Nero D. Ace

ah, didn't know things were that rough around here. i stopped showing by when college started and right after that, i got my corporate job. i just now got time to breathe and it's been 8 years. crazy.

Been good, haha. I was watching the new Code Geass movie the other day and realised I was way too old to talk about it with any of the new gen bois and girls. I also remembered that it was someone from here who got me into code geass in the first place so just came to see if anyone was still around. Didn't expect the massive overhaul to the site lol.

Jesus, it's been years. What'd i miss?

A) In the very first line, I said "Sword Art Online - The Animation was a disappointment to me." It was my personal express opinion that the show is highly over-rated. It's not the worst anime ever but it certainly by no means deserves all the mindless praise it gets either. I deliver bashing where bashing is due. If a developer/producer/director fail to deliver a product that is anything less than the highest quality that they could offer, you can be sure that I will be there jamming my foot up their ass. I expect the same thing to happen to me when I do the same. Imagine a world where a bad product existed and only good reviews and ratings were allowed for it with all the bad critiques brushed aside. Imagine if you were the most honest to god citizen against piracy in the world and you had a chance between buying a Blu Ray set of Sword Art Online or something else. Now think if all of them had only good ratings viz. the good ratings allowed by the company. How would you be able to make an informed purchase. Informed purchases are not only the right but also the duty of a good consumer. C) I say that these characters have done this shit before which is to say they've finished the game with their friends and then quit. When they return, the world is highly different from what they remember and much larger on account of the expansion pack. Sure, they may have some knowledge but it IS a new world hence, the experience of adventure. Also, even in .Hack, you watched mostly veteran players go about their daily activities. I rather enjoyed Signs. The latest CGI movie and the Twilight thingamajig were the ones that annoyed me. D) Defending SAO as a fan is fine with me. Lord knows I've done much of the same in my days. However, it does NOT change the fact that the production company lost their overall vision for the show really quick. I know because I was watching it on a week by week basis. I saw the first episode, got hyped, download a PDF of the light novel, read the descriptions of the episode and waited for Episode 2. Episode 2 revealed that they weren't following the first book down to the letter but instead doing it in chronological order. Even if it were a pure romance show, I wouldn't have minded it. The problem was that it could never decide what kind of show it wanted to be. Season 2 was basically the most prime Disney storyline ever, a grand quest in a new land to save a damsel and they fucked that up as well. How? Again, by glossing over the interesting parts like the adventure and the character development in real-time in lieu of romance scenes with his fake sister, something which again, doesn't amount to anything. I'm sorry, but SAO - all 26 episodes are bad. Individually or as batches of episodes, they MIGHT hold up but as a cohesive whole, they lack anything to keep it together.

