PlayStation 3 Retrospective – Joseph’s Picks

 

Perhaps it was hubris, but after such a strong start in the game industry, dethroning Nintendo and destroying Sega’s console department almost completely with the PlayStation, then printing money with the PlayStation 2 and being the home of literally all the games except Mario, Sony probably thought they were on top of the world and could do no wrong.  They might’ve decided that gamers had their backs and were willing to pay any price for the next generation of their highly successful and record breaking brand.

$599 US Dollars became a meme almost overnight, and really, what did Sony expect?  A lower price than their competition is exactly why their very first console outsold the Sega Saturn.  Well, that and other factors, but we won’t get into that here.

The PlayStation 3 began as a joke in the gaming industry but eventually recovered enough that it didn’t fare too badly against stiff competition from the Nintendo Wii and the Microsoft Xbox 360.  Nintendo’s new Wiimote gimmick, plus aggressive advertising put it in literally every home, and Microsoft did their best to court markets it ignored on their first Xbox, as well as became the first console to fully embrace the indie market.

For me, the game that sold me a PlayStation 3 was Final Fantasy XIII.  I’d been a fan of Final Fantasy since playing the early games in the series, then followed it onto the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 when I acquired used hardware and bought the software, used as well.  Everything up to Final Fantasy XII was great and even the stinkers weren’t that bad.

Final Fantasy XIII was alright and at the time I liked it.  Linear storytelling isn’t always bad.  I was underwhelmed by some aspects of it, and it was certainly a different kind of game than what had come before in the series.  I think by this time in my life I was also craving experiences beyond my favourite genre, the traditional JRPG, and fortunately the PlayStation 3 delivered.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward
Developed: Square-Enix
Published: Square-Enix
Genre: MMORPG (expansion)
Released: 2015

As if to prove Drew’s point about PlayStation systems having long tails, Square-Enix supported the PS3 well into 2017, but by that time they acknowledged that there were things that they wanted to do with Stormblood that they couldn’t do if they continued to use the aging hardware, so they finally discontinued PS3 access to Final Fantasy XIV.

Before then, gamers got to enjoy a trip to Ishgard, which became their new home for two years.  I still remember the feeling that this was an event unlike anything I would ever experience again.  Damn near every player on the server logged in during early access and made their way in droves from Camp Dragonhead in Coerthas, west to the Steps of Faith and into Ishgard for the very first time.

And what a time it was.  The story was fantastic, having already been built up in the previous few content patches as a clash between man and dragon, with a faction of heretics siding with the dragons and claiming that history didn’t tell the whole story.  Flight was introduced and new environments were designed to be explored thoroughly a couple times and be far more challenging to navigate than environments in A Realm Reborn.  Everything was expanded upon, with new ways to earn experience crafting and gathering, more dungeons and more raids, more classes to play as, everything about Heavensward felt like an improvement.  If this was how the game’s PS3 support was going to end, it sure went out on a high note.

Journey
Developed: Thatgamecompany
Published: Sony Computer Entertainment
Genre: Adventure
Released: 2012

Although the Xbox 360 courted a lot of indie developers, that didn’t mean that interesting projects didn’t appear on the PlayStation 3 from time to time.  Journey was more of an art game than an adventure game, but players certainly felt like they’d gone on an adventure when they played it.

The central idea behind Journey was that it would be a multiplayer game which didn’t tell you anything about the player you were grouped up with and you wouldn’t be able to communicate outside of basic sounds and jumps.  Players were put together at random from whoever happened to be playing at the time, and would accompany each other through a game whose story was told by its environment.  Players could explore to their heart’s content in what were at times stark and lonely landscapes.  As such, every aspect of the game was supposed to help encourage these players to work together rather than troll one another, and wouldn’t you know it, it worked.

For a game with such a simple set-up, it gave its players such an emotional high that blogs were set up to document player stories, giving them places to try to reach out to their fellow players and thank them for guiding them through the game.  Even years later, players were moved to seek out these blogs and submit their stories to share.

A spiritual successor, Sky: Children of the Light, is currently running on mobile devices.

