LogFAQs > #976967786

It's a lot like the WiiU (though not as extreme) in that it had a solid library of really high-quality games, but not all that many of them. Notably, that was an era when JRPG's were big, and it had very, very few of those (though, again, Tales of Symphonia and Paper Mario TTYD are still highly regarded despite being less than numerous), which kept it from really thriving. That's actually a big part of why you struggle to think of third-party titles that we still care about: JRPG's have fallen out of vogue, and those made up a solid chunk of the PS2's success.

Still, I agree that it's a quietly underrated console. People generally won't actively disparage it aside from pointing out sales, but it's kind of tacitly accepted that it had a substantial number of games that are now considered classics, without many people overtly giving it credit for that.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

I did play GC version years later and it was graphically a gen ahead of the ps2 version almost

This is something a lot of people seem to have forgotten. Every system Nintendo's released since the GC has been dunked on for not being as powerful as its contemporaries, but there was a very substantial power gap between the PS2 and the GC/Xbox that didn't stop it from becoming the best-selling console ever, let alone within its gen. The ecosystem of the console industry is now very different in that the vast majority of third-party releases are multiplat, which makes parity a lot more important to avoid being excluded from such releases, but the bottom line is still that having a good library matters more than specs in terms of overall success (hence the DS outsold the PSP 2:1 and the 3DS utterly demolished the Vita).

Metalsonic66 posted...

It also had a fuckin' handle

I don't know why I like that handle so much, given that I can't think of a single scenario where it would actually be useful (99% of the time, it stays in place, and if I am transporting it, it's either a short enough distance that a handle isn't necessary, or it's long enough that it's going in a larger bag or something), but I really like the handle.