5 Ambitious PS2 Games That Everyone Forgot About

The PlayStation 2 is the best-selling console of all time. With that comes thousands of games for players to dive into. Due to its vast catalog, many great PlayStation 2 games have fallen through the cracks. Even with such a gigantic user base, every game can’t be played by a large audience, even if some of those games have majorly influenced modern designers. With that in mind, the list below looks at five games that have gone largely forgotten, but did at least one thing so well that we’re still feeling the aftereffects.

Here are the five most ambitious PS2 games that no one remembers.

5) The Bouncer

The Bouncer was Square’s first international release on the PlayStation 2. Considering the legacy the developer had built in the RPG space, expectations were incredibly high for the beat ’em up. The high-profile E3 trailer showing off destructible environments didn’t help either.

Unfortunately, The Bouncer was a middling game that looked great for the time. However, while Square couldn’t get the destructibility into The Bouncer, the team did add an early version of ragdoll physics. That, on its own, was a forward-thinking feature that we still see used today, but The Bouncer‘s use of pressure-sensitive buttons might be its biggest advancement.

We don’t see them used as much nowadays, but pressure-sensitive buttons on the DualShock 2 became a major talking point for Sony. The Bouncer was one of the first to use them, though they wouldn’t hit peak popularity until Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Regardless, The Bouncer might’ve been a failure in most respects, but you can’t accuse Square of not trying to innovate.

4) The Adventures of Cookie & Cream

Long before FromSoftware became a household name around the world, it was pumping out King’s Field and Armored Core games. Both series became cult hits, but FromSoft decided to try something new in 2000, giving players the colorful action-adventure game called The Adventures of Cookie & Cream.

On the surface, there’s not much here to differentiate it from all the other mascot action-adventure games. However, Cookie & Cream includes one key feature in the co-op mode that makes it stand out from the crowd.

While playing with a buddy, each player controlled one of the main characters. You could play on separate controllers, but FromSoft included an option to play on the same controller. With one player holding the left side and the other on the right, it quickly became a cult favorite. We haven’t seen too many developers use the feature, but Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons notably used it to create one of the more compelling games of the 2010s.

3) Shadow of Memories

Shadow of Memories is known as Shadow of Destiny in North America, but no matter the name, Konami’s murder mystery is a deeply ambitious detective tale. You play as a 22-year-old man named Eike who has been stabbed to death. However, he’s resurrected and sent to the past, where he has to solve his own murder.

Eike can explore four different eras, and things done in one era affect the others. You’ll also need to keep an eye on the clock, because Eike has to be back in his era at his time of death, or the game ends. The plot is trippy enough, but it’s the interconnected puzzles that made Shadow of Memories stand out.

Despite relatively solid reviews, Konami didn’t do much with Shadow of Memories after its initial launch. It was released on PSP, and director Junko Kawano created a quasi-spiritual successor called Time Hollow for the Nintendo DS. That said, Shadow of Memories never quite took off like Kawano’s more famous series, Suikoden.

2) The Mark of Kri

These days, Sony’s San Diego Studios only makes the yearly MLB The Show series; however, its first game was much different. The Mark of Kri is one of many 3D action games in the PS2 era, but it had an important addition that would influence the future of action combat design.

Kri‘s big gameplay gimmick was that you could mark enemies around you with symbols corresponding to the DualShock 2 controller. From there, you could easily swap between foes, dealing damage to the group around you, while keeping everyone at bay.

If that sounds a bit like Batman: Arkham Asylum‘s combat, you’d be correct. Rocksteady obviously improved the system quite a bit, but you can see some of the DNA that would become Batman‘s free-flow combat.

1) Red Faction

I mentioned that The Bouncer wanted to have destructible environments, but couldn’t get them into the final product. Thankfully, Red Faction was able to pull off the feat, making it one of the must-have games on the PS2, if only to see what was possible on the new hardware.

Sure, the actual shooting part of Red Faction is pretty middling, but seeing GeoMod technology in action was more than worth the price of admission. Red Faction‘s use of unscripted destruction was one of the more impressive things players had seen on the PS2 when it launched in 2001.

Thankfully, Red Faction wasn’t completely abandoned like many of the other games on this list. The series has received three sequels and a spin-off, but nothing has ever quite lived up to the original. There have been talks about a comeback for several years, but as of 2025, the last new game in the series was 2011’s Red Faction: Armageddon.

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