Christmas PS2 RPGs

[Moogy]

Here's a list of absolutely essential PS2 RPGs:

All NIS SRPGs (LPT, Disgaea, PB, MK, and Disgaea 2) - You can probably skip LPT. I'm planning to buy another copy of D2 to get different boxart, so I'm rather biased towards NIS. All of the other games are completely excellent, though.

Digital Devil Saga 1&2 - Simply the best turn-based battle system ever made, combined with amazing music, awesome graphics and atmosphere, and a kickass, dark, and mature story. DDS1 is hard to find now, but these games are so worth it.

Star Ocean 3 - An awesome, free-roaming battle system, post-game content that will keep you occupied for a long time, and Motoi Sakuraba. Only cons are that it's very slow to start off and the story sucks.

Wild ARMs 3 - Incredibly stylish (Western steampunk), very cheap (5 dollars), amazing characters and storyline, awesome puzzles, and some of the best music ever composed for a video game. A must-play.

Xenosaga I-III - Screw Star Wars, this is the best trilogy ever. It only gets better as it goes on, too. XS1 and XS2 are both great games, but XS3 is a fantastic conclusion, and a worthy successor to Xenogears. Not to mention, XS2 and XS3's OSTs were composed by Yuki Kajiura. XS1 was composed by the LEGENDARY Yasunori Mitsuda, but, the OST sadly sucks for unknown reasons. Probably the fact that there are like 3 songs total. Uh, anyway, I digress. An amazing sci-fi epic in 3 parts.

Dark Cloud 2 - Excellent game in every aspect. The perfect dungeon-crawler, with a pretty decent plotline and so much content that you'll be playing it for hundreds of hours just to beat it. Then you still have another whole dungeon.

Probably some more but I'm too lazy right now.

For PSX games, god I dunno. I own every SNES, PSX, and PS2 RPG released in America, so feel free to ask me about any of them.

[itmorr]

I've got the DC2. I'll check some of those out for sure. Thanks.

[TS_SonicMaster]

I say go with Tales of Symphonia or Tales of the Abyss like Squeek said.
The Tales games are nice lengthed, have nice storylines and full time battles but you can pause it when doing your so its all good.

[Moogy]

ToS is a GCN game. There is an enhanced PS2 port, but it is only available in Japan.

TotA I haven't finished playing yet, but it's shaping up to be even better than ToS.

[kickassbuddy]

FFXII

[DarkProdigy]

Quick question for Moogy: Xenosaga I was amazing. Xenosaga II, not so much, in my opinion. The final installment won't disappoint me with the dumbed down battle system of the second game in the series, will it?

[Moogy]

XS3 is far better than both of them. I don't know why people dislike XS2, though... Everything about it is better than XS1, even if it does have mistakes. "Dumbed-down battle system?" Have you even played the game? The battle system is far more complex than XS1's ever was.

Anyway, like I said, the series is worth playing for XS3 alone. XS1 and XS2 were both well worth playing, but XS3 is simply on a different level. Like I said, XS3 managed to be a true successor to Xenogears - something that XS1 and XS2 just couldn't do. XS3 finally does everything right, one more time.