You can’t talk about ambitious consoles without talking about the OG PlayStation. A 32-bit dynamo capable of jaw-dropping 3D graphics that could play CDs from a first time console manufacturer? Yeah, it’s almost miraculous to look back on.
Aquanaut’s Holiday
Given that it’s the name of one of the game’s job titles, Aquanaut’s Holiday could easily describe the events of Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, but this obscure PS1 game from around the console’s launch has nothing to do with dragons or punching dudes in Hawaii, or punching Hawaiian dragons.
Developed and published by Artdink of more recent Dragon Quest III: HD-2D Remake fame in Japan, with Sony Computer Entertainment publishing the game in the rest of the world, Aquanaut’s Holiday is the game that walked, or paddled, so games like Subnautica could run, offering players a look into the world of 3D underwater exploration. Granted, there’s no terrors of the deep lurking here, so you’re safe in that regard, but there’s some similarities regardless.
Despite being an overworked marine explorer, you decide to return to the water for a vacation after restoring harmony in the seas, which seems like the wrong way to get rid of job-related stress but who are we to judge? Sorry honey, kinda up against it right now with the entire ocean, just going to go and discover Atlantis this weekend to get away from it all. Anyway, with no obstacles or enemies in your path, the oceans are yours to explore fully, and even though Aquanaut’s Holiday is one of the first released PS1 games, the graphics here are some of the best on the console, despite you know some obvious draw distance issues. It was an ambitious effort from Artdink to try and showcase what this new console could be capable of, and it even spawned a couple of Japan-only sequels.
Now, I tried coming up with a segue for this next game, but I just couldn’t think of anything. Talk about a Myst opportunity.
Riven: The Sequel To Myst
Trying to release a super serious, point and click adventure game that wasn’t Monkey Island or Broken Sword on consoles in the 90s felt like a bit of a fool’s errand. Regardless of how good the game was, console fans often wanted something a bit faster, and the controls needed for a proper point and click were usually lacking. That didn’t stop Sunsoft from taking on the project of porting Cyan’s Riven: The Sequel To Myst to the PS1. Myst was already a pretty expansive and ambitious point and clicker, and Riven turned that dial even further with larger environments and tougher puzzles, but somehow, Sunsoft pulled it off.
Granted, some sacrifices and compromises were made along the way in order to make the PS1 port happen, with Gamespot at the time remarking that it’s a fairly adequate port albeit with worse graphics and controls. Perhaps the biggest sign of how ambitious the PS1 version was though was that it came on a whopping five discs. Multiple disc PS1 games aren’t exactly uncommon, of course. Most of the Final Fantasy games launched with a few discs, but Riven’s five discs is a console record, proving how big the project of porting the game to console was, and how ambitious Sunsoft were for undertaking it. You’d feel a little like Kaiba while wielding those quintuple discs, and it’s something you’d never see today, well, unless the arse physics in GTA 6 get really out of control.
Now, would we choose to play Riven under our own volition on PS1 in 2025? Absolutely not, but still, the fact that they even tried to port this over was ambition personified.
Next up: D’s guys were nuts for this one.
D
A bizarre blend of adventure and interactive horror FMV that preceded Resident Evil, D was the first major release for the game’s director Kenji Eno. Despite being early in the PS1’s life cycle, FMV horror games had been around for a few years already. 1995 would even see the launch of Phantasmagoria, which would become one of the most renowned and infamous games in the genre, so D had a lot to live up to. The results were certainly worth it, largely due to the lengths director Kenji Eno was willing to go in order to ensure D was a success.
The game boasts impressive 3D graphics, with developers Warp referring to main character Laura as a digital actress who would appear in other games, like the Dreamcast’s D2. The gameplay is also somewhat open-ended, as you’re given two hours to solve a mystery surrounding your father, otherwise the whole thing ends. A pretty unique setup.
As for Eno’s own ambitious tendencies, violence and cannibalism were added to make the game more striking, but he feared it’d force the hands of censors. Because of this, he sneakily created a clean master version which he submitted to censors late. After passing the censors, he took the plane over and switched those copies with the uncensored versions, resulting in the gory D we know today.
Well, some of us. Despite being a smash hit in Japan, there just weren’t enough copies of D produced in the west, and it remained something of a cult hit for decades.
