Yeah, so. Pretty much my sole experience of PS1 was going to a college friend’s house in '96 and seeing that he had one set up in his living room. He showed me Tekken, which kinda blew my mind. I had still never owned a gaming device more sophisticated than an Amiga, and the apex of polygonal graphics for me was ‘4D Boxing’ on that platform circa 1993. I think it was one of the first moments where I realized 3D games were a thing, and not just for games like Doom and Quake, but for everything.
I obviously can’t come up with 10 games for PS1. Can you?
Final Fantasy Tactics
Final Fantasy VII
Castlevania Symphony of the NIght
Resident Evil
Metal Gear
Vagrant Story
Parasite Eve
The rest I don’t care much about. I don’t think PS1 was that great a console for games, despite what many seem to think, but those few games are era-defining, however.
EDIT: Heck, FFT is still the best TRPG out there, RE1 got rerelease-ported on PS4 and it’s still a classic, FFVII is the best-known 3D super-long RPG, Vagrant Story is still quite unlike anything else ever done, Parasite Eve is one of the first “cinematic” games, SOTN is half of the metroidvania genre’s name and Metal Gear finally shown the world the first signs of the extent of Kojima’s madness and 80’s action-flick addiction.
I guess I’ll give this a try. I didn’t much care for the PS1. It tried to push 3D really hard, and yet 3D games of that era looked horrible.
For example, Gran Turismo 1, and 2 would be my top PS1 games, and probably two of the best looking 3D games on PS1. But they had all kinds of floating point artifacts.
I played some Need For Speed games on there, but they looked and played horribly, so I’m not going to include them. My top game was by Toys for Bob, the Star Control 2 people, who made a game called Unholy War. That was a lot of fun, playing with my brother and nieces.
And there was a game I watched a roommate play that made decent use of barebones 3D graphics by having a VR looking landscape. That was Ghost in the Shell.
"8. Colony Wars
7. Wipeout 3
6. Wipeout XL
5. Final Fantasy VII.
4. Ghost in the Shell.
3. Gran Turismo
2. Gran Turismo 2.
Unholy War
Edit: Thanks to the other posters reminding me about Wipeout XL and Wipeout 3, both of which I enjoyed. Also Colony Wars, which kind of sucked because I couldn’t play it with a joystick, so it didn’t stand up to the PC space sims of the time.
Tekken 3 has to be in there
FF Tactics
Jumping Flash
Wipeout
Twisted Metal
My big thing is some of these titles were also Saturn, and that’s what I had instead- felt the Saturn was the better system overall despite the crappier sales- especially with the RAM cart.
Oh man, I loved the PS1 - not as much as the PS2, which may be my favorite single console, but it was great. I played much more Japanese stuff, even JRPGs than I generally do. So stuff like Chrono Cross and Dragon Quest VII rate highly for me. The Resident Evils, of course. Shooters like Einhander, one of my favorites of the genre. But early in the console’s lifecycle I played a fair number of PC ports, stuff like X-COM and Panzer General. And I couldn’t tell you how many times I played through Symphony of the Night, one of the best metroidvanias.
I’ve still got my PS1 collection actually, I’ll go through it tonight to be sure I didn’t leave out any big ones.
This was really my console of choice (I went without a console for much of the PS2 lifespan).
Let’s see:
Final Fantasy 7 (the first AAA game?) Final Fantasy Tactics (Tactics Ogre on PSP is better, but I discovered it much later. This was the best tactics game for me for a while) Front Mission 3 (although this one was really good too, and had a theme I liked more) Symphony of the Night (second to Super Metroid in the genre, but still compelling today) WipeOut XL (still the best Wipeout for me. 3 wasn’t bad either.)
Vagrant Story Super Puzzle fighter 2 Turbo (I was unbeatable at this, unbeatable!!!) Abe’s Odyssey Metal Gear Solid G-Police (Cool sci-fi helicopter sim. The game had graphics setting on the psx to xhoose between framerate or draw distance) Gran Turismo (only real driving sim I’ve really enjoyed until Dirt Rally)
Never got to try Colony Wars, but I’m sure it would have been up there…
The Playstation was a game changer. Narrowing it down to 10 isn’t easy:
Final Fantasy Tactics
Final Fantasy IX
Chrono Cross
Resident Evil 2
Blood Omen: Legacy Of Kain
Tenchu
Tomb Raider 2
Colony Wars
Castlevania: SotN
Syphon Filter
Like I said, 10 isn’t easy:
Resident Evil
Tomb Raider
Resident Evil 3
Metal Gear Solid
Fade To Black
Gran Turismo
G Police
One
Twisted Metal
Silent Hill
I think the 32-bit era, despite its rough graphics, is a great one because it was the crossover point where some of the best 2D games met genre defining 3D ones.
