496 PlayStation 2 games worth playing: critically acclaimed, still popular, or loved by the players who rated them. Sorted by how sure we can be that players rate a game highly. Some genres are left out on purpose; see how this list was made.
How this list was made
Of the PS2's 4,338 games, 3,198 are playable without reading Japanese. A few deliberate cuts (listed below) narrow that pool, and a game makes this list if any of these is true:
- Critics rated it 80 or higher.
- It's among the most popular PS2 games on Vimm's Lair or RetroAchievements.
- PS2 players rate it highly: a combined GameFAQs + Metacritic user lower bound of 3.65 / 5 or more, from at least 25 ratings.
- Retro players love it, and someone backs them up: a vote-adjusted Vimm's Lair rating (lower bound) of 8.36 / 10 or more, plus either a PS2 player lower bound of 3.5+ or a critic score of 75+.
- Retro players love it and play it: a Vimm's Lair lower bound of 8.32 / 10 or more, and at least 1,000 players on RetroAchievements.
★ Critic score from GameRankings only: WRC II Extreme (82%, 18 reviews) and World Championship Snooker 2004 (80%, 11 reviews) were released in Europe but not the US, so Metacritic never scored them; their critic scores come from GameRankings, mostly from UK outlets.
What's deliberately left out (opinionated, so you know what you're not seeing):
- Japanese-text games (1,140): Japan-only releases that need you to read Japanese, like RPGs, strategy games, visual novels and text-heavy sims. Import-friendly Japan-only games such as fighters, shooters and racers are kept.
- Team and league sports (386): American football, soccer, basketball, hockey, baseball, cricket, rugby, volleyball and their management sims. Racing, wrestling, boxing, golf, tennis, pool, fishing and extreme sports stay.
- Games that need extra hardware (183): rhythm and music games built around a guitar, drums, a dance mat, a microphone or a camera, plus two Densha de Go! train simulators built around a train controller. Rhythm games playable on a standard controller (Gitaroo Man, Amplitude, Frequency, PaRappa the Rapper 2, Space Channel 5 and others) are included. EyeToy: Play is left out too, since it needs the EyeToy camera.
- Superseded editions (7): when a later release is the same game with more in it, only that one is listed, e.g. Persona 3 FES rather than Persona 3, Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution rather than Virtua Fighter 4, Melty Blood: Actress Again rather than Act Cadenza.
- Yearly series (19): when a series put out near-identical yearly updates, only the best entry is listed: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005, WWE SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain, NASCAR Thunder 2004, Fight Night Round 2, Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 and MotoGP 4. Entries that play differently stay too, e.g. NASCAR: Dirt to Daytona, Tokyo Xtreme Racer: Drift 2 and MotoGP 08.
- Online-only games whose servers have closed (8): Final Fantasy XI and its three expansions, EverQuest Online Adventures and Frontiers, Front Mission Online and Hardware: Online Arena. They can't be played anymore.
- Better on another console or PC (12): a clearly better version exists elsewhere, even when emulated, so they're left to that platform. Dreamcast: Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis 2 (Sega Sports Tennis on PS2), Capcom vs. SNK 2, Grandia II. Xbox: Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Double Agent, Max Payne, Max Payne 2, Psychonauts and Godzilla: Save the Earth. PC: Deus Ex. The first two Splinter Cell games stay, because their PS2 versions have missions the Xbox versions don't.
- Retro compilations and straight arcade or Neo Geo ports (55): collections of older games (Namco Museum, the Mega Man and Sonic collections, Metal Slug Anthology, Sega Genesis Collection, the Oretachi Game Center discs and others), Neo Geo games released unchanged on PS2 (Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Metal Slug 4 and 5, The King of Fighters 2001) and arcade games whose original boards run natively on MiSTer (Hyper Street Fighter II, Dragon Blaze). The originals play just as well under emulation, so they belong on those systems' lists. Ports whose PS2 version adds something you can't get elsewhere stay, e.g. DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou (Death Label mode), Espgaluda (arrange mode), Vampire: Darkstalkers Collection, Metal Slug 3, The King of Fighters 2000, 2002 and 2003, Rockman: Power Battle Fighters, Street Fighter Alpha Anthology and Pinball Hall of Fame. Ports from the PSP and other handhelds are kept and judged on their PS2 ratings.
Data collected September 2026. Download as CSV.
Download as a DAT file: Redump checksums for one release per game, chosen by Fresh1G1R's PropeR 1G1R rules (via Retool), with every disc of multi-disc releases. Use it to check or organise your own disc dumps with a ROM manager like RomVault, clrmamepro or Igir. It contains no games.