Jak 3 Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 5/25/2021)

[Image from igdb.com]

Jak 3

Developer: Naughty Dog

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Genre(s): Open World, 3D Platformer

Platforms: PS2

Release Date: November 9, 2004

A rule of thumb that should be expressed more often is that a lackluster sequel to a video game does not equate to a bad one. Sequels are a tricky thing across all mediums of art and entertainment. They are readily welcome under the right circumstances, but they are always a gamble because of their inherent nature of using the previous titles as a sort of reference. This is even trickier when the sequel is a continuation of the narrative elements of the previous titles, like the characters and the story. Video game sequels have a different nature to them than the sequels of other entertainment mediums. The first game usually serves as a template for the game's world and usually comes with awkward hiccups that come with formulating a new IP. The second game gives the developers a myriad of opportunities. The typical course of action is to either buff out the cracks of the first game or deviate from it entirely. The third game usually mirrors the first two games while adding only a few new features to make it discernable from the first two, but still shows that the series has run its course and the developers were short on new ideas.

The Jak and Daxter trilogy on the PS2 is a fine example of this series progression. The first game could’ve stood on its own as a phenomenal platformer that capitalized on the advancements the new console generation came with. The second game smoothed over the cracks of the first game that were noticeable comparably to the strengths of the sequel, namely characterization and story. It also managed to deviate significantly from the light-hearted tone and setting of the first game. Executing these directions fantastically makes Jak II the perfect sequel to the first game. Jak 3, similarly to other third entries in a franchise, does not deliver on the same ambition as the second entry. The setting and tone of Jak II are rooted in Jak 3, comfortably using it as a template. The radical shifts in tone and gameplay that catapulted Jak II beyond the confines of the first game were now merely the standard course for the series because we had seen them before. Jak 3 is not the achievement that Jak II is, but that does not make it a disappointing entry. It’s just as exemplary as the previous two games, with some people considering it the finest entry in the franchise. It’s not a sequel that excels by catapulting the franchise to new horizons, but one that arguably improves on the blemishes of the previous game for a more refined experience.

The third game does not begin with the standard, prophetic opening from Samos musing about Jak’s potential as a hero. At this point, the developers assumed that you were already aware of Jak’s heroism after two games. (Disclaimer: if you’re playing this game for the first time, the opening cutscene is shown before the main menu. If you skip it, you will have no idea what’s occurring or where Jak and Daxter are when you start the game). If you thought that saving Haven City would’ve granted Jak absolution from his status as a renegade (no pun intended), you’d be mistaken. The opening cutscene sees a flying Krimzon Guard van flying over what appears to be a desert. The aircraft lands, and Jak emerges from the back of it in handcuffs with blue Krimzon Guards surrounding him. He has been banished from Haven City and left to die in the hostile desert wasteland, a scapegoat to blame for the metalhead invasion of Haven City in the second game. This was a decision by Count Veger, the head of the city council who overruled Ashelin's executive orders to keep Jak. Ashelin gives Jak a beacon, and the aircraft flies away. Daxter and Pecker also decide to join Jak on his trek through the desolate wasteland. I understand why Daxter would want to go with Jak, but why Pecker? I wouldn’t want to walk through the scorching desert with both of them at each other’s throats, but that’s exactly what happens.

All three eventually collapse from exhaustion, and Jak has delirium-induced flashbacks about what happened up to this point after the second game. Apparently, defeating Kor was not enough for the metalheads to retreat from Haven City. The strongest ones survived and are now working with a series of Krimzon Bots to further the invasion of the city. Their allegiance is effective as they topple the Baron’s Tower, destroying several Haven City districts on impact. This devastating moment is a jaw-dropper for anyone who played Jak II. The metalhead invasion has reached a point of uncontrollable pandemonium, signified by the destruction of the Baron’s Tower. It was a symbol so formidable and so gargantuan that it made the Baron and his rule seem impervious. Alas, this is a changing of the guard and a fantastic segway into the next game. The beacon Ashelin gave to Jak alerts two men who stumble upon our heroes and shelter them from the storm. Jak and his friends are now in the sand city of Spargus, led by a wasteland warrior named Damas. Pecker becomes Damas’s new advisor, and Jak and Daxter have to prove themselves to Damas to stay in Spargus.

