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, ten 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 136: Konami's Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

• Original Release (JP): 17/11/2004
• Not PS2 Exclusive (remastered for PS3)

I didn't think I would be talking about Naked Snake's Naked Jungle Adventures again so soon, but I suppose it was an inevitability. As some of you might already know, while I've yet to actually play my copy of the original PS2 version of the third game in Kojima's "cool guy" action series Metal Gear Solid, I'm very familiar with the PS3 remastered version - those travails have been thoroughly journalized with this oddly formatted "reactions" LP series (links at the end). If only I'd known how prolific reacting to things was on YouTube, I could've cashed in. Of the two core Metal Gear Solid games released on the PlayStation 2, MGS3 is easily my favorite. It made the stealth challenging, incorporating "camouflage indices" that measured the conspicuousness of your current gear relative to your immediate environment, its boss fights were memorable and clever (well, except for maybe the bee man), and it has a series-best Cold War era plot concerning a psychotic lightning colonel, a highly advanced Soviet battletank, a triple-agent femme fatale, a very young Russian officer who was proud of his gun-twirling but not so proud that he wouldn't meow loudly to call in the kitty cavalry when needed, and a near-mythical badass hero in The Boss, who had every angle covered from the start but couldn't let her favorite pupil or fellow WW2 veterans know about her true goals. Great soundtrack, dumb humor, some neat action sequences, the ever-present espionage thriller movie aspirations, and a fan wiki's worth of new MGS lore and callbacks for the franchise zealots to greedily devour. The game's a trip and, in retrospect, incredibly impressive for its time.

Yet, you know, there's still that little minor complication that I still don't like the MGS games all that much. Each one has been better than the last, at least in terms of mechanics and gameplay - Kojima's nothing if not an ambitious game designer who shoots for the moon and learns from his errors - and I'll admit to playing MGSV for far longer than is healthy. (In fact, I'm still planning on going back someday to sweep up those side ops, if I find a lull in my gaming schedule.) MGS3 isn't perhaps a game I'll ever boot up again, since I'm not sure I can handle how antiquated it would probably feel compared to MGSV or even MGS4, but playing through that series a few years back has really imparted to me why it was so important. It has my respect, if not my love. For those reasons and more, MGS3's getting added to my reserves pile: the shortlist of "definite maybes" that will fill out the rest of the shelf should nothing better come along in the second round. Considered.

Case File 137: The Code Monkeys's Garfield

• Original Release (EU): 19/11/2004
• Not PS2 Exclusive (also out on PC)

Metal Gear Solid 3 is a bona fide classic, but it's not what people come to a PS2-focused blog series to read about. They're here for the Lasagna Cat himself - the big orange tabby who makes us all happy, the King of Yuks, the foremost feline farceur of the funny pages: Jim Davis's legendary Garfield the Cat. Ask your parents. OK, so what's so special about this Europe-exclusive Garfield licensed game? Well, not much, if I'm being honest. However, developers The Code Monkeys came upon a fairly original take for a game based on a cat who barely moves except to eat, and I have to respect that they went for something both innovative and incredibly banal (but not necessarily in a bad way) instead of the same old licensed platformer or mini-game collection. Jon Arbuckle leaves his home in Garfield's care with the promise of lasagna if the house is still in one piece when he returns, and Odie immediately trashes it while Garfield naps. Realizing his love of layered pasta dishes supersedes his laziness, Garfield grabs a vacuum cleaner and gets to work restoring the suburban dwelling to its immaculate original condition. The game is, in a sense, one of those adventure games that only lets you carry so much stuff at once, but instead of using this inventory to solve environmental puzzles, you're simply returning each item to its original resting place. It involves some exploration and guesswork, as you figure out what goes where, and the juggling of many misplaced objects at once through inventory micromanagement and storage bins. You can also use the vacuum cleaner to remove spiders and pull out drawers to walk on to open up routes to objects otherwise out of reach. There's no built-in speedrun aspect, but it seems inadvertently built for such a set-up: were you to determine the most effective route, you could probably beat the game in less than an hour. Jon gives you something like eight before he is scheduled to come back home, which is more than enough for a blind run. It's safe to say that this game is kind of ridiculous. The lack of challenge or any kind of health system/game over state means it's as casual as they come, especially for a retail console game, and the vast majority of the time is simply spent picking an object up, walking over to where it should be (there's a transparent outline for every object to help you out) and putting it back. I actually kind of like it, though: both as a novel custom-built premise for a game based on the nondescript slice-of-life adventures of a sardonic house cat, and as a chill and relaxing few hours spent on a simple menial task. Almost like the 3D platformer equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle (the game has a jigsaw puzzle in it too, which might be what inspired this comparison) or a hidden objects game.

