>>12108476
Dark Cloud is just the perfect example of what a typical exemplary PS2 game was like. Like, 2 in particular had an a amazing central town that opens up as you progress, all kinds of NPCs that you can interact with and move to different places, fantastic music, lots of stuff to upgrade, photography for inventions, sphera golf, town building and customization, time travel, two main characters with different abilities etc. Cool, amazing, right?
But you actually sit down and try to play it? You mostly do nothing but just repetitively clear randomly generated dungeon floors, over and over, just brute, forced repetition with no thought out human design, dragging out everything way beyond what anyone would want from a game like this. And that's it, that what most of the game just is and consists of, in spite of all the crazy cool ideas it has. There's close to no areas to meaningfully explore outside the town, just repetitive dungeon crawling though random, throwaway floors, over and over. It ends up feeling insane that something that "ought to be good", like the Dark Cloud games feel they should be, are just piles of repetitive nothing content.
>>12108571
The PS2 definitely has good games, but way, way fewer actually great/unique titles than people claim it does. Its games feel almost the opposite of that the PSX had. Like, you'll play a PSX game, maybe somethign different to what you've experienced before, and it'll maybe feel a bit, jank, a bit rough and lacking in refinement in some ways, but otherwise you'll get used to that quickly and find that it comes to give you hours of entertainment and a solid amount of depth where you can pick it up, enjoy it and and discover new things frequently enough without awkward barriers or excessive time wasting.
