i would say the HD era is the tipping point for when game development's exponential growth starts bringing back extremely diminishing returns, and obviously like half of japan imploded at that time so if you're a weeb into 3D games primarily a lot of your favs are gonna end up in that era. but i wouldn't say it's anything special about the ps2 era, more just pre-HD game development in general. noteworthy that while that's where a lot of the best 3D action games are, it's far less true for genres not about 3D movement.