Top 10…
Metal Gear Solid
Final Fantasy VII
Gran Turismo
Vagrant Story
Einhander
Grandia (If only the Saturn one had come stateside…)
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Ridge Racer (Substitute one of the sequels if you like, but the original is iconic.)
Wipeout (or XL… )
Resident Evil
Closely followed by…
Klonoa: Door To Phantomile
Final Fantasy Tactics
Colony Wars
Tekken 3
The Unholy War
Bushido Blade
Rollcage: Stage II
Alundra
Front Mission 3
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
…and there are many more. I’m sure I left things out I might want to include. Tomb Raider would be another, although I’d probably go with the Saturn version since that was where they were developing first.
Oh man yeah, the Working Designs games - Alundra and the Lunars on PS1, so great and pretty difficult. There was a time I would pick up anything those guys put out. Hell, I got a TurboGrafx so I could play Cadash and Cosmic Fantasy, but that’s a topic for another thread …
Final Fantasy Tactics - one of my favorites of any system; the combo of the story, the class system, and the battles hits the right spot for me
Suikoden II - the best straight JRPG of the era. Sorry, Final Fantasy.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - so good that it’s really shocking it’s third. Big gap below this one. There would be an actual gap in the post but the Discourse list function has strong feelings about that.
Chrono Cross - if this didn’t have the Chrono Trigger baggage, it would have been much better received, because it’s absolutely excellent in its own right
Tactics Ogre - the PSP version was better than either FFT version, but the PS1 version lagged a bit behind
NFL Gameday - Pick a year. I’ll say '98 since that was the first one I had. Outdid Madden every year until EA bought the exclusive license to eliminate all the competition.
SaGa Frontier - this game had a lot of weird quirks, and ended up being love/hate at a time when Square could otherwise do little wrong. I loved how different it was from everything else they were doing, and enough of it worked for me.
Final Fantasy IX - my favorite of the three PS1 games, though if you wanted to argue VII based on the Legacy argument, I’m okay with that. I think IX was the better game, though.
Vagrant Story - Square was really good and prolific at the same time for quite a while there, weren’t they?
Grandia - I didn’t really have a strong feeling about the last spot. The Lunar games and Ogre Battle were both excellent, but I had played them on their original systems. It ended up coming down to this or Alundra (or a Tales game, I guess, but those are almost background noise to me even if I reliably enjoy them), and I just liked Grandia more.
Great system, for many reasons that others have mentioned already, especially the 2D/3D era clash. Unfortunately it’s also the point where the JRPGs started getting so long that it’s harder to do a ‘quick replay’ outside of a speedrun approach.
Me and my friends all had N64s growing up so my exposure was limited (and to this date, despite liking the series I’ve still barely played the PS1 Final Fantasy games; FF7 bored me enough that I actively stopped). So uhh… Symphony of the Night, which has come to enough other systems that I’ve played it a ton? Oh, and The Adventure of Little Ralph is a great 2D sidescroller but sadly never made it out of Japan.
Hell, I played most of those on the PS2! My college friends already introduced me to JRPGs, there was more backlog than I could tackle. I had all SNES and PS1 JRPGs to compete with current stuff. So the filter goes somewhere, and it wasn’t gonna be Chrono Trigger ;)
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
Matt Hoffmans BMX
Tekken 3
Gran Turismo
PaRappa the Rapper
Tenchu Stealth Assassin
TOCA
Colony Wars (and sequels)
Metal Gear Solid
FF7
Oh, wow! How could I forget the Lunar Silver Star Story Complete special edition of Lunar? I loved that game and definitely in my top 10. Will have to bump Syphon Filter.
Actually, I had forgotten a bunch of other JRPGs, any of which could easily go in my top 10: Wild Arms, Suikoden, Vagrant Story, Valkyrie Profile, Vandal Hearts, Brigandine. And others I am surely forgetting about.
The SNES, Playstation 1 and Playstation 2 were the best systems for JRPGs.