Okay, I just wanna get something off my chest before I start off on this one. Sword Art Online - The Animation was a disappointment to me. A HUGE friggin disappointment. When I'd first heard the premise, I was really excited about it. I mean - an MMO virtual world in which players get trapped for good, unable to log out, permadeath and the only way to get out is reaching the top most floor of the tower. It was gold. It sounded like .Hack but better. In reality, it was so much worst and it primarily came down to a few HUGE problems the show had - 1) Incoherent Vision When I was watching it, half the time, I didn't know if it was a love story, an epic story or a survival story. It got that muddled up. The show rapidly shifted between scenes that illustrated death of players in virtual worlds to shots of moe characters. And later on, it shifted from the MMO feature entirely. I mean, yeah - they were still IN an MMO but they could have been in just another generic fantasy universe for all that mattered. 2) Pacing Now the prime reason that *I* still watched the show after the first 8 episodes was the fight sequences because honestly, they were really fucking cool. I mean, REALLY FUCKING COOL. But they kinda effed up again because you had to sit through some pretty generic shit just to watch these 3 minute scenes. 3) The Main Character This guy is bad-ass This guy is lame The ratio of lame:bad-ass is WAY TOO HIGH. I swear, there were some moments when I didn't know whether I was supposed to be impressed or baffled by his actions. OKAY, NOW LET'S GET TO LOG HORIZON! WHY!? BECAUSE IT'S THE SHOW THAT SWORD ART ONLINE SHOULD HAVE BEEN!!! "Eat shit, SAO." Seriously, I mean seriously, just hear me out here, okay? I'm gonna do a constrast thingy with this - 1) So there's only 3 episodes out so far but already you can see that they had a proper vision with this show. The characters are reasonably well defined, they aren't complete idiots and they actually act like they've been playing the game for a lot of years. All 3 main characters were veterans in the MMO long ago and left when they had finished it. They come back when an expansion is announced (which I think basically doubles the map size and make VR possible) and discover they can't log out ("OMFG! Wha I do?!"). They try to get their bearing on things and regroup with their old friends from the game to assess the situation. But wait, if players die in the game, do they die in real life too? FUCK NO! Right at the beginning of Episode 2, they clear that out. You die, you respawn. It's as simple as that. And personally, I think it makes more of an impact than the permadeath from SAO. It makes the reason for Player Killings much more plausible rather than just "Gamers are violent and will kill if they can get away with it". 2) The pacing is done brilliantly. They do just enough exposition to keep you informed on current events while still moving the adventure along on a steady pace. Also - ADVENTURE! An MMO which is up to you to explore is an adventure and SAO just didn't give it a shit about that. They glossed over all the adventuring bits in flashbacks and in-between episodes so they could focus on more shots like these - Log Horizon is all - EFF THAT CRAP! Which isn't to say that it doesn't do character development. In fact, the character development happens DURING the adventure while covering new ground and exploring new areas, NOT SITTING IN AN INN AND TALKING! 3) Oh man, the Main Character. Okay, confession time. He's THIS type of character- WAIT WAIT WAIT. Hear me out here. Sure we've seen this type done to death already. The cool character who knows all there is to know until *plot device* happens. The master strategist. The all-knowe - you get my point. I won't say that this show does something DRASTICALLY different with this type of character but think about it, it's an MMO setting. This is EXACTLY the kind of main character that you WANT. Someone who's unlocked all achievements, helps other people finish quests, explores new dungeons. I mean, SAO was basically real life in a game form but Log Horizon is still a game to some extent and the characters realise that. Enemies have agro patterns, Not every player is a sword-wielding knight. You need support classes and defense classes and tanks and buffs and MOAR MMO STUFF!!! I mean, just take a look at this combo - MINOR BATTLE SPOILER FROM EPISODE 3 - Debuff Enemy Buff Ally Assassinate! So Yeah That's it I'm done now Go watch Log Horizon. Seriously. I mean It MAY turn to shit later but its good right now. Okay, How's this? As a final treat, Just listen to this bad-ass J Rock OP. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb5srfa8YFc

This might be a chance to get rid of some of my inventory - Game I'm Trading - 2x Castle Crashers - http://store.steampowered.com/app/204360/ At this point, I'm willing to take any offer to be rid of these.

Borderlands 2 - Psycho Pack. I usually don't get DLC unless it's an expansion pack but god damn, this character just looks so fun to play as. That said, the only other thing I got was Borderlands 2 itself as well as the Gold upgrade for Civ 5. This summer sale was really meh to me. Hope the XMas one is better.

