With the recent news that Sony has ceased production of the PlayStation 2 worldwide, the death knell has been sounded for this most successful of consoles. Many of today’s gamers started out with the PS2 as their first console, but whether it was your first experience of console gaming or just one step in your journey, the PS2 was unquestionably great. Over 10,000 titles were released for the PS2 worldwide, but with production now ceased, there’s a real danger of this back catalogue of games being completely lost to time. While the PS2 was backwards compatible with PS1 games, only the first run of 60GB PlayStation 3 consoles in the UK are backwards compatible with PS2 games. What this means is, unless you have a PS2 or a rare PS3, you’d better snap up one of the last few PS2 consoles available if you want to play some of the best games of the last decade.

Yes, while the PS3, 360, Wii and Wii U may dominate the headlines for the games of today, it remains true that there are some real classics that many gamers may have missed out on, even if they were around during the PS2’s heyday. The good news is that many of these titles are now available for ridiculously low prices online. There are any number of sites that can list the mainstream games you should obtain (many of which have received HD remakes for current gen consoles), but here are five hidden gems of the PS2 era that every gamer should check out.

While Japanese developer Level-5 might be best known for their excellent “Professor Layton” series, or perhaps the highly anticipated “Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch”, their first foray into gaming was the PS2’s Dark Cloud. An action RPG with city-building elements, your job as the protagonist was to explore dungeons, fighting hosts of enemies along the way, to retrieve special orbs. These “Atlamillia” represented parts of a nearby town or village which had fallen foul of an evil genie – when returned to the surface, they could be placed around the vacant space left behind.

Talking to villagers or townspeople would yield clues as to where each part would go: perhaps the occupant of a house always saw the sun rise when she woke up, meaning you should angle the house so that the window faced eastwards. Or maybe the owner of the windmill mentioned he loved the sounds of birdsong and running water, indicating that it would need to be placed near both a tree and a river. The change of pace between dungeon crawling and world building – unique at the time – ensures that Dark Cloud remains an excellent game to this day.

Released as “The Adventures of Cookie & Cream” in the US, this game was a quirky take on co-operative gameplay that was one of the early efforts of From Software (of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls fame). You played as one of two rabbits, who have been told that the moon has disappeared and that they need to hop off and find it. In doing so, they must traverse an interesting series of puzzles and platforming tasks.

A typical level of Kuri Kuri Mix would have Player 1 as Chestnut (or Cookie, in the US) on the left hand side of the screen. On the other half of the vertical split would be Player 2 as Cream. Together, you would move upwards through the level, with levers and switches on Chestnut’s side allowing Cream to progress and vice versa. Anyone who has played Portal 2’s co-op would immediately recognise the sort of gameplay involved. Whereas the game can be a little challenging if you try to play solo (meaning you control both characters with only one controller), having a friend join you to play this bizarre title will bring out the best in it.

I’m cheating a little here, since the .hack series I’m referring to encompasses four games: .hack//Infection, .hack//Mutation, .hack//Outbreak and .hack//Quarantine. While released in separate boxes, these games were very much four parts of a larger, overarching title. Its genre is somewhat unique: a single-player, fake MMORPG. In effect, it is a game within a game, since you play as a young man named Kite; someone who is himself playing the in-game MMO called “The World”. The game accomplishes the façade of pretending to be online by creating various fake players who run around and speak as though they were people playing The World at the same time as you.

While in The World, you play through various “fields”; levels which contain dungeons, through which you progress while defeating enemies, levelling up and all associated MMO fare. Throughout this is a storyline that continues even while not “logged in” to The World, with email messages being sent to Kite through a faux-OS desktop interface. A truly esoteric and lasting experience, the .hack series also came with a DVD in each box with an accompanying episode of the the anime that tied in with the games, which themselves are the sequel to the original .hack//Sign anime. With an interconnectedness that is rarely seen these days, the .hack series is definitely worth checking out.

Another fairly unique game, almost the very first thing that happens to you in Shadow of Memories is your fatal stabbing. While definitely dead, you nonetheless awaken in a strange place, where a mysterious man named Homunculus greets you and offers you the chance to change your past. Accepting a device from him, you go back to a point before your murder and attempt to prevent it, discover who did it and why… but end up getting killed in some other fashion in the process.

So the pattern repeats, with the player character travelling through multiple time periods, solving puzzles and investigating different events, all while racing against the clock. If you can’t solve all the puzzles in time, it’s not so bad – as long as you’re back in your own time – because you’ll just be murdered again and can go back and take another shot. But if you are not back in the correct time period before your borrowed time elapses, that would be a paradox, which means it is truly game over.

With a deep and engaging plot that would be spoiled if I went into any great detail, Konami’s Shadow of Memories is an adventure game like few others, full of intrigue and with no less than eight possible endings. Without a doubt, it remains one of the finest titles the PS2 had to offer.

Easily one of my favourite games of all time, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time was the first outing for the Star Ocean series in the 21^st Century and the only one to be released on the PS2. While it offers nothing spectacular in terms of unique game mechanics or a particularly strong following in Europe or the US, Star Ocean has – in my opinion – one of the most enthralling stories of any RPG of that era, coupled with some of the most enjoyable gameplay on the PS2.

Trying to describe an RPG is difficult at the best of times, as you attempt to cover everything from the characters, the basic plot, the combat system, the meta-gaming, the conversation system and other key factors. To barely scratch the surface, Star Ocean is set in an alternate, future Milky Way and places you in the role of Fayt, whose holiday is ruined when the resort planet he’s on is attacked by an alien race, sparking a galactic war. Separated from his family, Fayt’s adventure begins with him simply trying to get back to his parents, but soon develops into much more.

Set across several different planets, with a multitude of characters to add to your roster and a real-time combat system that ensures each battle is as exciting as the next, there’s never a dull moment in this game. The plot may sound thin from what I’ve described, but to reveal more would potentially spoil the game; I would recommend this game to any RPG fan, especially those who have played other titles in the series.

As I mentioned before, there are tens – if not hundreds – of other games that you should play for the PS2 before it becomes impossible to do so any more. Unless Sony decide to make the PlayStation 4 fully backwards compatible with all previous iterations, the PS2 console itself remains the best method of playing PS2 games. It seems unfair to gamers, who haven’t experienced all that the last decade had to offer, for all of that gaming excellence to be consigned to the annals of history. Perhaps now that Sony has officially retired the console, they’ll look to other ways to monetise this vast catalogue. If re-releasing any of the above titles will allow a new generation of gamers to experience them, then I would consider it a worthy cause.

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