekken than I do about Dead or Alive, and this is another game that seems to have found its way into my collection through no effort on my part. Eliminated.

Case File 005: FromSoftware's Evergrace

No Caption Provided
  • Original Release (JP): 04/27/2000.
  • PS2 Exclusive

Evergrace is more Souls-ian than most early From RPGs, being a third-person action game, but where I credited Eternal Ring with not being stupid difficult, stupid obtuse and stupid slow, Evergrace is all of the above. My initial interest in the PS2 was motivated by the impressive assortment of RPGs for the PlayStation 1 - games like Final Fantasy VII-IX and Tactics, Grandia, Vagrant Story, Suikoden 1 & 2 and many others. In contrast, the early PS2 RPGs were generally garbage on wheels, and yet I kept snatching them up whenever I saw them.

Still, Evergrace did exhibit a few hints at future Souls greatness. For one, you could equip your character - either the male lead Darius or the female lead Sharline - with armor and weapons and have them appear on the character model, which wasn't common at the time. Another aspect was how upgradeable armor and weapons determined your character's strength rather than stat upgrades from leveling up. Even so, it's a game I gave up relatively early even during a time when I had little else to play. I've yet to properly revisit it. Eliminated.

The game is actually pretty ugly even without my help.
The game is actually pretty ugly even without my help.

Results

After reviewing this initial batch of five PlayStation 2 games, we're 0 for 5 for potential Top Shelf entries. Huh, and I thought it would be difficult to narrow this list down. I suppose it will be once we're past the dodgy launch games.

< Back to the Case File Repository

3 Comments