LogFAQs > #876205203

2002
https://i.imgur.com/uUbdXKy.jpg

Notable Games:

Animal Crossing
Battlefield 1942
Eternal Darkness
Grandia 2
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Kingdom Hearts
Metroid Fusion
Metroid Prime
Morrowind
Neverwinter nights
Ratchet and Clank
REmake
Rez
Splinter Cell
Suikoden 3
Super Mario Sunshine
Warcraft 3
Wild Arms 3
Shenmue 2
Unreal Tournament 2003

transience's take:

1 - Metroid Fusion
2 - Rez
3 - Metroid Prime
4 - Suikoden 3
5 - Tactics Ogre: Knights of Lodis

Overall: 28th

Gamerankings top 5:

1 - Metroid Prime
2 - GTA: Vice City
3 - Warcraft 3
4 - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4
5 - Splinter Cell

GameFAQs:

1 - Metroid Prime
2 - GTA: Vice City
3 - Kingdom Hearts

Every generation has one year like this, where there's just a weird lack of great releases for a full year. The SNES generation was 1993. The PS1 gen was 1999. And the PS2 gen was 2002. No Final Fantasy, no Metal Gear, no Zelda and an uncharacteristically bad Mario. No new hardware and very few breakthrough games. It was even a down RPG year. Squaresoft, the company who murdered 2000, put out only one game in 2002. It was a big one, but still.

2002 is unquestionably the year of Metroid. It had been eight long years since the hugely influential and popular Super Metroid. Metroid was ostensibly a 2d series and the move to the third dimension didn't make a whole lot of sense. Do you make a 3d platformer that's nonlinear? How would that play on the Nintendo 64? Do you make another portable game like Metroid 2? The result was shocking - a first person shooter made by an American company. I was extremely skeptical. Nintendo went 'kiddie' during the Gamecube era - Mario's cleaning up graffiti with a water pack and Zelda went from the dark Majora's Mask to the bright and colorful 'celda' - and Metroid Prime seemed the polar opposite of that. What was this game? Wouldn't turning Metroid into a FPS strip all of the life out of it?

As it turns out, nope. Metroid Prime was amazing. It was somehow more atmospheric than Super Metroid. The exploration and music was incredible. It didn't really feel like a shooter at all. We coined the term 'first person adventure' for this game because first person games just didn't look and feel like this. (I think there was an element of pretentiousness to this, too - we wanted to look down on lowly FPS's and show how the glorious Metroid was anything but one of those.) Metroid Prime had rave reviews across the board and is probably still in the Gamerankings top 10. Just as important, it gave Nintendo a franchise that could appeal to more mature players. It wasn't blood and guts or anything but it also wasn't a game for children.

Samus wasn't content to just own the Gamecube though. Metroid Fusion was also the GBA GOTY. Fusion was a much more familiar entry for those who just couldn't handle the first person transition. Big Metroid fans (hello) disliked the linearity and the removal of series traditions like bomb and wall jumping - but it was also a really fun 2d Metroid game on a handheld. They hadn't really made those before. Metroid 2 was okay for what it was but the hardware was extremely limiting.

There were three or four other major games this year. Rockstar turned around a new GTA game in less than a year with Vice City. Vice City was even bigger than GTA3: more violent, more controversial and more popular. It felt like you couldn't get away from Grand Theft Auto in 2002. There was stories about murder in the news following GTA3's release. Jack Thompson rose to prominence right around this time too. GTA3 put the whole genre on the map but it felt like Vice City put it over the top. It was the best selling game of 2002.
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xyzzy