PlayStation 2 RPGs and you?

The PS2 was the last great JRPG generation, in my opinion. At least for consoles; the genre has soldiered on in portable form.

Just from memory, my favorites on the system (of many I enjoyed) would be Dragon Quest VIII, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, Rogue Galaxy, and Wild ARMs 5. I also enjoyed Final Fantasy X, even if folks seem to hate it now. A lot of other games are still really good, but absolute, upper-tier JRPGs are pretty rare on the system. I think the PS1 actually has more absolute, unquestioned classics, but the overall quality level on PS2 is very high, probably higher in aggregate than the PS1.

EDIT:  Boy, I could just keep adding stuff, but before I forget, Tales of the Abyss hits all the right notes for me.  It took me a bit to really get into it, because the combat ends up less combo-happy than Symphonia.  Once you adjust, though, what's here is definitely compelling compared to a lot of the Tales series.  For all the grief that series gets, at the very least most of them are solid, B-tier material that rarely surprise, but also rarely disappoint.  The very definition of comfort food!

Not my favorite generation or console for RPGs. Feels over-saturated, with not enough succinct quality titles and way too many "epic" bloaters. 

Grandia II and Ys VI are among the best RPGs on the system, and both are better on their original hardware.

I do (also) enjoy Dragon Quest VIII, the Drakengard games, the From Software stuff, La Pucelle: Tactics, Tales of the Abyss, Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria, the Wild Arms games, the Ys and Phantasy Star remakes, and a few other things. There's a handful of other titles that look promising, buy I haven't had a chance to play them. As far as big-name stuff goes, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time is awful, Kingdom Hearts feels like an elaborate prank, Dawn of Mana is cringe, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is only quasi-playable, and the Final Fantasy games are just meh (GBA and GC had better installments). Overall, the Game Boy Advance was the best sixth gen RPG system. 

I fell out of JRPG's during this gen. I'm still not quite sure why, but I know even when I was younger and went through this era, the aesthetic changes of JRPG's from the 16/32bit era to the PS2 didn't help. Sure you had better tech and other genres got upgraded, but JRPG's ditched all the pixel art work or pre-rendered backdrops and were now usually getting dubbed, frequently horrible ones at that (and I tend to think I have a high tolerance for game dubs). The genre changed really dramatically honestly. I was also pretty easy to please with simple turn based games, but a lot of stuff started getting experimental here... for better or worse. All that said I'm no expert on the genre in this era whatsoever and it's still one I want to explore. Need to get another working PS2 eventually... my whole PS2 backlog is mainly JRPG's.

As for the ones I've played, Xenosaga III is my favorite. Too bad it's such a hard sell being the last of a flawed trilogy with dramatic gameplay/etc changes in between each installment, so it's very jarring. I love them all but the first has not aged well gameplay wise. Graphically and story wise I think it still holds up a lot, but the combat is just really dragged out later on along with the entire game only having one battle theme (even for bosses) until the final boss and no dungeons have BGM whatsoever. Xenosaga II gets way better with the cutscenes and focuses on a really good arc with one of the best villains in JRPG's to me, but then its battle system is beyond wacky and an online friend of mine helped me understand it better than the game itself explains. I hated II originally, but almost 10 years later after giving it another shot I really liked it. III's gameplay is the best, with its combat system basically being just like FFX's where you can switch characters out mid battle, it's got a simple skill system and is just awesome. The second disc might even surpass Xenogears for me. What I love about Xenosaga over Gears is that it's intergalactic sized with space and planets, the scale of the trilogy is absolutely insane with a Bible-sized encyclopedia database of anything and everything you'd ever want to know about in the third game. Every main character basically has their own rival and final boss by the end of III, so the last final stretch of all these final bosses coming to closure is insane. Graphically this game looks incredible too, even better than some early 7th gen stuff. While I have continued to love Monolith-Soft's newer games, Tetsuya Takahashi himself even admits that all the Xenoblade's up to this point are basically just "simple shounen stories". I think they still do characters and the execution of storytelling well, but these games are not even a fourth of how layered and complex Xenogears and Xenosaga were. I'll keep dreaming we see something like Xenosaga again. Again, I can easily acknowledge its flaws and I've been content with being like one of the three people on the internet and world that loves this trilogy, but yeah I just love its world so much. The anime OVA was decent but only covers a fraction of the first game, it would probably need like 100 episodes or more to cover everything. For my money it's pretty much better than most sci-fi anime out there.

Well, of course I have to ramble about Xenosaga.

Other than that, I originally hated FFX despite loving the music and battle system, but I finally replayed it two years ago or something with the HD version and really turned around on it. It's a joyful and damn fun game with a cast that is pretty fun. I don't really care if Tidus is a goofball now, the unemotional Cloud, Squall, Lightning, etc types get really dull.

FFXII is great, even if I fell out of it and didn't finish it. Namely because the story didn't exist and you'd go hours upon hours of stretches without the plot moving forward, so I lost interest. But I'm excited to get back to it with the HD release as well. And I've grown to love Sakimoto's music even more thesedays so that will be fun too.

Grandia II was awesome, but I remember it being hilariously bad in some ways, like with the sound effects or music in spots, then the final dungeon is like... going through a ton of body parts of this giant monster or something. I don't know but a lot of this game was a big joke to one of my friends and I. The gameplay was freaking amazing though so it's really fun, definitely recommended. I've been kind of curious about the remaster of this one too.

Suikoden III was another hate -> love affair after a 10 year gap or so. I originally hated it because of its style and the combat system is pretty slow compared to the originals, but I finally buckled down and powered through it a few summers ago. Now I have to say, it has the best characters in the franchise to me. But plot wise I still like the first two games more. Chris was my favorite character in 3 and probably one of the most badass female protagonists out there. It's still a flawed game, with lots of backtracking across a small set of levels and the branching storylines with three characters bloats it out a bit, think it was like 60 some hours for me. I'm really glad it clicked with me and I experienced it though. In comparison, I loved Suikoden V back in the day but never beat it, because it seemed endlessly long! And it had a pretty bad budget with tons of loading screens or something, I just remember the game being clunky and slow from a technical point. I loved how this one felt more like 1-2 though. I still want to check out IV despite its bad rep and I have Tactics.

I hit up some of the NIS / Atlus stuff back then, but none of it really resonated with me much. Phantom Brave, Disgaea (think I played 2), Odin Sphere, etc... didn't finish any of them.

In my backlog, I'm most interested in Valkyrie Profile 2 (despite having never played 1 due to the prices), Shadow Hearts series, and Arc the Lad Twilight of the Spirits.

Kingdom Hearts has its fans for sure... but for me, someone that had zero nostalgia to this series and tried the PS3 HD remaster of 1 a few years ago, I ran away from it fast after a couple of hours. I should start throwing this game out when people start bad mouthing issues with Secret of Mana's combat or something, because KH just felt awful.

I think I'll always remain picky about this era for unforeseen circumstances, but hopefully there's some gems I still need to discover.

So was Front Mission 5 translated? Assuming you emulated it. It looks insane. I couldn't get into Front Mission 3 for some reason, but maybe the PS2 ones would click with me.

I played Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance myself, but for some reason I remember not understanding what I was doing haha. Wasn't versed in the loot stuff yet or something. I want to check it out again sometime.

Dark Cloud I loved, wasn't sure if that counted. I never beat it though, as it got really repetitive and had a lot of flaws so a 7/10 seems totally fair. I definitely sunk a lot of hours into it though and it was interesting at the time.