Bayonetta
Developed: PlatinumGames
Published: Sega
Genre: Action, Hack and Slash
Released: 2009

It’s interesting to consider that the first project from the newly created PlatinumGames was the tough as nails Bayonetta when the final project from Hideki Kamiya’s previous game studio was the much kinder and gentler Okami.  Whether this was on purpose or not, I don’t know, but it sure made Bayonetta an interesting, if sometimes frustrating experience.

That said, the harder difficulty to the fights made me want to get good, so I practiced Bayonetta’s moves during the loading screen in order to get better at them and maybe get through fights without constantly dying.  Conventional wisdom was that the game was better on the Xbox 360 because it had shorter loading times than on the PlayStation 3, but longer loading times meant more time practicing moves until the game was ready to dump you back into the action.  As a result, I knew several players on the Xbox 360 who had to turn the game’s difficulty down in order to get through it, but I on the PlayStation 3 was able to beat it on the default difficulty setting.  Ever since, I’ve considered the PlayStation 3 the superior version, despite longer loading times.

Admittedly, it has been years since I played the game and I didn’t understand the story when I played it, so damned if I can remember it now.  I would love to return to the game someday and figure it out.  Fortunately, this year it was ported to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with a Nintendo Switch port being released in 2018.  If you missed out on this game a decade ago, now is as good a time as any to experience it again.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
Developed: Ninja Theory
Published: Namco Bandai Games
Genre: Action-Adventure
Released: 2010

It seems the game industry has not been very kind to Ninja Theory.  Their time on the PlayStation 3 was very rocky.  Their first project for the console, Heavenly Sword, was even featured on Heroes, but it wasn’t successful enough for them to create the trilogy they originally set out to make.  Their third project was the Devil May Cry reboot DmC, which earned death threats from fans and which Capcom eventually backpedaled from in order to resurrect the main series in last year’s Devil May Cry 5.

Their second project for the console was easily their best.  Enslaved loosely adapts popular Chinese novel Journey to the West into a post-apocalyptic world, and just like Heavenly Sword, more games were planned but ultimately cancelled, likely because the escalating costs of game development during the PlayStation 3 era made mid-tier game titles like this not as financially viable as they would’ve been on the PlayStation 2 unless they lit sales charts on fire.

That’s a tragedy, because the game deserved better.  It was fun, was definitely not as difficult as Bayonetta above and so it should’ve had wider appeal, the game’s characters were well written, and it was basically one long escort mission except also good… but I guess the game wasn’t advertised very well and people didn’t talk about it, so it didn’t have a high enough visibility for the general gaming public.  It certainly might’ve gained a bit of traction if it had been played on Twitch a few times when it was launched.  Too bad Twitch didn’t launch until 2011.

Don’t cry for Ninja Theory, though.  The PlayStation 4 was much kinder to the developer, given the success of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice in 2017.

 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

If there’s one thing that the PlayStation 2 was known for, it was that it had a ton of games.  There were so many good and interesting games released for that one console that I have a pile of them that I’ve yet to even play.  Just for that one console.  The PlayStation 3 didn’t have quite as many, it had a mere fraction of the games of its immediate predecessor, but the entire generation still had enough interesting games that, along with the Wii and Xbox 360, plus the two handhelds (PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS), I have a pile of games from that generation I’ve yet to play, a few of them being on the PS3.

I think the games which I would most like to complete sometime are the Atelier games.  There were seven of them in total that appeared on the PlayStation 3, and although some of them received better reviews than others, the fact that there’s a company putting out yearly sequels to their niche RPG series without drawing unflattering comparisons to Assassin’s Creed or yearly sports titles is amazing to me.  The series is generally well received and even the entries that series veterans don’t enjoy as much have updated versions that are favoured by the fan base.  Although I have only played some of the titles that appeared on the PlayStation 2, I look forward to giving the Arland and Dusk trilogies a try.

 

The PlayStation 3 may be gone, but it is definitely not forgotten and at least for some players, the console has a bit of life left in it.