Omega Boost
When it comes to PlayStation and ambition, Polyphony Digital are one of the studios that come to mind. The talented team behind the incredibly successful Gran Turismo series, you’d think that kind of notoriety would’ve given them a Midas touch as far as the PS1 was concerned, but after the release of Gran Turismo 1, Polyphony would have a go at creating something entirely different. The result, Omega Boost, has been given a bit of a retrospective upgrade in the years since its release, but reviewers weren’t the kindest to Omega Boost when it launched. They weren’t “harsh”, but they’ve been nicer, you know?
Feeling like a cross between Panzer Dragoon’s on-rails shooting and the space dogfighting you’d get in a Star Wars game, Omega Boost’s tale of dudes piloting mechs and travelling through time to stop the rise of AI is something we need more of right now. The gameplay is fast and frenetic, really putting the PS1 through its paces during the tail-end of its lifecycle, while the mech designs themselves come courtesy of Shoji Kawamori, who worked on the Macross series. Admittedly, Omega Boost is a short game, but the impressive graphics and stellar gameplay show how ambitious Polyphony were to not be known as just the Gran Turismo guys. Hm, guess that didn’t last. Cons of changing racing forever, I guess.
Terracon
To be fair, it’s pretty easy for most gamers to ignore your game when it didn’t launch outside of Europe, which is what unfortunately happened to Terracon. It’s surprising, really, as the game was even published by Sony Computer Entertainment in Europe, but I guess Sony had little faith in the game’s success in America or Asia. It’s a shame really, as while the gameplay is just a 3D action platformer that was prolific during the PS1 era, it’s the graphics that really showcase how ambitious Terracon truly is. Just look at the game in action and tell us it doesn’t look like an early PS2 game. The character models in particular are among the PS1’s greatest.
Despite being a relatively normal action platformer, Terracon has a plot set up that’d put War & Peace to shame. You’re Xed, part of the Plutonians, a race of aliens from Pluto, shockingly, who are suffering from overpopulation, so they turn their gaze to the other planets in the solar system. Because of this, Xed and his mate Doc create Terracon, a massive mothership able to help terraform the other planets, and the project works. Unfortunately, for the Plutonians though, they fear the self-aware nature of Terracon, and in response to threats of being shut down, the ship annihilates Doc and the rest of the Plutonians. At least Doc kept a hologram of himself with instructions on how to beat Terracon, but that involves travelling across planets, collecting drives and activating missile defense systems.
Yeah, it was ambitious of the developers to think people were going to sit through all that preamble. D’s guys were nuts, wait I already did that one.
Vampire Hunter D
Despite sharing an important letter and also being a story about vampires, D and Vampire Hunter D have absolutely no relation to each other. Anime and manga fans will know already that Vampire Hunter D is a classic of both mediums, with a lineage dating over 40 years at this point. Even though it’s probably one of the more ridiculous properties in anime and manga history, bringing together genres and themes in its post-nuclear supernatural world, Vampire Hunter D has only ever had one video game, and you believe the reviews it received on launch, it’s one of the worst PS1 games ever made.
So what makes the game ambitious? Not the story, as it’s a streamlined retelling of the second movie, Bloodlust, with half the characters and locations removed. Where the ambition comes from is how it blended Resident Evil style survival horror gameplay with hack and slash swordplay, with main character D preferring to settle things with the blade than with guns. If that type of formula sounds familiar to you, it’s because Capcom were also about to strike it rich doing the same thing with Devil May Cry a couple of years later.
While it’s certainly a lot more clunky than DMC, Vampire Hunter D proved that if Capcom weren’t going to do it, someone was eventually — and it’s a formula that has really caught on since, like a random illness from a child’s birthday party. What kind of germs are these kids fostering out there?
Germs: Nerawareta Machi
The PS1 was a console for experimentation. I mean, Net Yaroze literally put the power of game dev in the hands of the consumer, but that doesn’t mean actual game developers weren’t creating some absolutely weird games. Germs absolutely fits that bill, so much so that we’ve already talked about it before in our Weird PS1 Games That Are Actually Good video, a video that’s actually good that you should check out, but it’s also crazy ambitious. An open world first person urban-based survival horror game that’s built specifically for the PS1? That’s a ludicrous undertaking, and yet somehow Germs managed to pull it all together.