So I wanna start off by saying that if it hadn't been for Dragon Ball Z, I would've never gotten into Japanese animation. I'm not just saying it as a "what-if" scenario. I'm serious when I say that DBZ was my entry into everything shounen action, and then shounen drama, and some shoujo drama and currently, seinen. The thing is ... where I live, you usually have the same foreign TV shows/cartoons on continuous re-run alongside the local daily soap operas. Basically, it sucks. You either HAVE TO watch these things or give up TV. And you don't just give up TV in the first 20 years of your life. This shit is vital. So, when I was 13ish ... SOMEHOW, a branch of Toonami found it's way here and they introduced 2 new shows - Cardcaptor Sakura and Dragon Ball Z, one a magical girl anime and the other, classic shounen action. Both shows appealed to me from the beginning itself, as they brought forward a new type of culture and tropes I wasn't used to before. I mean, kids doing shit other than just whining and waiting for parents to solve their shit, flashy beam attacks, new music types ... I was sold for life then and there. So when they both got cancelled about half way through, I got pissed off and started looking for another way to finish the shows - online streaming and eventually, downloading. But then, I started getting into new shows - Bleach, Naruto, One Piece and a separate channel called Animax launched that specialized in Japanese anime, where I watched the first Fullmetal Alchemist and Ghost Hunter (YuYu Hakusho). And a few years ago, I started getting bored as shit from them. Naruto and Bleach had started strong but unlike DBZ and Ghost Hunter, they were refusing to end, which was a good thing at first, but later on, the drop in quality and design decisions made them unbearable to watch. FMA: Brotherhood had been good albeit with a poor start, but I was getting interested in different "types" of shows now, ones that had a fixed 13/26 episode format and were mostly original animations. These shows, like UNGO had a fixed plot line and followed a pace of their own, giving the production company a lot more freedom. TLDR; I started my anime spree with shounen anime - Dragon Ball Z and moved up to Bleach and Naruto, as well as types of Seinen and Shoujo. A few years ago, I started getting bored of the Shounen mentality. Sure, One Piece had still kept me interested but I'd attributed it to the fact that I had become a fanboy of it's author Eiichiro Oda. And on my 21st birthday, I became highly convinced that I was - "growing too old for this shit now." Blah, maybe I was. Shounen Jump had been making really cliche stuff for a while now and Naruto/Bleach were in an all time slump for me. The only reason I was still reading them (because watching was too painful) was to discuss it's shitty-ness with fellow readers. But then, the day before yesterday, I was tired after finishing a major design document and wanted to watch something to take a break. I was in the mood for anime but had seen all the good shows that came out this year. Also, I'm reaching my bandwidth limit so I needed mini MKV's to download. I went to some mini MKV site and found that the new Hunter X Hunter series was up to 80 episodes. Reasoning that this was as good a time as any to marathon it, considering everyone had been telling me how awesome it is, and given that each episode was 50 MB a pop, I started the torrent. Within 2 hours, I was deep into the show and had just blown my "too old for this" theory to smithereens. Granted, I'm a god damn fanboy for One Piece. Then why is it that I can enjoy a show that's based on something 13 friggin years old that was made for my older self? Could it be that the shounen action genre itself isn't dead? But it's just the quality that has severely dropped? (Apart from One Piece, of course.) I'm 30 episodes into this show and I gotta say, this show brings back the feeling that I had when I first got into Naruto/DBZ/Bleach/One Piece. That boy-ish charm combined with the moments of human disparity, which is overcome through hard work and willpower! Granted, HXH got generic at times, there's a whole bunch of cliches here that would've flied 13 years ago, but are now a bit hard-pressed against the new Shounen. But ... compared to new Shounen, there haven't been any hair-pulling moments for me yet in HXH. So, here's where the ANAL-ASS-IS happens! I'm gonna take parts of Hunter X Hunter and compare it with other Shounen stuff, citing the reasons why I think that part is better than it's counterpart in other shows. I'm gonna try and include as many counter-parts as possible based on the shows I've already seen. I really wanna deconstruct this really carefully, so I'm gonna make one point at a time and only after I've thought over it carefully. So, here's point number ONE - PACIFISM -I'm a lover, not a fighter I like my main characters to be pacifists sometimes. And this matters a lot in Shounen anime. Most of these characters are in their teens and mighty inexperienced, as well as prone to violent acts of anger at times. Learning when to not be angry is a critical part of their character development and an important phase in their journey. However, sometimes pacifism is exaggerated to the point of "hair-pulling", a term which I will use to illustrate the point at which the viewer will start insulting the character for being a Gandhi prick. This point is usually reached when the character is - A) Really really adamant about not fighting. The character is unbelievably dumb. In most cases, B is the result of "hair-pulling". Take the following cases, for example - (Warning- I'm not gonna put spoiler tags around every event. For your safety, if you haven't reached the following episodes for the following shows, leave or risk being spoiled - DBZ - Ain't nothing I can spoil that the internet hasn't already Naruto Shippuden - 220 Bleach - 316 One PIece - 408 Hunter X Hunter (2011) - 23) Let's start off with the first one I remember - 1. GOHAN - DRAGON BALL Z This kid ... This f*@!ing kid! Son Gohan, child of Son Goku, main protagonist of Dragon Ball Z holds distinction for having simultaneously - the most bad-ass moment of the show as well as the most "hair-pulling" moment. After being beaten all around by Perfect Cell, an android whose sole purpose is to become the strongest and eliminate those who aren't, Gohan finally becomes the most powerful character in the show at the time after Android # 16 is mercilessly destroyed by Cell. After gaining that immense strength, Gohan proceeds to return the favor 10 times over and beats the ever loving shit outta Cell. Seriously, look at the guy's face after being punched in the guy - So the heroes are cheering now that they're finally winning. Gohan's ready to chalk up a win for the Z fighters and what does he do ... he let's the bug-man live, refusing to kill him. That's right, Gohan went Gandhi. At the worst possible time. He didn't have to kill him, but god dammit kid! Put him in some kind of phantom zone! At the very least, take out the obligatory bomb he has inside him! And sure enough, that last part comes back to bite him in the ass. Cell starts a self destruct sequence, Goku pulls an obligatory savior trope, Cell resurrects stronger than before and now they are right back where they started. I'm not particularly mad about this one partly because it leads into one of my favorite anime moments in history - and partly because, hey, THIS is what Gohan is and always has been - the Pacifist. While his dad has always been eager to fight and become the best, Gohan has always, from DAY ONE shown that he will fight only and only to protect his loved ones, and never for glory or self-worth. As a result, the hair-pulling-ness fades away after a while and the score for this comes down to ... 5/10 2. NARUTO - NARUTO ... I'm not gonna include an image of the guy. If you know him good. If not, I'll describe him - ORANGE clothes, BLONDE hair, WHISKERS, simpleton. Now, in the early stages, Naruto would solve problems in one simple way - standing up to the guy who's causing problems. Didn't matter how strong he was. Just stand up to him and hit as hard as possible. It was standard, it was classic and it was fun to watch at times when the little tyke would start improvising mid-fight. He was basically a god damn fighter. Then some shit happened, his sensei died and he ended up training to face the guy who killed him not just for revenge/justice but for protecting the village. He goes through some deep meditation shit and emerges as something of a Buddha - So this results in a major fight between that guy, called Pain and Naruto, which ends in a rather unique way - they both accept each other. Naruto can never forgive Pain for killing his sensei but he knows that killing Pain will just cause an endless cycle of death all over again, just as had happened so many times. It's a rather interesting moment. For a change, a fight ends so anti-climatically. Not with the hero standing victorious over the villain, but with the hero and villain reminiscing about all that they've lost. This moment wasn't hair-pulling to me at all although other's reactions were different. No, the hair-pull for me came at this moment - For me, this ... THIS ... is the lowest point in Naruto history. After an intense fight with Pain and achieving a sense of enlightenment, Naruto decides that the best way to make peace in the world is by letting anyone with pent-up-anger beat the ever loving shit out of him. The whole section was a giant hair-pull for me, enhanced by the fact that the girl beating him up wasn't that endearing of a character at the moment she's introduced. There's no particular reason for her to beat him up. She's beating him up because he's asking her to beat him up. All the while that she should be doing what she came to do. ... The initial pacifism was handled well, but this moment was probably THE point where I started thinking - "Well, Naruto's shit now. What else can I read?" 8/10 TO BE CONTINUED ... What do you think about this analysis? What moments/points do you agree/disagree on? Lemme know! I really wanna gauge the shounen meter from different sources.