Immediately, the change in setting once again gives the player the feeling that we’re not in Kansas anymore. Instead of teleporting through a warp gate and ending up somewhere without any scope of the setting, it’s the somewhat nearby Spargus, a wasteland city built on the sand. It’s where the refuse of Haven City goes when Haven City casts them out. It’s sort of like Haven City’s Australia. In fact, the elements that make up Spargus are reminiscent of a certain Australian post-apocalyptic movie franchise. Spargus is what occurs when several people are forced out of their homes to survive in the hostile environment that was initially meant to be their tomb. The culture of Spargus revels in the survival of the fittest. The denizens of Spargus fight in a sparsely built arena surrounded by molten lava to keep their place in the city. It’s a rough place with an even rougher livelihood. Jak quickly acclimates to the culture of Spargus as it fits his rash attitude. Out of context with the story, roaming around the city as Jak makes it seem quaintly old-world. It’s a small area that looks like Tatooine if it was on the beach. Wind chimes can be heard at all times, and zoomers are replaced with Leapers, lizard-horse creatures that control just like the Flut Flut from the first game. It’s ironic that the rural setting of Spargus is a culture shock from Haven City, considering Jak and Daxter originally came from a rural setting.

A larger area outside Spargus in the desert wasteland that Jak was thrown into by Haven City. The wastelanders of Spargus often excavate the area for artifacts. Jak not only does that, but also races, disposes of different breeds of wasteland metalheads, and makes frequent visits to the Monk Temple north of the desert. Traversing the desert can be quite daunting, so Jak has many vehicles to choose from in Kliever’s lot right near the desert entrance. Jak will start off with the piddly little Tough Puppy but will quickly unlock some vehicles with different kinds of attributes and firepower. The Sand Shark is a speedy vehicle with machine-gun turrets. The Gila Stomper is a durable vehicle made for defense. The Dune Hopper, my favorite of these buggies, enables you to jump incredible heights, and it’s armed with a grenade launcher. There are also other buggies you can unlock in the menu with precursor orbs. The vastness and rough terrain of the desert wasteland make up for the compact size of Spargus. Combining these areas almost rivals the city-scape of Haven City from the second game. The wasteland frequently can be arduous to traverse due to the landscape being more compatible with some vehicles, matched with the constant marauder vehicles slamming into you to throw you off course. As often as I became annoyed with the obstacles in the desert, it is the essence of Jak 3 that separates it from the industrial cityscape that made up the foreground of Jak II.

Jak isn’t only limited to places in the sand. After the first act, Jak makes his way back to Haven City through underground passageways. Haven City is still the same rank, hellhole from the previous game, but it’s a little different. Due to the Baron’s tower collapsing and the passage of time, some of the familiar areas from Jak II are absent. The waterways, stadium, and the area with Mar’s Tomb have been destroyed by the tower's fall. Places like the bazaar and the field area are now a ghastly looking metalhead territory, arguably a worse fate for these areas than being crushed. Most of the sub-areas like the pumping station and Dead Town are totally gone. Areas like the docks, the industrial highways, and the slums remain relatively intact. The sewers make a return but are designed to be much grander in scale like the Lost Precursor City instead of the dark, claustrophobic pit it was in Jak II. Haven Forest makes a return without the Mountain Temple, but the land is a crisp, autumn brown instead of spring green. Whether that’s because it’s autumn in Jak 3 or the land is dehydrated from the corrupted influence of the metalheads is unknown. The only relatively new place is the ritzy, gentrified area where the water slums used to be. The oppressive tone of Haven City from the second game is no longer felt. Instead, the city is always on pins and needles because it is a battleground against the KG Bots and the metalheads.