Set in a city under attack by a mysterious infection and an influx of mutants, you play a newspaper reporter striving to get to the bottom of things. You’re able to explore the city by foot, or via vehicles and public transport, and you’re encouraged to speak to citizens and gather clues in order to find out more information. Meanwhile, as time passes, the city becomes more and more flooded with mutants, forcing you to fight in a lot of situations. Perhaps the most ambitious part is how death isn’t the end of the game, as if you die in combat, you actually turn into a mutant and can either find a cure, or start your own rampage.
If you’re wondering why more people don’t rave about Germs, it was originally a Japan only release, but the only limit you should have when it comes to this game today is how many times you’re willing to click on a Google search result.
Colony Wars 3: Red Sun
Spit on a list of the PS1’s library of games and the odds are it’ll land on a Psygnosis whipper, and while they’re mostly known for their work on Wipeout or even Rollcage, one PlayStation series of theirs that’s been lost to time is Colony Wars. A space fighting simulator, the first two games in the series told a fairly linear story about a war in the far-flung future between the Earth Empire and the League of Free Worlds, descendants of the settlers sent out of the Solar System in bid to obtain new resources.
While the first game was ambitious in its own way, with the campaign being shaped by your performance during the game’s missions, Colony Wars 3: Red Sun opened the game up further, allowing you to play the role of mercenary. Here, you were given control over the missions you wanted to complete (though obviously some were still story mandated), and could even upgrade your ship, something that wasn’t allowed in the mission-based structure of the first two games. Sure, it’s not quite Elite: Dangerous levels of space simulation, but creating a PS1 version of that kind of idea is super ambitious regardless, especially when Psygnosis launched 9 other games during the same year. Absolutely wild behaviour.
Rakugaki Showtime
From one Cultured Vultures “ol’ reliable” studio in Psygnosis to another with Treasure. We’re still sad that this little wonder of a game didn’t launch outside of Japan, especially considering it’s one of the most gorgeous and well-realised games on the platform.
On a console where everyone was chasing polygon count above all else, Treasure, who marched to the beat of their own drum at the best of times anyway, utilised a hand-drawn with crayons aesthetic that’s unlike anything that’s come before or since. Even the first Paper Mario, which launched a year after Rakugaki, didn’t emulate the hand-drawn visuals.
Far from just being a new take on 3D graphics for the PS1, the gameplay is also completely unlike most video games, with the best summary being “Power Stone if it was dodgeball”. Rakugaki Showtime boasts 17 playable characters, including a guest appearance for Marina Liteyears from Mischief Makers, and if given a wide enough release, this could have been up there among the best PS1 fighters. Sure, it’s not that deep and the framerate can be aggressive at times, but it’s lovely to look at and has an aesthetic unlike much else really.
Unfortunately, a legal dispute between Treasure and publishers Enix regarding who owned the rights to the characters, meaning it was yanked off shelves. Worse still, Treasure were going to revisit the formula for a planned Tiny Toons game on PS2 and GBA, but the publisher for that release basically shat the bed before the game could be released. I’m over it though. OverBlood 2.
OverBlood 2
You want to talk about ambitious PS1 games? The original Overblood definitely fits the bill, as it’s considered by many to be the first fully 3D survival horror game ever made, while games like Resident Evil and others used pre-rendered backgrounds for their 3D. Reviews might have been mixed for it, but there’s no denying that the original OverBlood shot for the moon. Expectations were high for the sequel then, but when OverBlood 2 launched as a cyberpunk action adventure game instead of another survival horror game, you can believe that some were confused. We imagine North American gamers would have been confused too, but OverBlood 2 was Japan and EU only for some reason.
With a story that some would call a Final Fantasy VII clone, following a group of freedom fighters battling a corrupt corpo looking to escape a dying planet, OverBlood 2 might have been overshadowed at launch, and the reviews weren’t too kind on the game’s cutscene length either. Some cutscenes would clock in at around 10-15 minutes, which for a modern game sounds like normal these days, but back then, it was almost unheard of outside of Hideo Kojima games. Does that mean it was any good? Well, you can download it for yourself and be the judge, but the 3D cyberpunk world and lofty story certainly qualifies as ambitious.
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