To this day, most would consider God of War II to be among an extremely small number of games that could vie for best looking game on a system that regularly cranked out visuals some felt it never could.

Easily one of the most impressive accomplishments on a system rife with them.

The first time you stumble upon the Steeds of Time, its a truly jaw-dropping sight and then you realize they are the level.

Final Fantasy XII does epic like few games on the PS2, offering a massive world that is new and diverse, but has multiple callbacks to the Ivalice found in Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story even going so far as to link the games if you read deeply enough into the lore.

Great characters, a lengthy story and a battle system well, fortunately were commending the visuals here rather than the more arguable parts of the game.

Oh, and it did a pretty great job of looking great while it did it.

For a system that was deemed to be the least powerful of the three on the market at the close of the last generation, the PS2 sure seemed to have the whole idea of scale down pat.

With its lonely, blown-out look and crumbling ruins, there was no doubt that ICO would be on our list years ago, but the sequel takes that same aesthetic and expands upon it by filling a bigger, more open world with absolutely towering beasts that are literal level-sized boss fights.

The visual splendor that Team ICO has created with their second game is nothing short of jaw dropping even all these years later in the era of HDTVs.

Using a unique and ever-changing cast of colossi, the bosses became the stages (for lack of a better word), and no game before or since has really been able to match that sense of wonder, exploration and discovery.

The level of tech know-how has benefitted plenty of Sonys games, but it really came to a head on the PS2 with the release of the moody, intensely atmospheric and absolutely gorgeous Ghosthunter.

Though the game itself had some issues, a lack of visual pop certainly wasnt one of them, with some seriously impressive lighting effects and texture work that made the most of the hardware it was running on.

Still to this day one of the most disarmingly pretty technical showstoppers on the diminutive black brick.

If you can find a copy of the game, fire it up and check out the lighting in swampy area seen below.

Then remember its running on hardware thats now 10 years old.

Even before we moved to HD resolutions, game creators were lamenting the time and effort needed to crank out hand-drawn visuals that would satisfy the polygon- and texture-hungry masses in the same way it used to back during the 8- and 16-bit eras.

Thankfully, not everyone had given up on realizing that sprites could still look incredible, as the multi-jointed ones in Vanillawares Norse-themed action RPG proved.

If youve ever wondered what the future of 2D graphics will look like, just use this game as your jumping off point.

The amount of love and effort poured into the visuals alone make this an extremely tantalizing game.

Best Ps2 Games