Time can be a cruel thing. While it gave us some really great things like Time Crisis 2, it can also make us bald and fat. However, just like Keanu Reeves and the “what’s brown and sticky” joke, there are plenty of PS1 games that are exempt from the ravages of time, along with you beautiful people in the comments section. You gave us plenty of awesome suggestions in our last video, and now we’re here to preserve them like insects in amber, though with sadly no Jeff Goldblum cameos in which he negs you. We asked, but he was too busy being weird.
1. Final Fantasy Tactics – elr492
“Final Fantasy Tactics. Modern strategy RPG basically look the same and play with the same principles,” says elr492, “developers are basically making the same game 27 years later.”
He’s right, you know. Final Fantasy Tactics may be a series largely forgotten about by Square Enix so they can put more money towards being frankly terrible, but the fact that so many developers today take notes from the series speaks volumes for how important it is.
Establishing Ivalice for the first time, a setting we’d see again in the Tactics series and another game that also finds its way into this video, Final Fantasy Tactics follows Ramza as he is thrust into the Lion War, which is much more harrowing and a lot less tasty than you might think.
What is tasty, though, is how the game looks even in 2024. We think you could just keep adding decades on top of Tactics and it simply won’t show it. The sprites may be simple in this tactical RPG, but there’s a feel to the overall aesthetic, character portraits, and music that will make it probably even more timeless than a lot of the full fat 3D Final Fantasy games.
If you want to play modern games that feel like Final Fantasy Tactics, the indie sphere boasts bangers like Fae Tactics that are undeniably inspired by the series, but Triangle Strategy and Unicorn Overlord also hit a lot of the same notes to great effect.
2. Oddworld 1 and 2 – RJ-cq8dd
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember exactly where you were when OddWorld: Abe’s Oddysee changed your life forever. Being able to fart on command was the ultimate wish fulfillment for a child back in the day, but watching your little green Abe explode into chunks of meat was an experience so harrowing for me that it scared me too much to play it for years.
Look, all I’m saying is going from watching Digimon to watching yourself getting eaten by a wild pack of slug dogs is a lot, OK? We do have to disagree with RJ-cq8dd a little when he says that “both Oddworld games will always be beautiful and enjoyable,” as there are times when OddWorld is practically begging your undeveloped brain to look up a guide, but it’s certainly got a look and ambience to it that will always be almost ageless.
In the first game, Oddysee, you play as Abe, a mudokon who discovers that Amazon actually doesn’t have his best interests at heart and is turning his mates into chicken kievs. You must escape from the farms by chanting, farting, and leaping your way to glory, solving one brutal puzzle after another, even using your powers to take over the bodies of enemy guards in the process. The sequel, Exodus, is much of the same brilliance.
There are a lot of PS1 games that objectively just look miles better with all kinds of emulation enhancements slapped on, but honestly, for our money, the Oddworld PS1 games should look exactly as mucky and murky as the developers intended. Both of these games have been remade as New n Tasty and the sadly kinda overlooked Soulstorm respectively, if you really gotta see those meat chunks in higher fidelity.
3. Breath of Fire III & IV – kazzy3308
“Breath of Fire 3 has some of the most beautiful character and enemy sprites from that era, and the low poly 3D enviroments also aged very well,” claims Kazzy3308, no doubt in between karaoke sessions. He’s right, and we’ll do you one better and throw the 4th game in here too.
Breath of Fire is a pretty rad series that’s really kind of sadly been forgotten about as the years go by, so much so that yoga is now one of the first things that appears when you look it up. The last game in the series, Breath of Fire 6, was an online only game released for PC and mobile, but only in Japan, and it lasted for a little less than I can do a downward dog for.
It’s quite a shame to see how far Breath of Fire fell off, as while it was never a series that lit up the mainstream like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, Capcom’s RPG still had a tonne of fans who thought that yeah, turning into a dragon is actually kind of sick actually. Those fans supported both Breath of Fire III and IV on the PS1, the series’ first 3D forays after its debut on the SNES.
And it’s easy to see why they did, as these games remain absolute lookers today, with tonnes of detail in the characterisation of its Animorphs-esque cast, but more in like a charming way than a haunting, melted way, with Breath of Fire IV in particular offering the kind of visuals that’d launch a thousand imitators on Steam.
While Breath of Fire 3 received pretty solid PSP and Vita ports, Breath of Fire IV has never found its way onto another console in the PlayStation ecosystem since its 2000 launch. We’ll tell you under our breath how you can easily and much less expensively play it today: Geoffrey Rush from 2003 until 2017.
4. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1-3 – otisthe1410
While commenters like otisthe1410 have mentioned a whole bunch of other awesome recommendations, we’ve decided to highlight one series in particular that’s, to tell you the truth, been bizarrely absent from the channel until now, but here we are, doing everything we can to feel younger in our mind: it’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
That Hangar level. The Neversoft logo. Video tapes. More time-based anxiety than a hedgehog running around underwater. Spider-Man. When you think of the PS1, these are all things that are basically inseparable from it for many, as the Tony Hawk’s series captured the essence of an era like few games ever have, or maybe ever will.