There's no universe where I'll claim it's one of the best forty-four games for the PlayStation 2, even factoring in personal preference and that I've only played a fraction of the console's full library, but then one of the secret goals of this feature has always been to shine a spotlight on the more modest games in my collection. Eliminated.

Case File 138: The Behemoth's Alien Hominid

• Original Release (NA): 21/11/2004
• Not PS2 Exclusive (also out on Xbox, GameCube, PC, GBA and... Gizmondo?)

Back in the halcyon days of the internet, or at least the halcyon days of the late 90s when there was actually stuff on there besides rudimentary home pages, usenet groups and "Mr T Ate My Balls" fan ring zones, I spent a lot of online time admiring the works of the gifted contributors to Newgrounds, one of the earliest portals for Flash-created animated shorts and games. Most of it was dreck, but even that was fun in its own way, as the commentators of that site could be ruthless towards those they perceived to be less than perfect to the extent that the animators then started making flash cartoons specifically to call out the sad jerks who kept voting everything down. Populated in equal parts by creative talents and vindictive assholes, it blazed a trail for the likes of YouTube to follow. Yet, the site's co-creator Tom Fulp always had his eye on breaking out and making his own video games, which is fair enough for a guy who named his Flash animation website after a synonym for the Neo Geo console. So far, the company he and Newgrounds regulars Dan Paladin and John Baez (as well as a couple others who have since left) created - The Behemoth - has made and continues to make games that resemble Flash cartoons but ostensibly offer a much richer gaming experience. Presently, I've actually yet to see that happen. At least, that was certainly the case with the paper-thin Alien Hominid, The Behemoth's first proper retail game. It's an incredibly challenging, and violent, side-scrolling brawler/shooter hybrid that began life as one of many games on Newgrounds (as did the original Meat Boy, in fairness) and did enough business to help fund The Behemoth's subsequent game, the better-received Castle Crashers. Alien Hominid definitely feels like an up-rezzed Flash game, for better or worse.

I don't really hate the game, but then nothing in The Behemoth's oeuvre as really resonated with me, even as a life-long fan of Newgrounds. I thought both Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers were fun for about half an hour, built as they were like classic arcade/Neo Geo games (I tell ya, that name was no coincidence), and BattleBlock Theater had one too many issues for me to recommend it. Pit People might be neat, but at this point I'm no longer inclined to find out. Eliminated.

Case File 139: Level-5's Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King

• Original Release (JP): 27/11/2004
• Not PS2 Exclusive (remastered for 3DS and mobile devices)