This made my day. Imma go watch YGO Abridged again.

oh yeah, don't get me wrong. I'm always, ALWAYS a fan of japanese games finally getting localized, even if they take years. And i've been following NIS America for years. During the PS2 era, they had be hooked with their SRPG's, Atlus had my "social" JRPG's and Square was ... well, Square. (FF-10, 12, not bad.) I've finished the fan translation and I'm happy to say that it was perfectly edited. It doesn't take much for a grammar nazi like me to start pointing and stuff and that pretty much didn't happen with the game. And yeah, from a financial standpoint, even though NIS has always been THE company for localization even when the games themselves always scored 6's and 7's in the West, it would be too much of a risk to start translating 2 games at the same time. WARNING: INSANELY SPECULATIVE CONTENT TO FOLLOW. <SANE PEOPLE - STAY AWAY> I do have one little gripe about it. It's nothing serious and the conditions of it happening weren't that high to begin with but the fan translators had been posting updates about their progress for a long time, almost a year ago, i think. And I find it really hard to believe that NIS just got the idea for localizing this title in the past month. Now, maybe for some internal reasons, they couldn't but right now, I just have this thought in my head as to why they couldn't "license" the fan translation. It's not like it hasn't done before. Such was the case for Ys: Oath in Felghana by XSEED Games. I mean, these fans had been working on a project all this time off their own accord for free. Again, this is pure speculation and I have NO details about the conditions, but couldn't they have come to an agreement after looking at some sample builds? I mean, these fans really outdid themselves. I saw not a single kanji through the whole game. Everything from the dialogues to the pictures had been completely translated. And this would've given the home team a bit more speed in finishing the game. Heck, they could've even asked the fans to not release the PSP patch and they would've been fine with it. They've mentioned that if they were ever given a C&D after announcement of an official port, they would've gladly gone with it. Even now, they're just asking people to support the game by buying the VITA port. But then again, I don't have details. For all I know, they haven't started the translation yet. Maybe they're already done. Maybe they were done months ago and waiting for the right time to announce it viz. in release with the anime. Like I said, just my personal speculation.

