I loved the PS2 era of gaming a lot. This may be a controversial take, but the PS2 era did not last long enough.
Everything about the aesthetics of the games that the PS2 produced were excellent. In my opinion, this is the point when low fidelity and high quality assets overlapped just enough to make games more comprehensible to their players. That enabled a lot of innovation that the PS3/360 era handled entirely differently. Forget an era, the PS2 is the last part of an entire age of gaming that delineates what I’m referring to.
The PS2 was a huge turning point in what games were and could be in 3D. Prior to this, many games were abstract and the characters were a lump of polygons. With the PS2, this began to change. So we began to get games that our minds had to do a lot of interpreting but could see reality through. Nowadays, I’d argue that your mind does less interpreting and so the resulting picture has glaring inaccuracies.
It also helped that ps2 was primarily played on CRTs or at least plasma which helped the picture look better in plenty of scenes than a PS3. Not to mention the color palette of games after the PS2 turned to muck.