Remember those rolling robots from that one mission from the second game? They are now a common enemy in Jak 3. The Krimzon Guards are no longer active. They’ve either disbanded as an executive order from Ashelin or color-swapped and fashioned themselves into Torn’s army against the invading forces. These guys are puppies compared to the pack of wolves that were the Krimzon Guards. They may look the same, but these guys will not retaliate if you hit them, and they constantly whine about how hopeless their situation is. Honestly, this is a sentiment that’s only felt by them. The hopeless tone from the second game just isn’t there. There is a new feeling of awe whenever you are near a familiar city area that was crushed by the tower. Picturing how the area used to be in the second game gives weight to the colossal impact the fall of the Baron’s palace had.

Haven City isn’t quite the urban playground it used to be. The setting of Spargus and the wasteland are present to deviate from Haven City to formulate a unique identity for Jak 3, and they both succeed by offering a different landscape. However, the small scale of Spargus does not match the grand scale of Haven City from the second game, and the desert, while on a bigger scale, isn’t comparable due to being restricted to traversing through it by vehicle. Haven City is supposed to be a shell of its former self this time, so of course, it’s not as wide and sprawling as it used to be. Individually, none of these areas are up to par with Haven City from the second game in an expansive singular world with branching paths. The strength of the world in this game is having both Spargus and the wasteland with the less expansive Haven City as two parts of one whole. If one area feels too restricted after a while, flying out to the other one will always feel comparatively fresh. The only problem is that this method of traveling between these two places via flying vehicle is the only time in the series where there are geographical inconsistencies. The main strength of the first game was that each level was seamlessly built between the individual levels. It was practically an open-world platformer. The second game shifted into an open-world game with the same cohesive world design even between the sublevels. The dig site was the only place Jak would fly to by aircraft, but the player could discover that the site could be accessed organically near the pumping station via the jet board. We have no idea how far Spargus is from Haven City because the only way to travel back and forth between the two main places is by KG aircraft, which is done through a cutscene. This is probably done to make Spargus seem well removed from Haven City, but it compromises the integrity of the seamless world-building the series strides in.

It’s a shame that something interesting the developers implemented to make the third entry fresher became a hiccup, but the less concise world-building isn’t all bad. Quite a few missions in this game, like the volcano trek and invading the floating KG factory, are some of my favorite missions. Jak only visits these far-off locations once, but these missions are longer, and more action-platforming focused. They even squeeze in plenty of time to play as Daxter in these missions, making the teamwork of the two during these missions give it a little more of a grander scope. It’s like the Mar’s Tomb section in Jak II, one of my favorite sections from the second game.

One common change a third entry will implement is a focus on accessibility. This is either a conscious decision by the developers to garner a wider audience, or it comes naturally with the ample opportunity to improve the gameplay mechanics by the third game. Naughty Dog took the incredibly steep difficulty curve of Jak II into consideration and decided to make the next entry a much smoother experience. The checkpoints during missions are much more liberally placed, Jak periodically gains armor that allows him to sustain more damage, and Jak has many more tools at his disposal. All of the gun mods from the second game return, along with two more mods for each of them. The scattergun gets a charged-up beam whose blast radius will take care of any small, grounded enemies and a grenade launcher with plentiful ammo. The additional blaster mods will ricochet off enemies a couple of times and launch a disc that will scatter about 50 blaster ammo at enemies. The Vulcan Fury comes with an electricity mod and one that spurts several tiny, blue homing bullets. The peacemaker has an anti-gravity mode in which enemies will float defenselessly in the air for a while and what is essentially a nuke that makes the RYNO from Ratchet & Clank look like a Playskool toy.

Dark Jak also makes a return with a few new features. Instead of releasing the Dark Jak power all at once for a short period, the eco is stored in a gauge and can be used with any amount of dark eco. Dark Jak can still use the bomb and wave to clear rooms of enemies. Dark strike and dark invisibility are moves that Jak obtains through the course of the story. They are mainly used in platforming sections outside of the hub-worlds. I think these moves were implemented because Dark Jak was so underutilized in the previous game. It gives the player more reason to use Dark Jak, but these sections feel shoehorned. An entirely new feature in Jak 3 is Light Jak. After visiting the monk temple in the desert, a precursor shines a light on Jak. He erupts with a burst of light, encapsulating him in a blue-hued, incandescent glow. Light Jak is angelic while Dark Jak is beastly; the ying to Dark Jak’s yang is further represented by the gauges in the bottom left corner of the screen. Light Jak is triggered by the same button as Dark Jak, but the L2 trigger coincides with another button to activate a specific Light Jak power. Light Jak can heal himself, briefly stop time, use an energy shield, and fly. Like Dark Jak, Light Jak is poorly implemented as they are only really needed for certain platforming sections. The only Light Jak move that is useful in most cases is the heal option.