It's been said that Level-5's previous work with the Dark Cloud games was simply a dry run for taking the reins for Enix's (now Square Enix's) biggest property as their most important project by that point. Those people would be wrong, of course, since Dark Cloud 2 rules everything. Still, there's no getting past the fact that Level-5 proved themselves worthy of keeping Akira Toriyama's pun-laden fantasy world of interchangeable women with giant foreheads and antagonists with pointy ears in good stead, and from there became one of the biggest Japanese game developers active today. Without really understanding where the series had come from - Dragon Quest VIII was, inexplicably, the first core Dragon Quest to be released in Europe - I got the jist pretty quickly from the sheer personality that this game exuded the moment I switched it on. An offbeat, cartoonish world that operated on Looney Tunes logic as often as it relied on fantasy tropes, with a localization that prioritized puns and outrageous British accents (to reiterate, this is a series that has had characters talking with Cockney accents since the late 1980s, and #8 was the first core DQ game the UK ever saw) and a classic turn-based combat system to ground everything in the franchise's age-old adherence to tradition. That isn't to say that Dragon Quest hasn't innovated in the past - Chapters of the Chosen was quite a departure from what everyone else was doing at the time - but you don't generally come to a Dragon Quest expecting the unexpected. Still, that hardly matters when you have so much packed into this game, like the enormous open world, the elaborate alchemy crafting, the monster capturing, and a challenging and entirely optional final chapter that lets you earn the best possible ending. It was a delightful introduction to this long-running series, and inspired me to check out its predecessors. You know, eventually. (The only other core DQ I've actually completed so far is the fourth, but I'll get around to the rest soon enough, you'll see.)

It's probably fortunate that there are no other Dragon Quest games for the system, because it means DQ8 has nothing to compete with in the second round. As is the case for all four Level-5 JRPGs for the PlayStation 2, it's practically required playing for any genre fan. Approved.

Case File 140: Success's Zoo Puzzle

• Original Release (JP): 02/12/2004
• Not PS2 Exclusive (also out on DS, GBA and 3DS)

Several months before I bought a Nintendo DS, I picked up what looked like a cheapo budget knock-off of one of the DS's earliest hits - the match-3 animal block game Zoo Keeper - because it looked like so much fun that I currently wasn't having. Turns out this game was actually the originator, and Zoo Keeper the Johnny-come-lately imitator. Well, all right, that's not quite the case either: both games were the product of Japanese developer Success, who originally took the idea from a browser game. Success developed versions for the GBA and PS2 before porting it to the DS where - in a situation very similar to a number of Switch games right now - it benefited from being part of a small library of an in-demand new Nintendo console, the owners of which were looking for something, anything, of an acceptable level of quality to play on it. Zoo Puzzle's more or less identical to Zoo Keeper, if perhaps lacking a bit of polish and the useful touch interface, with the goal being to clear a certain quota of each zoo animal on a grid of blocks by clearing them away in matching lines of three or more. Fairly straightforward, but this was before match-3 games had really taken off, so it was common to see Zoo Keeper inserted into any DS you might happen to spot on the subway or bus to work and back.

It's... kind of surreal to recommend this game now, with match-3 being so thoroughly explored as a concept in so many diverse ways, like the hybrid-RPG Puzzle Quest or hybrid-endless runner 10,000,000. Heck, it even appears as one of the many modes in Evoland 2: a game built around parodying once-ubiquitous genres that it hopes you remember well enough. Zoo Keeper, and Zoo Puzzle, was at the vanguard of that wave and fairly rudimentary in comparison to what came after. Even if I were to consider it worth playing today, I'd still recommend that bandwagony DS version over this one. Eliminated.

Case File 141: Clover's Viewtiful Joe 2

• Original Release (NA): 07/12/2004
• Not PS2 Exclusive (also out on GameCube)

Confession time: I've never played this game. I don't have anything against Viewtiful Joe, besides the fact it regularly kicks my ass. Alas, that is linked to the reason why I never booted up the second game: I never could beat the first one. I think I was stuck on a shark? Or maybe the guy immediately after him. Viewtiful Joe demands a certain amount of proficiency over its controls and powers before you can start dealing the big damage, and until then every boss fight is this battle of attrition where you're sending chip damage back and forth. Once you're attuned to the game's flow, it gets a lot easier, but I've never been able to properly grasp Hideki Kamiya's particular brand of timing- and combo-focused character-action game. I struggled my way through the combat in Devil May Cry and Bayonetta also, though I did manage to beat them both eventually. Without making excuses, I suspect he makes action-adventure games for those entrenched in the fighter game scene, where memorization and mastery over the fundamentals is paramount. It certainly makes his games rewarding to beat, when I can survive them.