While the general gameplay is obviously not as fluid as the recent remakes for more modern consoles, there’s a beautiful simplicity to the original Pro Skater games that’s transportative to a time when everything wasn’t just all evil and grainy and black and white. You’ve got a spare ten minutes to finally collect all those letters until Digimon starts, right? Taxes? What are they?
Chuck in the greatest collection of licensed soundtracks ever, the kind of names that simply don’t exist today (what the hell is a Chad Muska?), and more secrets than an island full of famous people, and you have a series that feels equally of its time and also timeless.
Not Pro Skater 4 though, that’s terrible on the PS1. Just play it on PS2.
5. Final Fantasy IX – brichan1851
“Final Fantasy IX has aged beautifully,” writes Brichan1851. “To this day, it holds up better than the other two (VII, and VIII), though they are fine games.”
We’ll agree and disagree with you there, Brichan, as while FF9 has indeed aged like a fine bottle of Tizer, Final Fantasy 8 feels more like it was invented by aliens being fed instructions by Johnny Knoxville as time goes on.
Final Fantasy IX, though, man, what a beauty this game was and remains today. It honestly would not have looked out of place at all on the Dreamcast. One of my personal fondest memories ever is of receiving this as a surprise from my uncle, booting it up, and seeing the PlayStation 1 being pushed to its absolute limit in the year 2000, just before the launch of the PS2. It wouldn’t take long until Final Fantasy X would come out with the kind of leap that felt beyond evolutionary. You had no idea how far video games could push the envelope back then, and it was just incredibly exciting to look on and let your imagination race.
Final Fantasy IX though, what a gorgeous, optimistic game this is, the closest the series has come to a Sunday morning cartoon. Granted, it does have its dark moments, like the whole mother killing thing, crikey, but from top to bottom the cast is a delight with the game being a love letter to the less edgier, earlier Final Fantasy entries.
It’s strange to say that a game that sold over 5 million copies is overlooked, but following up FF7 and 8, with most players eagerly awaiting Sony’s big black box at the time of release, meant that FF9 didn’t quite create as much of a fervor. That’s a shame, but here’s hoping that long rumoured remake not only does it justice, but also introduces even more people to Zidane and the gang.
6. Bloody Roar 1 and 2 – erakahfishfishfish
Fighting games in the 2020’s greatest weapon hasn’t been a fireball or a chained kunai or an aggressive post-launch DLC model, but something a bit sweeter: Member Berries. Dormant franchises like King of Fighters and even Fighting Layer can come back, but then there are also series like Mortal Kombat that are seemingly entirely powered by nostalgia. ‘Member the character we just killed off? Fiver, please.
Which makes it even weirder that a series like Bloody Roar could be more or less completely forgotten, especially as they were such fun fighters, according to erakahfishfishfish. There’s a good bit of Animorphing going on on this list, but Bloody Roar arguably has the coolest application of it. Can you imagine how wild it would be to hear about a game on the playground in which you can kick people’s heads in as a rabbit?
Bloody Roar may not be the most complex fighting game today, but Bloody Roar 2 in particular has some truly excellent animations for the time that are right up there with the best in Tekken, particularly when it comes to the transformations. The story is also somehow even more batshit than Tekken, with fox men accidentally killing their own mothers, gorilla homies joining the circus, and Tai Fu, again. Society had a big tiger men thing going on for a while there.
Both of the Bloody Roar PS1 games look and feel great today, but the series actually had a further three installments after this which didn’t quite capture that same feeling, including one that released originally just on GameCube and admittedly looked bloody lovely. Sadly, Bloody Roar as an IP has been hibernating since 2004, 56 years ago, which is crazy. We’ve mentioned this before, but the perfect spokesperson is right there for a reboot!
7. Valkyrie Profile – shoresy6943
Cut the PS1 and it will probably bleed a forgotten RPG series. Or twenty. It truly was a golden age for the genre, with arguably not even the PS2 having so many heavy hitters so often. This obviously means that a few of them will fall into the cracks and get lost to time, but shoresy thinks that Valkyrie Profile is timeless.
Yeah, we can’t argue with that. Whether it’s the version on PS1 or Lenneth on PSP, there’s some ageless quality to the original Valkyrie Profile that follow-up games in the series have always been chasing without quite as much success here in the west, but Silmeria on PS2 is also absolutely worth checking out.
In the OG, you play as Lenneth, a valkyrie who’s travelling through Midgard (no, not Midgar) as she looks to collect souls to enlist as einherjar to help against the upcoming Ragnarok, which does the opposite of rock, actually. Think of Valkyrie Profile as a little bit Final Fantasy, a little bit Folklore, and even a smidgen of Spiritfarer, an absolute whipper of a game, by the way, as Lenneth looks to piece her past life together again.
