The 25 Best PlayStation 2 Games of All Time

The 2000s was a decade where the last vestige of old game design meant that studios could successfully churn sequel after sequel nearly annually without ever really taking any dips in quality. Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal is the third game in the cartoon shooter series, although it’d be easy to forget; there were 10 installments of Ratchet & Clank from 2002 to 2009 alone.But for the PS2 era of the franchise, Up Your Arsenal is a clear pinnacle, with the biggest assortment of ridiculous gadgets, drivable vehicles, and even a newly introduced online multiplayer mode. The race to be the face of Sony’s system led to many potential mascots popping up during this period, but of the lot only the duo of Ratchet & Clank remains, having just reappeared in recent years with one of the best PS5 games currently available. Trekking back to this older entry makes it easy to see why the series has such staying power.

Although the PS2 had an outsized share of blockbuster series, it wasn’t lacking for weird little games for freaks. Katamari Damacy is the ultimate example of an idea so bizarrely surreal that its mere existence feels like some kind of corporate prank.The premise sees a god-like being, the King of All Cosmos, accidentally destroying all the stars and moons while drunk; it’s up to his son, the diminutive Prince, to gather enough resources to rebuild the celestial bodies. Those resources consist of literally everything on Earth, with players rolling a very sticky magical ball around each stage, sucking up whatever’s in their path as the junk heap grows. It begins with small things like paper clips and crayons, but before long, the prince is steamrolling houses and cities to bring back the moon. Katamari Damacy never really starts to make sense, and that’s to its credit. The cult favorite doesn’t need to concede to normalcy when its grip is more than strong enough to suck in even the most unwilling observers.

Everyone’s got their favorite fighting game. For arcade heads and Super Nintendo aficionados, it was some version of Street Fighter II; for early adopters of Sega’s doomed platforms Saturn and Dreamcast (and later Xbox), it might be Dead or Alive. For PlayStation fans, it almost certainly Tekken.Namco’s 3D action series has always been a technological showstopper, usually appearing first in arcades before being ported to PlayStation, where the power of the disc-based system shined with all its polygonal glory. Tekken 5 was the second mainline entry for PS2, and cranked everything great about the franchise to the max. With 32 characters from across the martial arts spectrum and one of the soapiest stories in gaming, it’s pound-for-pound the best fighting game on PlayStation 2, and one of the best of all time.

After making what might’ve been the single best game for the first PlayStation with Metal Gear Solid, creator Hideo Kojima aimed to up the ante and cinematic flourish of his subsequent sequels — each in some way intended (but failing) to be his last. While Metal Gear Solid 2 mostly rehashed the story and controls of its predecessor, the prequel Snake Eater reinvented what a Metal Gear game could be.Following Naked Snake, the mentor and genetic father of the series’ original protagonist Solid Snake, Metal Gear Solid 3 forces players into a jungle-bound espionage mission where survival is paramount. Eating rations and wildlife replenishes stamina, and everything from bullet wounds to scorpion stings demand medical treatment in-menu. Long considered a favorite among fans, the game pared down some of the philosophical navel-gazing of its predecessor, but only just so. It remains a Kojima game through and through, where soap box pontificating about the nature of war brushes against villains who spit hornets and scantily clad spies flaunt their bodies to entice teenage appetites. But 20 years later, it’s an experience that’s still influencing how cinematic storytelling can be used in interactive media.

The origins of Resident Evil 4 are somewhat funny. After Sony emerged as the next big thing in gaming, pilfering Nintendo’s biggest franchises and third-party partnerships from under their nose, you’d think that Capcom’s horror franchise would make its big next-gen debut on the PS2. Except, it didn’t; Resident Evil 4 was one of a very select handful of mature-themed titles that found a home on Nintendo’s GameCube as part of a short-lived exclusivity deal — at least initially. About six months later, it arrived on PlayStation, where its sales vastly outpaced its maiden run thanks to the platform’s larger install base.Resident Evil 4 is seminal for many reasons. The first of the series to eschew the clunky, tanklike controls of the older entries, it helped popularized the over-the-shoulder, third-person shooting mechanics that are now standard in pretty much every action game of its ilk. It also moved away from zombies and claustrophobic urban environments in lieu of an eerie rural town in Spain. Destined to be endlessly remade and re-released, it’s generally considered a franchise peak, but its initial popularity was partially due to its arrival on PS2.

At the time of its release, there hadn’t been a game as terrifying as Silent Hill 2. While the big horror series of the time, Resident Evil, was trafficking in zombie-laden jump scares, Konami’s eerie opus invested more in an oppressive, somber atmosphere that left players feeling isolated and questioning every inch of their pixelated screen. Within the dense fog of the streets and alleys of Silent Hill, only the mangled flesh of Eldritch frights loomed, perpetually creeping from the borders of the mind to the screen itself.Set in the epicenter of American horror — rural Maine — the story follows James Sunderland, a man drawn to the idyllic town by a letter from his deceased wife. Hoping to find closure in their once-lakeside getaway, James’ story devolves into madness as aberrations begin creating physical manifestations of his personal trauma. Armed with just a flashlight and an unrelenting will, it’s up to the player to find a way to free themselves from the torment. Silent Hill 2 arrived at a point where horror games were evolving beyond the novelty of simple scares, weaving a more humanistic kind of horror, and still stands as one of the crown jewels of the genre — with a recently-released modern remake giving the game a fresh coat of paint. But the original holds up well, and remains a seminal example of how the immersive aspect of horror works just as well, if not better, in gaming than any other medium.