So, the deal here will continue to be that I must defeat the first Viewtiful Joe - which I own on GameCube, hence its absence on The Top Shelf so far - before I'm willing to start the second. Since that'll mean playing through a non-PS2 game, we're kind of at an impasse regarding Viewtiful Joe 2's continued presence in this feature. I'll come back for you eventually, but for now it's henshin-a-gone-gone, baby. Eliminated.

Case File 142: Marvelous Entertainment's Harvest Fishing

• Original Release (JP): 01/27/2005
• PS2 Exclusive!

Yeah, I'm not sure what I was thinking with this one. Marvelous is best known these days for the later Harvest Moon games, which at one point split apart from its original developers and became two series which are getting harder to tell apart, and for publishing the likes of Deadly Premonition and No More Heroes. They also swept up the back catalogue of prolific 16-bit developer Victor Entertainment/Interactive at some point, and with that acquisition came the long-running Kawa no Nushi Tsuri (or Legend of the River King) series of fishing RPGs. These were games that combined the usual traits of a fishing game - you have the find the right bait, then wait at the right part of the river at the right time of day to catch the specific fish you want - with RPG mechanics, like actually fighting the bait before it would allow itself to become fishfood, or upgrading your stats and equipment through experience and acquired cash respectively. You couldn't just fish the fabled River King right away, you needed to level up and continue to purchase better rods with the proceeds you make from reeling in lesser fare. Anyway, the GameCenter CX episode on Kawa no Nushi Tsuri 2, the third game in the series and the first to be released on Super Famicom, made those games seem quite appealing. I've always liked (but not loved) fishing mini-games in RPGs, and the idea of an RPG built around the act of fishing sounded like a neat break from the norm. That's how I ended up with Harvest Fishing, the poorly-named European release of Kawa no Nushi Tsuri: Wonderful Journey, a.k.a. River King: A Wonderful Journey. It's really just the same game again but for PS2.

Well, suffice it to say I got pretty bored pretty quickly. Turns out all those RPGs with fishing mini-games made them work because they were only a small part of a much bigger whole. I'd take some time off to hook a bass or several in Dark Cloud 2, Breath of Fire III, Stardew Valley, Yakuza or what have you because those mini-games worked in small doses, and could net you curatives or valuable items you can use for the rest of your adventure. It's a bit different when all you're doing is the fishing part. Anyway, it was worth finding out for myself, at least. The road less travelled and all that. Eliminated.

Case File 143: Snowblind's Champions: Return to Arms

• Original Release (NA): 07/02/2005
• PS2 Exclusive!

It didn't feel like too long ago that we were talking about Snowblind's first foray into the universe of EverQuest on this feature, slightly adjusting the venerable MMORPG's structure to befit their own action-RPG loot model that they first devised for Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. I didn't get too far into the sequel for whatever reason, but it seems for all intents and purposes an extension of the first game but for higher level characters. You could create your own character or import your Champions of Norrath victor for a head start, and then you're right back into the fray taking down any number of EverQuest mobs and villains and sweeping up the valuables they leave behind. I find that I can only enjoy loot RPGs for so long, and part of that is how they insist on a loop structure that has you beating the game once and moving onto NG+ with better item drops and tougher monsters. Whether it's to this series's credit or not, the loop is gone and your advanced character is given a whole new quest to keep them challenged, though it does of course mean buying the new game (and waiting for its release, for that matter).

I've already moved the original Champions of Norrath to the second stage, so I suppose I should extend the courtesy here as well. Especially since I didn't get too far into it (maybe I was just burned out on loot RPGs - I was also playing the X-Men Legends games around this time, which I own for GameCube so that's another series that you won't be seeing here). Considered.

