10 Stellar PS2 Games That Deserve Next-Gen Reboots

I’m not ashamed to declare my eternal love for Sony’s PlayStation 2, one of the greatest consoles to ever exist. It built on everything good about the PS1, and doubled down on hardware and software, resulting in a long-lived piece of kit that played hundreds of must-have games. It also launched multiple franchises that continue to the present day, like this week’s God of War: Ragnarok. Still, there are many other PS2 games that deserve modern reboots—here are 10 of our picks.

SkyGunner

Cel-shading as a visual style came into its own in this console generation, and one under-seen example was Atlus’s SkyGunner, a dogfighting action game that was surprisingly deep and fun. As one of three playable characters, each of whom has their own missions and aircraft, you’re tasked with protecting an experimental engine housed aboard a massive floating museum. This one overflows with character and detail, and the gameplay is brilliantly tuned with lots of combo and score attack potential for hardcore players. Developers PixelArts don’t seem to have made anything else, so who knows the IP’s status?

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter

Capcom’s Breath of Fire series was, for the most part, a competent but unspectacular group of role-playing games. However, the fifth game in the series was wildly different—a stylish, grim, post-apocalyptic dungeon crawler with brutal and obtuse mechanics. As tunnel dweller Ryu, you must ascend to the planet’s surface in the company of a mysterious girl. A clever combat system that blended turn-based strategy and real-time action, along with the “D-Ratio” that unlocked new story possibilities on multiple trips through the game, made it a cult classic. It also had one of the best soundtracks of the era. Another Breath of Fire game was created in 2016, but it dumped everything cool about this one and turned into a free-to-play, online action-RPG with lots of microtransactions.

Nanobreaker

Devil May Cry was a huge influence in the PS2 era, and many studios took their shot at the stylish action genre. One of the weirdest was Konami’s Nanobreaker, produced by Castlevania mastermind Koji Igarashi. As cyborg Jake Warren, the “Genocide Hero,” you invade an island ravaged by nanomachine-mutated beasts, hacking and slashing with a transforming weapon that releases massive gouts of blood all over the levels. All that gore isn’t just for show, though—predating games like the Doom reboot, spilling the juice restores your health. Throw in a plasma whip to yank enemies around, and you have a super fun action game that would be great for the PS5 generation.

Steambot Chronicles

The PS2 had a number of deeply charming RPGs, but none were quite as sweet as Steambot Chronicles. Released as “Bumpy Trot” in Japan, the game puts you in the shoes of a shipwrecked kid named Vanilla who finds a bipedal mech and takes it on a series of adventures. The surprisingly rich, non-linear storyline makes every minute a joy, especially with the passel of odd side quests and activities. Vanilla joins a band, learns how to play multiple instruments and songs, battle other Steambots, and more. A sequel was planned but was cancelled in 2011, and the franchise has been dormant for over a decade.

Magic Pengel

The intersection of gaming and creativity is a fun place to play, and one of the most curious entries was 2002’s Magic Pengel. Released by Taito with input from Studio Ghibli, the game plays kind of like Pokemon with one big exception: all of the monsters are drawn by the player’s hand using in-game art tools. The varying sizes, shapes, and colors of their parts determined their attacks and statistics. The follow-up, Graffiti Kingdom, expanded on the creativity while transplanting the genre to more of a platform-action thing. 

God Hand

One of the most notorious cult classics of all time, Capcom’s God Hand was a brutally hard brawler with a demented sense of humor from the brilliant mind of Shinji Mikami. As Gene, you saunter through a Wild West full of apes, punks, dominatrixes, and demons, using a massive, customizable moveset of martial arts to kick their butts—sometimes literally. Even though the wacky humor was a major selling point, God Hand stands the test of time for how it embraced difficulty and challenged players, and in a post-Dark Souls world, the opportunity is clear for a modern reboot that fixes the awful graphics of the original.

Robot Alchemic Drive

Another unique robot-piloting game, Enix’s R.A.D. had the unique twist of not letting your main character ride around in his massive mech, but rather steer it with a remote control. That means to see the action, you need to scramble to the top of a building, and hope it doesn’t get smashed in the melee. The plot is a tribute to the classic giant robot anime, with your high school hero or heroine battling an alien invasion while trying to keep property damage to a minimum. One of the coolest things about this game was how it really played with the sense of scale between the human-sized characters and the giant robots, and today’s technology could make that even more effective.

Siren

Survival horror really came into its own in the PS2 generation, and one franchise that puzzled gamers at the time was Sony’s Siren. The gimmick is that your characters can “sightjack” the Shibito zombies that prowl the levels, learning where they are and how they behave before making your way through them. It’s a uniquely tense experience that is certainly frustrating at times, but once you figure out how the system works it’s deeply compelling. The series saw a sequel and a remake on the PS2, but there’s so much potential still there, especially because Sony owns the IP.

Mister Mosquito

The PS2 was home to some unusual concepts, but few were quite as zany as Mister Mosquito. Developed by Japanese studio ZOOM, it cast the player as a blood-sucking insect living in the home of the Yamada family. On each level, you swoop around the massive human figures sucking blood from specific points on their bodies. There was a Japan-only sequel, but think about what modern console power could do—imagine a bigger, open-world bug simulator with even more potential. 

Blood Will Tell

Based on a manga series by the legendary Osamu Tezuka, Blood Will Tell is a curious little game that obviously takes inspiration from Devil May Cry, but delivers something quite different. As the swordsman Hyakkimaru, you must reclaim 48 body parts stolen from you by demonic fiends. Sporting an array of prosthetic parts to make up for what’s missing, you hack and slash through fiends and spirits. The original game was good, but it’s such a killer idea that taking another crack at it seems like a no-brainer.