PS2 gaming

So was shopping the other day for the fourth Haibane Renmei dvd. Just had a serious yen for the end of the series since I had spent a chunk of time lately looking at some other sketch stuff that Yoshitobe Abe (the artists name, I think) had done (believe he also did Serial Experiments Lain, but too lazy to go dig through my dvds to check).

Couldn't find a copy of it, or any of the other half-dozen anime dvds I've been on the look out for lately. Most of them are late dvds in series that came out a while ago, some of them are the first dvds in series I'd like to watch, some I keep looking for but don't think have actually been released in the US yet.

So instead I went video game shopping. Wasn't intentional, store I went into I actually went into looking for dvds, but they had video games and their entire selection was on clearance. So I picked up Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King and Suikoden Tactics, both for the PS2.

DQ8 is... Wow. Other then the fact that the main character looks disturbingly like college age Gohan from Dragonball Z and Angelo keeps reminding me of grown up Trunks from the same series, neither of which is surprising because the character design was done by Akira Toriyama who did the Dragon Ball (should that be one word or two, too lazy to check) shows. I mean... The game is just soo cool. Hard to describe why in ways that make sense. Just the feel of the game really. It is 'old skool'. It reminds me of old console games, RPGs that were all about story and character and not about flashy FMV sequences or the poly count on the models. The only RPG that has made me really be this interested in it for a while is 'Tales of Symphonia' for my Gamecube (which I have played all the way through at least 5 times and am on my way through yet again to get some of the last few titles/costumes for people).

It also comes with the Final Fantasy 12 demo, which I really haven't been interested in enough yet to look at. Another FF game... Meh.

Suikoden Tactics on the other hand... Very cool game in my opinion, but unless you like both the Suikoden series (specificaly Suikoden 4 which it is loosely based around) and tactical style games you may want to give it a pass. It is still a cool game, I am very much in the liking of it. But it won't have the wide appeal that DQ8 will for people. If you are interested in the Suikoden series, I'd instead recommend trying to find a copy of the two PSX games (Suikoden 1 and Suikoden 2) or Suikoden 3 instead. Or wait for Suikoden 5 to come out in a couple months.

My other console game recommendation, and probably the next one I'll pick up, is Grandia 3. The original Grandia game was one of those old school sort of games. Happy, sad, drama, romance, adventure, mystery, very cool game. I have it for my PSX and it is a wonderful game. Grandia 2 I actualy prefer over the original, I just like the character designs better even if the story was a little better in the first one. I have it for my Dreamcast. Grandia Extreme was a dungeon crawl that came out a bit ago and really wasn't that great, it was mostly just you fighting through a dungeon for reasons I never actually heard explained by anyone I knew who owned it. Grandia 3 should be a beautiful, fun game. I like the parts of the combat system it is carrying on, but don't know much about the story of it.

Anyways, this is a great year for PS2 rpg lovers. Lots of RPGs coming out right now, most good, some merely mediocre. It is kind of like the last year of the PSX with all the rpgs that came out then. So many games that have been in development for a while are coming out now since the PS3 is on the horizon for release apparently later this year.