Case File 144: Falcom's Ys: Ark of Napishtim

• Original Release (NA): 22/02/2005
• Not PS2 Exclusive (also out on PSP and Steam)

Ahhh, Ys. This might've been the first game to fully win me over to Falcom's series of metal-infused action RPGs, where the pace is relentless and your foes are enormous. Ark of Napishtim is actually the sixth core game in the series, coming several years after Ys V (which was released all the way back in the 16-bit era) and was such a success that its engine would be used for a few more Ys games, specifically Ys Origin and Ys: The Oath in Felghana (a remake of Ys III, also from the 16-bit era). The recent Ys games probably come as a shock to anyone used to the languid pace of most JRPGs, where you'd normally spend hours in a dungeon beating down random encounters in turn-based exchanges of damage. Ys isn't a fan of waiting around, however, and instead has recurring protagonist Adol "The Red" Christin dashing around the screen with his slashes and special abilities at the speed of sound while music like this is playing. It's a seriously rad franchise, and having all three of the Napishtim-engine games within arm's reach on Steam has done nothing but deepen my affection for them.

As Ys's sole representative on the PS2, I'm happy to let it through to the second round. The only thing holding me back from an instant Approved is how Ys has always been a PC series - Napishtim started there, and these days the Steam version of the game is the most convenient means of playing it. For now, it's joining the reserves list with honors. Considered.

Case File 145: Omega Force's Dynasty Warriors 5

• Original Release (JP): 24/02/2005
• Not PS2 Exclusive (also out on Xbox)

Let it not be said that I didn't give Dynasty Warriors a sporting chance. I own the second game, which is actually the first if we're talking about the Dynasty Warriors games that use the now-ubiquitous Omega Force format of brawling one's way through thousands of faceless grunts, but I was inspired to find out how far the series had evolved since then with Dynasty Warriors V, the last of the games to be released on PlayStation 2 (in Europe, at least). The game certainly was more feature-rich and polished, though beyond its clear advances it was the same old game with the same old Romance of the Three Kingdom cast of playable characters (albeit, a lot more of them). I pottered around with a few of the characters for a while in the game's "Musou Mode", the closest thing to a story mode, and then lost interest. I think my ambivalence towards these games has always been due to the exceptionally dry and far too complicated chronology and overpopulated setting: I actually found I enjoyed the stylistically similar Bladestorm and Dragon Quest Heroes quite a bit more, tower defense-focused maps aside. Maybe that's just being too Euro-centric (and, uh, Enix-centric?) for my own good but with the right setting and the right kind of mission design I can see, and have seen, the appeal of these Musou games. Begrudgingly. Hyrule Warriors is next, provided I ever find a cheap copy of the Wii U version.

So yeah, this is another low blow for Lu Bu, but I'm going to have to Shu this game off on its Wei with nary a "Wu lad". Eliminated.

Results

That's the end of this week's round-up. We hid in boxes, decried Mondays, and ate Earthlings. We caught up with Japanese keystones Dragon Quest, Ys, and Dynasty Warriors. We hooked, we looted, we viewed and we zoo'd. It was certainly an odd collection of games to discuss, but that's ever been my preference. We also entered 2005 at some point, so now we're really coming down to the wire. By the end of that year the Xbox 360 will be out, with the Wii and PS3 following in the subsequent November to begin the seventh console generation in earnest. That's not to say that I abandoned the PlayStation 2 right away, but that's the chief reason why we don't have much longer to go for this first round. For the time being, let's luxuriate in what 2005 had to offer as the last year the PS2 would ever dominate.

Some harsh cuts this week means we're only getting three more games for consideration, bringing our grand total to 57 out of 145. Of those three, two are getting dropped in the reserve pile, so don't expect to see them pop up in the second round. We did also approve another game, the enchanting Dragon Quest VIII from Level-5's nigh-perfect PS2 output, which increases our number of the "shelf-assured" to thirteen games. Next week is a great one for fans of the weird and wonderful, including a few welcome returning franchises and the debut of a conspicuously absent series about rolling space balls that our new GBEast producer loves dearly. I'm dedicating the next The Top Shelf to GB newcomer Abby Russell for this reason. I suppose this week's can be dedicated to @benpack, since he presumably likes Dynasty Warriors. I mean, he enjoys Dota, so he's probably that type, you know? (Sup Ben. Still my bruh, brah.)

See you all again soon, and be sure to follow my May Maturity series all this month also.

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