9 PS2 Games That Were So Stylish They Still Feel Cooler Than Most Modern Blockbusters

The PlayStation 2 released at the turn of the new millennium, where stylistic standards across the spectrum of entertainment were changing and evolving. While there were plenty of games in previous generations I would happily call “cool,” as a millennial myself, I can’t help but be drawn to the PS2’s particular flavor of cool. It’s what I grew up with, after all. It wasn’t just about mascot platformers or driving tanks anymore. The PS2’s games offered a tour of the entire coolness spectrum, with the library all but guaranteed to have at least one title that made you say, “Whoa, that’s cool.”

Obviously, things like coolness and style are heavily subjective. What you consider cool may be considered passé by others. For its part, though, I think the PS2’s library managed to get coolness down to a science. With a combination of novel game ideas and then next-gen graphical and UI design, it was able to bring to life all kinds of stylish ideas that previous generations could only conceptualize. If I were to make my own recommendations for a hypothetical gaming coolness hall of fame, these are the titles I would pick.

9 Gitaroo Man

Why Aren’t There More Guitar Warriors?

Okay, real question: why aren’t there more games about people battling with musical instruments? I don’t mean regular rhythm games, or games that involve clocking people upside the head with a guitar. I’m talking lightning-riding, power-of-rock-compelling, musical warfare. It feels like the most obviously cool thing anyone could think of, but to my immediate recollection, the only game that ever took a swing at the concept was Gitaroo Man.

Gitaroo Man is a head-to-head rhythm game in which you, as the titular hero, strum on your futuristic space guitar to launch concussive bolts of rock ‘n roll lightning at a series of similarly instrument-equipped space villains. The aesthetic is admittedly very strange, with big-headed characters and a pastel color palette, but the musical theming is what ties the whole thing together.

Our hero, U-1, is a total loser in his daily life, but in becoming Gitaroo Man, he becomes a hero with unshakable confidence in his own abilities. Call me a dork, but there are few things cooler than achieving self-actualization, moreso when said self-actualization is achieved via laying down some seriously hot licks.

8 Killer7

Like a Playable Tarantino Movie

The late 90s and early 2000s saw the rise in popularity of more experimental, auteur productions in entertainment, with the works of Quentin Tarantino like Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill springing to mind. Around that same time, gaming was seeing its own boom in experimental works out of Japan making their way westward in earnest for the first time. One game of this nature that understands its own coolness quite well is Killer7.

One of the landmark works of Goichi “Suda51” Suda, Killer7 is a game that to this day is kind of difficult to describe in words alone. It’s kind of like a first-person shooter, but also a puzzle game? The entire experience is suffused in a distinctive air that’s both unflappably stoic and yet somewhat tongue-in-cheek, with your squad of reality-defying assassins doing battle with both undead politicians and a group of Power Rangers wannabes.

Killer7 has some of the most striking cutscenes and dialogue moments of its time and since. I still regularly go back and watch the scene with the four politicians playing mahjong because it feels like a bit right out of a Tarantino movie, complete with an abrupt, bloody end.

7 Viewtiful Joe

“Beautiful” Plus “View” Equals “Viewtiful”

Speaking of film trends (and Power Rangers, for that matter), everyone loves a good superhero movie. Well before the MCU co-opted the entire genre, superhero movies always had their audience, even when they relied more on practical effects and rubber suits. Honestly, I think practical effects are cooler anyway, and I’m pretty sure Hideki Kamiya, director of Viewtiful Joe, agrees with me.

The first game developed by Clover Studio, Viewtiful Joe is a love letter to tokusatsu film and television like Godzilla and Kamen Rider. Our hero, Joe, is a regular schlub who likes movies too much, but when his girlfriend is dragged into the realm of film, he runs in after her, adopting a super-powered alias with the ability to directly control special effects like slo-mo and camera zooms.

The thesis statement behind Viewtiful Joe is that a proper action hero should be a veritable force of nature, utterly untouchable by villains thanks to their ability to seamlessly dance around their attacks. If that’s not stylish, I’m not sure what you’d call it.

6 Jak 2

Newer and Edgier

The new millennium saw the rise of the edgy years, where cute and colorful aesthetics started making way for brooding vibes and leather bodysuits. Various franchises that played on the former experimented with the latter to… varying degrees of success, but if there were any franchise that managed to land on its feet during this transition, it was Jak & Daxter with Jak 2.

Jak 2 retains the previous game’s partially non-linear level design and platformer elements, but also adds a multitude of gameplay elements on top of that to really diversify the entire concept. Jak could still do his usual punches and kicks, for instance, but he also had a gun that could transform into a variety of different forms, traversal abilities like riding a jet board and carjacking, and of course, a berserker alter ego form, which was the style at the time.

While the darkening of the story’s overall tone has its pluses and minuses, the overall vibe of the game comes together surprisingly cleanly, and it still leaves a pretty strong impression years later. Not that there have been any new Jak games to compare it to in almost twenty years…

5 Okami

The Wonders of Mythology

Call me a bleeding heart, but I think it’s incredibly cool for an artistic endeavor to have clear, overflowing passion behind it, a commitment to its personal pursuit of stylistic excellence. For example, there have been plenty of games that use mythology as a backdrop, but don’t really lean that much into it beyond basic set dressing. Okami is not one of those games. To put it concisely, Okami commits.

