The PlayStation brand celebrates its thirtieth birthday in 2024 and we are ready to celebrate by choosing the five iconic games released on Sony consoles over the last three decades: few rules, lots of feeling. Only one game for each platform, ranging from exclusives to third-party games, from PS1 to PS5 excluding PSP and PlayStation Vita.
Thirty years of career summed up in five video games… it’s hard but we try. Inevitably, limiting the selection to just five games excluded many excellent titles that contributed to making PlayStation a cornerstone of pop culture. You are rightly wondering where are Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, Kingdom Hearts, Gran Turismo and God of War? Add them yourself! Tell us your preferences below in the comments following our own preferences, we will give voice to your contributions in a second article dedicated to readers’ choices.
Final Fantasy 7 – PS1
The reason for its inclusion in our top 5 is easy to say: before Final Fantasy VII, Japanese role-playing games simply did not exist in North America and Europe, or almost. Okay, the first episodes of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest also arrived on the NES in the United States with many censorships and changed names, think of Dragon Quest changed into Dragon Warrior to “mask” the role-playing nature and make it look like a fantasy game action or to the “chance” Final Fantasy VI became Final Fantasy III in the United States.
But for example Chrono Trigger was never released on SNES in Europe, Tales of Phantasia remained confined to Japan only and the same goes for the first Star Ocean. Super Mario RPG was not published on our continent at the time of its launch in 1996 and Dragon Quest VI was also never launched outside the land of the rising sun, with Enix dragging its feet due to the high localization costs and of the low expected sales.
With Final Fantasy VII, however, things change, Cloud’s adventure is a huge success and even Western players are starting to become passionate about Japanese role-playing games, a genre that is currently dominant in the sales charts. At the time, Final Fantasy VII won over the public thanks to its extremely high graphic quality, high-impact cinematic sequences and a cast of characters of absolute depth, still memorable today.
And the myth of Final Fantasy VII endures over 25 years later, so much so that today we anxiously await the release of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, the second part of the FF7 Remake project.
GTA III – PS2
And everything changed, forever. GTA III deserves credit for revolutionizing the third-person action game genre forever. Rockstar Games’ work arrived in 2001 and amazed everyone, becoming not only a symbolic game of PlayStation 2 but also a point of reference for the entire industry, which from then on would begin to use the “GTA model” as a mantra.
Talking about the importance of GTA for the video game industry and market would require infinite space and we don’t want to dwell on it too much, we simply say that the already excellent formula of the Houser brothers will then reach its peak on PS2 with GTA San Andreas but the myth of Grand Theft Auto continues today as demonstrated by the incredible numbers of the first trailer of GTA 6.
The Last of Us – PS3
The Last of Us comes out at the end of the PlayStation 3’s life cycle, a few months after the arrival of the PS4. Moreover, it is no mystery that in the last years of the PS3’s life cycle, Sony has put the turbo on by publishing a series of extremely successful exclusives that have allowed the console to recover the ground initially lost to the Xbox 360.
And The Last of Us is not only one of the best PS3 games ever, but also one of the most acclaimed video games ever in the history of the medium. Joel and Ellie’s adventure conquers the public and becomes an absolute cornerstone… but the story written by Neil Druckmann is too fascinating to remain confined to the world of video games and in fact ten years later HBO presents The Last of Us, one of the series most successful TV of 2023. And the story of TLOU is still to be written, with the probable arrival of The Last of Us Part 3 in the next few years and the debut of the second season of the serial.
God of War 2018 – PS4
God of War is one of the best-selling PS4 games ever with over 23 million copies, a game that rewrites the rules of narrative action games and overturns a franchise acclaimed by audiences and critics.
Cory Barlog exploits the sequence shot in the best possible way and writes a story based on the relationship between father and son, a relationship marked by a thousand difficulties for a story that reserves numerous twists and turns. Epochal to say the least.
Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart – PS5
PlayStation 5 is still a very young console and it is not easy to point out a game that can already write its name in history. However, we felt like identifying it in Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart, a title released in spring 2021, a not too happy period in terms of sales for PS5, with the chip crisis and production problems that made it very difficult to find the console in stores in those months.
This is also why Rift Apart perhaps didn’t shine as well as it could have on a commercial level, but as far as quality is concerned, there are no doubts about the merits of Insomniac Games’ game. The game starring Ratchet & Clank has nothing to envy on a technical level to a Pixar or Illumination film production and on a technical level it puts in place interesting solutions, think for example of the non-existent loading times thanks to the muscles of the PlayStation 5’s SSD.
A game that deserves a relaunch to experience a second youth now that there are almost 55 million PlayStation 5 owners in the world. And let’s not forget that many of the technological innovations experimented with Rift Apert were then used by Insomniac to shape the world of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.