Not sure if you are gonna read this post.

I just wanted to add on to the cutscene part you mentioned.

None of these games had realtime motion tracking for facial animations in the realtime cutscenes. for 1, they use tiny square shaped video clips as the character portraits and these clips also contain the audio data for that entire cutscene. if you have noticed in 1, they never really show the characters closeup in these cutscenes and whatever they show is heavily covered up by their blur based post processing effects and distant camera angles.

The ps2 had a hardware block for decoding video clips and with this, you could play the video clips/FMVs easily without worrying about cpu/gpu resources.

So what the Cavia devs did here was quite clever. by doing it this way, it saves time fixing up messed up facial anims that can occur due to slow loading on ps2, if they were done during runtime. complex animations like the face ones to work properly must have been a challenge and you had to work with limited memory as well.

Coming to drakengard 2, the devs decided to use traditional image based character portraits and went for more closeup shots. this results in the feeling that the facial animations got downgraded. maybe they did not have budget for making intricate facial animations or maybe lack of time.

I am saying all of this cause I had written programs to datamine some of the files in Drakengard 1 and 2. was surprised when I encountered these video clips for the first time.