Although PlayStation is the kind of ecosystem that has it all, there are areas where it’s historically fallen short of the competition. Despite nailing its own takes on mascot platformers and RPGs, the specific experience of a fantasy adventure in the vein of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda eluded the first generation of Sony hardware, and much of the second. That is, until Ōkami arrived at the tail end of the PS2 generation.Steeped in Japanese mythology and folklore, Ōkami aimed to give non-Nintendo players their own version of a sweeping fantasy epic where exploration offers rewards in the form of new abilities and subtle storytelling beats. Its cel-shaded visuals give the game a vivid aesthetic that’s held up extremely well compared to more realistic games of the era, with the flourish of sumi-e ink painting that endemic to Ōkami’s Japanese roots.

The spiritual successor to Ico, Shadow of the Colossus took the ethereal tone and minimalist setting of Sony’s experimental puzzle adventure and imbued the journey with exponentially greater scope. Rather than escorting a damsel through the hallows of an abandoned castle, the game lets players take on the role of Wander, a stripped-down hero whose goal to slay the towering colossi feels insurmountable.While series like God of War would make an action spectacle out of ascending titanic bodies and slaying deities of the old world, Shadow of the Colossus bathes its violence in melancholy. The sixteen colossi roaming the environment don’t feel inherently evil or deserving of death, and their terrifying majesty feels in tune with the game’s natural world. Each behemoth requires a multi-part gauntlet to scale and slay; it’s an experience one could call a boss-rush, but there’s no urgency to race through its challenges. It’s an esoteric game where taking in the beauty is part of the fun, and felling each giant makes you feel equally bad as you do triumphant.

Final Fantasy may have gotten its start on Nintendo, but its biggest and most successful eras, from VII to X, were all exclusive crown jewels for PlayStation’s library. After a rapid-fire sequence of three ambitious games for PS1, the tenth main installment of Square’s legendary RPG franchise arrived in the very first year of the PS2, instantly cementing the platform as yet another must-have console for fans of role-playing games.The technological leap from IX to X was jaw-dropping, turning the once-text based narrative into a fully voiced cinematic epic. Each Final Fantasy has its own self-contained story and world, and the bright, colorful realm of Spira felt like a huge shift away from previous entries, which bounced between medieval settings and elevated sci-fi. With the ability to swap in the entire cast of characters at will into the expanded party during battle, its gameplay felt bigger and more strategic than ever; it’s turn-based systems representing a high-point for classic RPG standards right at the fulcrum of the genre where action-oriented styles began to take over.

It’s absolutely wild to think that Rockstar Games was able to develop not one, or two, but three full-length Grand Theft Auto games from 2001 to 2004, each exponentially more ambitious than the last. Compare that to today, where fans have waited 12 years for the latest installment, and it shows how the business of game development has changed entirely.The third PS2 entry, San Andreas, is in many ways the very best Grand Theft Auto has ever been. Taking its crime-movie trappings away from the mafioso world of previous games and positioning its story in a fictional facsimile of South Central LA, it opened the storytelling potential in incredible ways. The world of San Andreas is sprawling — seemingly impossible so for the time. With so many missions, side-quests, and mini-games to indulge in, outside of just cruising around listening to the radio, it feels endlessly playable. How so much content and artistry were packed into just a single game from 2004 remains a technical marvel. For many PlayStation 2 owners, Grand Theft Auto is the definitive game of the era — the one that’s soaked up the lion’s share of their time and memories sitting in front of the TV before the responsibilities of adulthood set in.

When you look back at all that the PlayStation 2 was able to accomplish, from hosting generational RPGs and action games to squeezing out logic-defying open worlds with hardware weaker than an iPhone 6, it’s a tall task to pick one game that exemplifies everything that made the console great. But, in fact, there is one game that not just shows what Sony was capable of then (and now), but feels like a perfect encapsulation of gaming culture of the 2000s. Santa Monica Studio’s God of War is that game, a product of its time that could’ve only existed at this distinct juncture.God of War is everything that defines the modern concept of a first-party PlayStation game. It’s heavy on cinematic storytelling, with cutscenes that play out like extended movies. Its action is top-notch, breathlessly weaving players through scripted set pieces with the scope that Hollywood execs could only dream of. But despite its film-like qualities, it remains definitively a video game — an experience that’s defined by verbs like run, jump, and punch. And, oh, what verbs they are.God of War II picks up after the first game where the disgraced Greek general Kratos has killed the titular god, Ares, and taken up his mantle despite his status as a non-deity. Betrayed and killed by Zeus, Kratos must fight his way out of the Underworld and turn back time, slaughtering his way through the Greek pantheon along the way. The story is profoundly juvenile; Kratos is the ultimate edgelord — driven entirely by hatred and rage, speaking only in grunts and menacing one-liners. Using the Chains of Chaos, his violent tendencies empower players to rip through swaths of foes and cinematically eviscerate mythological figures with extreme prejudice.What it lacks in maturity (but not mature content), it makes up for with some of the best action gameplay ever designed. Kratos’ story is silly, but works wonders as fuel for dynamic combat with a perpetually self-sustaining sense of urgency. Each action is punctuated by stylish glory kills, and the boss encounters stretch the limits of what players think will be possible in a game. These days, much of this in commonplace, but the scope and sheer entertainment value of God of War is the blueprint. As games inch ever closer toward becoming playable movies, its greatest teaching is that, no matter how showy things get, it all needs to be in service of the interactive experience. That’s why it’s a video game.