Okami is entirely rendered in a graphical style reminiscent of traditional Japanese art practices like sumi-e and ukiyo-e, accomplished via distinctive cell-shaded graphics. When she’s not being weird or lazy, our hero Amaterasu strikes a very noble silhouette amongst sweeping colors and brush-stroked landscapes. The game looks like a painting brought to life, the epitome of visual style.

Of course, as another Clover Studio production, Okami is no slouch in the gameplay style department. Amaterasu’s strikes with her various sanctified implements, not to mention her many Celestial Brush techniques, are swift and decisive, the kind of combat you’d expect from a heavenly envoy smiting down evil. You expect a certain degree of coolness in any game where you play as a god, of course, but Ammy knows how to really inject some sun-powered flair into her work.

4 Kingdom Hearts 2

The Game that Got Us All Swinging Sticks in Parking Lots

The original Kingdom Hearts still remains one of the most remarkable leaps of faith in gaming history. By all accounts, mixing Final Fantasy with Disney shouldn’t have worked, but it worked remarkably well. While the first game set the stage, though, it was Kingdom Hearts 2 that really showed us what this dark horse concept could do with all cylinders firing.

Compared to the first game, Kingdom Hearts 2 is much more fast-paced and high-flying. Sora is older, stronger, and more competent, whipping out all manner of wild combos with his Keyblade bookended by acrobatic Reaction Commands and overhauled magic abilities, not to mention the inherent coolness that comes with his Drive transformations. It may have a lot of Disney styling, but it’s Disney styling you can smack upside the head.

Sora’s Keyblade prowess got just about everyone I knew to pick up a stick and try to duplicate it all in the local parking lot. It was like the JRPG equivalent of kids pretending to have lightsabers, and we all loved it. Even subsequent titles in the Kingdom Hearts series haven’t quite captured the unmistakable cool factor of the second game.

They Remade it for a Reason

In a similar vein to Suda51’s works, the games of Hideo Kojima have always had a distinctive air of style to them that you can only get from someone confident in their own design process. Kojima’s work on the Metal Gear series created some truly one-of-a-kind titles that even its own parent company can’t replicate without him, which I assume is one of the reasons Konami opted to remake Metal Gear Solid 3 instead of trying to make an original game again.

From its Cold War setting to its 007-esque theme song, Metal Gear Solid 3 is positively dripping with style. Compared to Raiden’s somewhat divisive reception in Metal Gear Solid 2, Naked Snake was exactly what everyone was missing about Solid Snake from the first game: cool, confident, passionate about his work, and just a bit of a goober. Not only is he a very capable and interesting protagonist, but his character arc and relationship with The Boss still entrances fans to this day.

Metal Gear Solid 3’s particular flavor of stealth gameplay was also very unique amongst its contemporaries, emphasizing careful, methodical sneaking and bushwhack attacks from a camouflaged state. It’s a timeless kind of cool, seeing a hyper-competent soldier emerge from the brush and drag an enemy to his doom.

2 Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3

Moody Teen Simulator

The PS2, compared to previous generations, saw a gradual uptick in contemporary JRPGs, ditching the sword-and-sorcery stuff for cities and guns. The Shin Megami Tensei games, such as Nocturne, were good examples of this, but arguably the best example on the system, and the one that would launch an entire JRPG empire, was Persona 3.

Persona 3 wasn’t just a contemporary JRPG, it had both a setting and gameplay loop wholly unlike anything else on the platform or released prior, even within its own franchise. A party of teens was nothing new, but teens that specifically had to juggle school life with nightly escapades into a den of nightmares was certainly different, especially when their battles with said nightmares regularly involved the teens shooting themselves in the head with magic pistols. It’s still kind of remarkable that it didn't stir up much controversy with that.

Even putting the broad setting aside, Persona 3 just had an inherently stylish, youthful air to it. The UI was very sleek and modern, the city felt like a hip and happening place, and your protagonist could gradually grow into being a major social butterfly. There’s truly no greater power fantasy than being a competent high schooler.

1 Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening

“Stylish” is Dante’s Middle Name

We cannot have any kind of conversation about style and coolness in PS2 games without touching upon Devil May Cry. One of the series’ core mechanics is literally called “Style Ranks,” for goodness’ sake. While this ranking system was originally introduced in the first Devil May Cry, though, it was Devil May Cry 3 that really went the extra mile toward integrating style into both its gameplay and presentation.

While the original Devil May Cry had some cool sword-slinging gameplay, Devil May Cry 3 pushed the envelope in terms of gameplay and weaponry diversity and action potential. Dante had all kinds of high-flying, acrobatic techniques in his repertoire, bolstered by his more esoteric weapons like Cerberus and Nevan. It didn’t matter how strange the weapons looked, the point was that you could fire off awesome wombo-combos with them.

It certainly didn’t hurt that DMC3 was when Dante was at his most brash and cocky, never hesitating to perform a wacky stunt like launching pool balls or surfing on a missile just for the fun of it. Even if you didn’t appreciate that particular flavor of style, DMC 3 was also the game that gave us Vergil, whose own coolness speaks for itself.