I've actually got mixed feelings about this, surprisingly. A while ago, I posted about how the anime adaptation had made me an instant fanboy of the series to the point that I got my PSP (which I seriously consider to be my worst purchase in life) fixed, imported a copy of the Japanese version, mounted the ISO, applied a fan translation patch, and played through the whole game. (And what a game it is!) So the details are a bit clearer now and it seems that right now, this release only applies to the first Danganronpa game, not the second one, which released 2 years ago. Now, hear me out here. The first game came out FOUR years ago on the PSP, for which the price is really cheap, even with importing costs. It probably cost me around 25 dollars. This SAME game is now coming out on the PSVITA for a retail price of 40 dollars as a stand alone while it's japanese cousin will be having BOTH the first and the second game bundled together for about the same price in yen. Now, maybe I'm just too used to being conservative with money when buying games, but this deal ... just isn't any good to me. In fact, something inside me makes me feel that i SHOULD be happy that any kind of VITA visual novel is getting localized officially but ... c'mon - 40 bucks for a 4 year old game on a device that's barely holding it's own? When a fan translation already exists for the SAME game on the previous iteration of that device? The FAN inside me tells me to buy a VITA and buy the game to support the localization for the second one, and that's really what bums me out the most. I AM a fan. I liked your game. I played it. I paid for it. Sure, I got someone else to translate it for me, but you got my money in the end. So then WHY do I need to purchase it again a few months from now and HOPE and PRAY that enough people bought it so that the company will maybe feel like localizing the second one? I really, really don't like the VITA right now. When I buy a device solely to play games, I expect it to give me a kind of experience I can only get on that device and right now, I count maybe 5 games that can do that - Gravity Rush, Danganronpa, Soul Sacrifice, the new Ys and some thing. The 3DS has around 20 different titles that'll give me that experience. In fact, a few months ago, I was ready to buy a 3DS until I heard of ONE game that was coming exclusively to the VITA - Persona 4 Golden. A game I had already played before. And finished. Twice. The nostalgia of playing the same game again on the portable device was the only reason I didn't completely cross the Vita out. So yeah, while the FAN in me wants to get the VITA, the logic side tells me that the 3DS is far better, just like the DS was in the previous gen. But Imma try and be positive about this for a change. Maybe in the next 6-8 months, the VITA will finally get it's killer app. I already have a PSP and was able to play the excellently translated fan version simply because I was too impatient for the anime. But yeah, if any of you HAVE a VITA, then since it can't run ISO files off a memory stick just yet, I'd advise and BEG you guys to buy Demon Gaze when it comes out this fall. Cuz you can be sure that if they don't sell enough copies in the States and Europe, an official version of the second game is NEVER gonna happen.

Aight, ladies and gentlemen. It's that time of the year. People can argue console specs and exclusives till hell freezes over but this event, this majestic, glorious event that is the Steam Summer Sale is where the PC Master Race truly comes to glory. Valve starts putting discounts on things like there's no tomorrow and during this craze, I begin to understand how women (and some men) in shopping malls surrounded by 50 and 75% off stickers must feel like. SO, LET'S MAKE THIS THREAD THE GO-TO PLACE FOR STEAM PURCHASES! Basically, 3 rules - 1) You see a game that you've played/heard of/let's played/reviewed with a reasonable discount. 2) You think that game is good and people need to play it. 3) You let EVERYONE know that that game is going, going and gone and list out the following - Name - Original Price - Sale Price - Time Left to Purchase - In addition, Steam also has community votes for 3 random games every 8 hours at the end of which, the highest voted game gets a discount. If you want a game to get voted, let us know and WE'LL ALL GO AND VOTE FOR YOUR GAME, YO! Aight, Imma start off with the following - Hotline Miami $10 $2.5 ~40 hours Thomas Was Alone $10 or 15 $2.5 ~40 hours Counter Strike GO $15 $5.?? ~6 hours Now I know Kotaku is doing their own Moneysaver thingamajig, but I really wanna know what games YOU GUYS think need to be bought and are at an all time reasonably low price to get it. Capiche? Aight, let's get this thing rolling.

