I dunno, I didn't play that many games for the PS2 in general, but had to have one because of how most music games of the time were exclusive to it, and the PS2 encapsulated the golden age of those games. It was a console from the days before DLC, so instead of buying the songs you want piecemeal and playing them all within one game, you'd end up just buying the yearly releases as they came, which meant you'd end up with like ten of essentially the same game, with all their songs spread across ten different discs. Double that if we're talking Dance Dance Revolution and how its Japanese releases had distinct songlists of their own, and now I have to choose one out of about 20 different releases, and that's...
....well, that's easy, actually:
View attachment 2750721
It had over a hundred songs without filler when the rest of the series tended to have around 70
(and one had like 40). The deal was, DDR in Japan was dying, and Extreme was meant to be the final entry in the series, so the arcade version reimplemented a generous amount of fan favorites from the series over the years
(sans licenses, i mean come on, it's Konami, they're cheap), and the PS2 counterpart had, well, half that, but still had most of what devoted fans would want. So, Extreme became the quintessential DDR game, and the home version even introduced a brand new super difficult final boss song where the lyrics outright ask you why you need Konami original songs:
I don't get it either.
But THEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN DDR started getting really popular in the Anglosphere, and WHOOPS! Time to keep it going! And then they did forevermore and it's been Zombie DDR ever since.
@SSF2T Old User nigga you know what I'm talking about
But that entire series is my defining series for the PS2, because despite how you can go right up to any Round 1 today and play a brand new version, it's like watching a new Simpsons episode: Palatable, playable, good enough I guess, but just really uninspired. It's a game designed in the 90s that's been tarted up to work in the 2020s without ever actually evolving its formula, so it's got that anachronistic feeling you get when watching modern Simpsons.
Right before the smartphone era, weebshit had a particular exotic luster you just didn't see elsewhere. This was right before they started developing media with a global audience in mind, so a lot of games of the time had a charming aesthetic not designed
for the west, but rather
inspired by whatever goofy 80s media made it over there, but then evolving towards an optimistic techno-future, what with how Japan was seeming like the world's one and only utopian tech central. They had all sorts of crazy advanced shit on their cellphones like full-color video calling, at a time when Americans were impressed that you could save numbers directly on your phone. I feel like I'm doing a clumsy job trying to explain these kinds of aesthetics, so let me just put it this way:
2000s Japanese aesthetics were basically:
View attachment 2750860 + + + View attachment 2750907
now they be all like
View attachment 2750948
So that ENTIRE spergpost should more or less explain how DDR wasn't just quintessentially PS2, but the aesthetics of the media at the time, and how media of that era in general encapsulated a very optimistic outlook that you just don't see anymore.
+ View attachment 2750907
