While Tale of Symphonia is often remembered as a GameCube RPG, this brilliant title’s eventual PS2 port means that it absolutely deserves to be in any conversation about this console’s best role-playing experiences. You can’t come close to seeing everything this epic has to offer in one playthrough, but those who love it won’t mind playing it again. Along with being able to recruit over 176 NPCs who each bring their own stories and abilities to the fold, this game makes a simply admirable effort to ensure that every person in this world feels like they really live in this world. Yet, I will always respect the way this game uses its NPCs. This game’s more relaxed style and often slow-moving narrative just aren’t for everyone. To be honest, I really do get those complaints. I’ve heard some criticize Radiata Stories for taking too long to “click” for them or simply never grabbing them at all. There is so much depth and so much creativity on display in this massive adventure that you can easily forgive its punishing difficulty and occasional unevenness. While this game’s fundamental weirdness is undeniably part of its charm, the bigger draw here is Nocturne’s weak spot-focused combat system and demon recruitment mechanics. This absolutely bizarre post-apocalyptic RPG sees you play as a high-school student tasked with navigating a demon-filled version of Tokyo in order to battle the forces that control this realm. This strange blend of film scene recreations and original storytelling gave fans the chance to dive into Middle-Earth again, and the game holds up remarkably well to this day as one of the best ways to relive your movie memories. Yet, there is something to be said for the fact that The Third Age gave us a true Lord of the Rings RPG adventure at a time when the films were still the hottest thing in the world. On the one hand, I do feel kind of bad putting this game on the list above titles that are a little more critically acclaimed, a little more innovative, and, in some cases, perhaps simply better than what was essentially EA’s Lord of the Rings-themed take on Final Fantasy X. You know what a couple of the games on this list will be, but a deeper look at the best PS2 RPGs will remind you just how deep this console’s roster of all-time great titles really was. The result was an elite group of developers finally getting the chance to watch their biggest dreams come to life in a way that was simply never possible up until that point. The PS2 represents this incredible moment in the evolution of the genre when we were both benefiting from the ambition of the PS1 generation as well as getting to enjoy the ways that PS2 technology made true 3D gaming so much more viable than it had ever been before. However, there’s a strong argument to be made that the PS2 not only deserves to be in that conversation but could very well end up taking the crown. When we talk about the best RPG consoles, we typically focus on the SNES and the PS1 (and with good reason).
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