Danganronpa Danganronpa Danganronpa. I just love saying that word. Much like Chimichanga. One of those words that's just fun to say, I suppose. Okay, so this season has been pretty barren for me. At the start, I found 2 shows which I decided to watch all the way through - Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan for the non japanese folks), and Gargantua. While I'm only passively following Shingeki no Kyojin, since I've been reading the manga since the past 2 years, I've dropped Gargantua. It started off with some promise, but the plot quickly dissolved away and while some people have said that it's more about the theme and characters than the actual plot, I gotta say - that main female lead annoys the shit outta me with her classic tropes. No way am I gonna be able to stand her for another minute. (I'm very opinionated about this. I will suggest that you try it out for yourself. Maybe I'm just getting too old for anime now.) So then, I was stuck all summer without a single show to actively follow. Until ... A pal of mine redirected me to a torrent to the first episode of this show Danganronpa - The Animation I saw three things about this that made me decide that THIS was gonna be my anime of the season - 1) There's a bear who talks like Teddie from Persona 4. And he's EVIL! 2) It's based off a visual novel in which the director of Persona 4 was involved. 3) The plot - 15 kids in a school. Trapped forever. Only way out - kill someone without being found out. If you do, you get to leave, everyone else dies. If you get caught, YOU die. *le squeal* Right at this point, I was sold. I didn't care how they adapted the show to the visual novel. I was fucking sold. Instant Fanboy. But then I saw the first episode and the execution and the screenplay and the music and the animation and ... whoa ... You fellas need to watch this. Push this up to the top of your list. I'm so excited for this that I wanted to play the game then and there. Unfortunately, like a lot of Japanese games, it was only released in Japan and only for the PSP. My PSP is in kind of a bad shape with a somewhat broken screen, but I googled around a bit and I found this awesome group of fans called Project Zetsubou who had translated the first game COMPLETELY and were on work on the second one as well as the prequel novel. You can visit their site here - http://danganronpa.wordpress.com/ I'm gonna replace my screen tomorrow and am already downloading the translation patch. This thing is gonna be my religion until I move onto the next Ace Attorney. I'm also gonna start an "Episode Journal" for this thing. In that, what I'm basically gonna do is watch an episode, take notes about what I think at specific points, like how the animation quality is holding up, is they're putting in needless filler and how the pacing is going and compile it into my usual "wall". I guess it's kind of like a detailed review with my personal opinion behind it. I know first episodes aren't exactly the best impressions and visual novels don't always make good tv shows (Fucking Little Busters is proof of that. God, how I slogged through all those episodes waiting for what the fans called a great twist only to find out all the good shit is gonna happen in Season 2. FML.) but I'm willing to be optimistic about this one. Hell, Stein;s Gate and Higurashi are gonna be at the top of my list for a long time and they were based off VN's as well. What are you still waiting around for? GO! WATCH DANGANRONPA! danganronpa danganronpa EDIT: Apologies! Apologies! I'd neglected to mention Hataraku Maou Sama (The Devil is a Part Timer!) This one ended a while back and I forgot all about it cuz of my short term memory. Wait ... which topic am I in? Was I writing about Dark Souls again? Oh yeah! Devil, part timer! That shit is awesome too. Watch it!

