Persona 4 came out this week to rave reviews, posting an astonishing 97 on Metacritic the day it hit stores. That’s not bad for a game on the PlayStation 2, a console that’s now eight years old.
The fact is, the old consoles haven’t died quite yet. Even the insanely popular Nintendo Wii hasn’t caught up to the installed base of the PS2. Persona 4 may be “probably the last great PS2 game” as Games Radar put it, but it’s far from the only great game from the last generation of consoles, and there may be a few you’ve overlooked. Now that their heyday is passed, you can pick them up on the cheap.
Persona 3: FES
For the value-oriented PS2 gamer who puts a premium on story and exploration, you can’t go wrong with Persona 3: FES. Even when it was new, it was a bargain, as the “FES” version is a re-release of the original game with an extra chapter and a few new features. (Atlus also underestimated demand for the first game, and hard-to-find copies were selling at a premium on eBay, so the new release was a welcome relief.) The arrival of Persona 4 is sure to drive the price of its predecessor even lower.
Persona 3 opens with your character transferring to a new Japanese high school. As you step off the train, however, you find that at the stroke of midnight, everyone around you transforms into coffins, the surroundings become splashed with blood, and malevolent shadows prey on the weak. You know, one of those deals.
You and your new dorm-mates seem to be the only ones who remember anything about the nightly events, and you begin exploring the mysterious tower that rises up from your school during the “dark hour,” as it’s called. Your days, meanwhile, are spent attending classes, doing after-school activities, and most importantly, forming and strengthening social bonds that lend power to the titular personas that you can summon to fight the shadows.
Persona 3 distinguishes itself from other Japanese RPGs with its vibrant color scheme, likable cast and intriguing premise. It’s not every game that uses Jungian psychology as its organizing theme, but Persona 3 makes it work.
Like many JRPGs, however, Persona 3 is long. Very long. Putting 100 hours into it wouldn’t be uncommon. That’s not a bad entertainment/cost ratio.
Burnout 3: Takedown
For those seeking a quicker entertainment fix, look no further.
The success of Burnout 3 launched more sequels: Burnout Revenge for the PS2/Xbox console generation and Burnout Paradise for the current ones. Like Persona 3, that means savings on the original game.
Unlike the gearhead-oriented Gran Turismo series, Burnout takes its cues from NASCAR. You come partly to watch things go fast, but mostly to watch those fast things wreck horribly.
Burnout 3 removes that pesky feeling of being a bad person by making it all for pretend, as well as putting cars right back on the road, fully repaired, after they wreck. Just to give it that little bit of extra awesome, after you wreck, you get to curve your mangled chassis through the air in slow-mo in the hopes of clipping another competitor and wrecking them as well.
It’s simple fun, but it holds up well. The game still looks great, especially when the sparks are flying in slow motion and you’re trying to drop your trashed car on the guy right behind you.
Psychonauts
The best is last. Psychonauts never did well. People just never knew what to make of it, with its strange art style and genre-bending gameplay. The people who gave it a chance, however, gush over it as one of the best games of the decade.
The game takes place at a secret psychic summer camp for kids with paranormal abilities. You play Raz, a begoggled young acrobat who runs away from the circus to enroll the camp and become a genuine psychonaut. The counselors find you and call your dad to pick you up, but not before strange things start happening to you fellow campmates.
Psychonauts takes place half in the real world and half in the mental worlds of various characters around you. For instance, the organized mind of Special Agent Sasha Nein is represented by a perfect cube that you run on each side of as his repressed impulses come boiling out. The brain of someone suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, on the other hand, is a parlor with his two personalities playing a board game against each other, which you can scale down to and interact with on the level of individual game pieces, each with their own characters.
The game’s not perfect. It’s a hybrid between an old point-and-click adventure game and a Mario-style 3D platformer, and sometimes the platforming gets frustrating in later levels. Many Psychonauts veterans will froth with rage at the mere mention of any combination of the words “meat” and “circus.”
Still, look at the opening cutscene. If you’re not utterly charmed, I’ll buy a hat and eat it.
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