Valkyrie Profile looks dreamy with gorgeously animated sprites, has more depth to it than Hel itself, and boasts a story that is surprisingly heart-rending. If you need to sell your soul to grab it physically, consider getting its recent PS4 and PS5 port digitally instead. The series also saw Valkyrie Elysium in 2022, which kinda played like a dull version of Astral Chain instead. Shame.
8. Vagrant Story – Natew5544
Listen, this really isn’t us this time. Honest. We bring the game up a lot on this channel, but Vagrant Story’s place here is Natew’s democratic right as a bird friend.
Just like Final Fantasy IX, Vagrant Story came out at a time when it was clear that Square was using every single ounce of power that the early 90s tech could provide them as we moved into the new millennium. Think of it like this: tech that came out in 1994, the same year as Tammy and the T-Rex, was able to astound players into the next decade.
And, despite the obviously wibbly wobbly textures here and there, Vagrant Story still holds up magnificently nearly 25 years on. There’s nothing quite like this action RPG dungeon crawler even today, with players assuming control of Ashley Riot as he pursues a cult leader in Lea Monde. You think Vagrant Story is going to be a particular kind of game, and then it flips the script with some frankly stunning cinematography that’d make Kojima proud.
Speaking of Kojima, did you know that the game is actually intended to serve as a prequel by the name of The Phantom Pain, with a sequel never coming out? The game has also never been given a proper remaster or even the most basic of acknowledgements from Square Enix over all these years, which is odd considering it’s also set in Ivalice and we’ve visited there quite a few times now.
While the game is timeless, it really is time that some younger people found that out for themselves too.
9. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver – Truehare
There aren’t many game series as weird and genre-hopping as Legacy of Kain. From top-down to third-person to MMO, Legacy of Kain did a lot for a long time and then did absolutely nothing for even longer.
That’s beyond a crying shame, as everyone who played Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver when they were young before immediately getting lost can attest that there’s a feel to these games that simply cannot be replicated today. Maybe it’s just me though, but did anyone else get a similar feeling from Returnal? The vibes? Let me know down below. The Legacy of Kain games were dark and edgy, but never tryhard, maybe that’s thanks to the theater actors giving it their all in the lead roles. The normal kids had Buffy the Vampire Slayer for their vampire fix, the freakazoids had the Legacy of Kain.
While commenter Truehare reckons Blood Omen is also worth some recognition for standing the test of time, we’ve got to go with Soul Reaver here, just for the dark, twisted essence of the counter-culture of the 90s that it was trying to capture. It doesn’t get much less mainstream than playing as a de-winged, betrayed vampire seeking revenge by eating one soul at a time while traveling between realms with atmosphere so thick that we’re pretty sure Evanescence wouldn’t exist without it.
Granted, Soul Reaver is undoubtedly a bit of a pain in the neck to figure out where exactly you are and what it is you have to do, like a Zelda game for misanthropes, but there’s far too much cool stuff going on underneath Soul Reaver for it to not at least be worth a look. Most surprisingly, you will even be able to give it a look on the Evercade soon, of all things, alongside Blood Omen.
It’s a start, we guess?
10. Klonoa: Door to Phantomile – TheDiamondSea
I think the biggest compliment you can give the OG Klonoa is that it received a pretty good remake that didn’t really need to exist. Okay, maybe it needed to give people options that weren’t setting their money on fire. It also received a Wii remake that a lot of people have forgotten about, so it’s clear that Namco and Hideo Yoshizawa were onto something way back in 1997, and something that they were right to be proud of.
We almost must apologise to TheDiamondSea for making them sad way back in our original video. But we unfortunately aren’t the only people to overlook Klonoa, as despite sequel after sequel, remake after remake, weird spin-off after spin-off, Klonoa has just never managed to get anywhere near the likes of Crash, Spyro, or even Croc in terms of mainstream recognition.
Honestly, we have no idea why, because Door to Phantomile is a beautiful game that brilliantly blends 2D and 3D with accessible gameplay that’s like a nice warm mug of Tizer. Maybe the game and series in general is just too sweet? It came out at a time when fashion criminals were the coolest characters in games, so a nice cat boy who lives in a world powered by dreams maybe just couldn’t compete with jorts.
Denim terrorism shouldn’t diminish Klona at all though, as this side-scroller still has plenty of charm even in 2024. And while the game is largely cutesy, Klonoa does have a couple of brutal emotional moments that might be better learning experiences for children about the provisional nature of life than getting them a puppy. Does Baby Shark teach them that everything dies in the end? We don’t think so, and that’s why Klonoa stays winning.
It’s a stick, by the way. What’s brown and sticky? Stick.
Check out the original video below!
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