ooooooh boy. *deep breath* Here's a "personal" top 10 - (Entire list follows after that) (Note: These are PS2 Exclusive or at the most XBox exclusive. PC games may not show up on this list, unless they were really really optimized.) 10) God Hand I can't say enough about this game. It's so frustratingly hard that it's easy to give up on. It has a meter which increases difficulty if you play well and decreases it if you start sucking. It's really rather unique. Something about it just kept bringing me back to this fun-as-bats beat-em-up. 9) Shadow of Destiny/Memories yh 8) Prince of Persia: Warrior Within yj 7) Okami h 6) God of War 2 j 5) Devil May Cry 3 j 4) Rogue Galaxy Star Wars! This is Star Wars, i tell you! In JRPG form! With action combat! Lush worlds! Beautifully detailed graphics! Interesting characters! Definitely deserves to be in the top 4. 3) Ico & Shadow of the Colossus I played the PS3 version but the PS2 version should be the same, albeit less in HD. These adventure games have an interesting gameplay mechanic unique to each game and the first one makes an escort mission entirely enjoyable! The second one is much more epic in scale but has a heart felt story to go with it. 2) Persona 4 This is probably the BEST modern JRPG to date. It has all the elements of a dating sim, a dungeon crawler and a time manager, bundled into a fun package, with interesting characters, a nice murder story to solve and tonnes of side activities. It took a lot of effort to bounce it down to number 2 from the top spot but that top spot is epic in it's own way ... 1) Metal Gear Solid 2/3 They are both FUCKING AMAZING games. I couldn't decide which one was better, so I just put the whole Metal Gear Solid franchise at the top of my list. They are unique tactical stealth espionage action games and they are just so much damn fun to play ... MGS 2) You know how they say Spec Ops: The Line did that social commentary on it's genre? Well, MGS2 did it as well, waaaaay before in the early 2000's. MGS2 has a certain post-modern theme about it that really shows itself well into the game and makes you start to question your own commands on the controller. It's not something that can be described, you need to play for yourself. MGS 3) What is true patriotism? Thousands of hollywood flicks have come and gone trying to answer that, yet nothing has done as marvelous a job as MGS3: Snake Eater. Probably the more emotional game among the 2, this game had an ending that almost had me on the verge of tears with the screenplay, the music and the one action that I, myself HAD to do to continue. Again, indescribable. Needs to be experienced. Rest of the list - Ace Combat Zero: Belkan War (Best. Flight. Game. EVER!) Beyond Good and Evil (Good game, not great, worth the experience. ) Bully (Rockstar, Open World, School, enjoy.) Castlevania: Lament of Innocence (Not as great as Symphony of the Night but a good 3D rendition of Castlevania) Dark Cloud Dark Cloud 2 (Really under rated JRPG's) Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition (The normal edition is damn near unbeatable!) Dirge of Cerberus (If you're a FF 7 hard core fan) Disgaea: Hour of Darkness Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories (Under rated SRPG's with a wacky story and fucken awesome gameplay) Dragon Quest VIII (Artwork by Akira Toriyama. 'Nuff said.) Drakengard 1,2 (Dragons, yo! And you get to ride em!) Final Fantasy - PS2 (But it's already on your lise, so ciao!) Gitaroo Man (Tonnes of fun!) God Hand (Hard as coconuts! Hardest game on the system!) God of War 1/2 (Hold! devils! Pot of Tea! Hold devils! Pot of tea Mulan!) Gran Turismo 4 (Damn good graphics. Pretty good racing sim as well.) Grand Theft Auto (This speaks for itself) Grandia (You know the drill ... under rated JRPG) Guilty Gear XX (Only fighting game I like playing on the PS2 anymore) Guitar Hero: Metallica (Only if you haz the guitar controller) Hitman: Blood Money (the last "good" hitman game ) Ico (If you have SOTC in your list, put this with it.) Jak & Daxter franchise (Naughty Dog, yo) Mega Man X Collection (I personally recommend the X franchise. It's fucking amazing.) Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks (The ONLY good MK for the PS2) Okami (Ahhh, the memories ...) Prince of Persia franchise (especially the second one!) Psychonauts (I regret not playing this sooner ...) Ratchet and Clank (Insomniac, yo) Resident Evil 4 (Granted, GC also had it. but the PS2 version was better) Rez (for some reason, it's fucking amazing. I never got it though) Rogue Galaxy (fucking ... tears ...) (also, HUGE UNDER RATED!) Shadow Hearts franchise (under rated, yet again.) Shadow of Destiny (dat story ...) Shin Megami Tensei - EVERYTHING! (They're ALL good. Atlus doesn't know HOW to make bad games!) Persona 3 (MUST PLAY!) Persona 4 (DEFINITELY MUST PLAY!) Sly Cooper franchise (Sucker Punch, yo) Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (Pretty good, wasn't expecting it to be.) The Suffering (Midway, yo) Suikoden 3 (4 and 5 suck.) Tales of the Abyss (Best Tales game, in my opinion so far) Tomb Raider - ALL! Splinter Cell - ALL! Zone of the Enders 2nd Runner (First one sucks.)