These new features collectively make for a less aggravating experience than Jak II, but the game is far too easy. This might be because I’ve replayed Jak II a staggering amount of times, but I don’t find the game to be the grueling affair that some people make it out to be. It’s consistently a fair challenge that could have had a less sporadic difficulty curve. The water slums mission can still fuck right off, though. Having all the weapons available to you in Jak 3 sure would’ve been helpful during that mission. Being a little too helpful is exactly the issue in Jak 3. Twelve different weapons with plentiful ammo and a massive power range trivialize the combat. Each gun mod serves its unique utility in the second game, and it’s really all you need. All of these new weapons are a blast to use, but not very many of the missions really stood out to me because they were such a breeze to get through. A couple of shots from the bouncing blaster mod doubled with the spin kick are almost guaranteed to wipe out every enemy on screen in seconds. It makes me wonder why anyone would use the regular blaster or any other base mods from the second game here. Dark Jak is also rendered useless in combat because of these superweapons. I didn’t use Dark Jak very often in Jak II, but it was always useful in a pinch. Those hectic moments where Dark Jak would be useful can be resolved with any of these weapons. This is also keeping in mind that Jak can heal himself with any amount of light eco, trivializing the difficulty even more. Easing the difficulty of the previous game is a common point of accessibility that makes many sequels less savory. Some may argue it’s better than struggling with the missions in Jak II, but that struggle made the game far more engaging. Implementing these new features backfired on Naughty Dog as the dark and light Jak are still poorly utilized in combat. Besides the healing mechanic, I suppose introducing Light Jak is pertinent to Jak’s progression as a character.

Most of the familiar faces from Jak II return in the sequel exactly how they were in the previous game. Jak is still the angsty, motivated young man he was in Jak II, and Daxter is still the wise-cracking comic relief. The supporting characters are still the same, but some lead in different positions. Ashelin has replaced her father as the leader of Haven City, Torn is the commander of the squad of soldiers defending the city, and characters like Samos and Onin are doing what they can to support the fight to defend Haven City. . The only character that is different this time around is Keira. Apparently, her voice actor quit, so they hired Tara Strong to do her voice along with a new character. She isn’t her perky self in this game as she is relegated to coyly standing around in the background with a few arbitrary lines that remind us that she still exists, which is a real shame. Her lack of a presence in this game also gives way to Ashelin being the prime love interest for Jak, erasing any implied romantic connection she had with Torn.

Jak 3 does not treat us to an entirely new cast of eclectic characters like in the previous game, but it does manage to introduce a few new faces. Damas is definitely the most important new character in the game. He is a headstrong, disciplined warrior and a strict leader who rules his city fairly but with a swift code of honor. He is reluctant to bring in Jak and Daxter at first because they are from Haven City but soon comes to Jak after Jak proves himself worthy as a wasteland warrior. It’s very reminiscent of Jak proving himself to Torn in the previous game. Damas and Jak discover that they have a lot in common as they start to form a sort of father and son relationship with each other. A secondary character in Spargus is Kleiver, a prime warrior in the city and the curator of all of the wasteland buggies Jak drives. He’s quite portly, looks like he reeks of body odor, and looks at every threat the wasteland has with a chuckle and a grin. He doesn’t serve much purpose in the grand scheme of the story, but his banter with Jak and Daxter is entertaining. A more unique new character is Seem, an androgynous monk living in Spargus. Seem is a stoic, serious being that gives insight into the arcane precursor forces at work. He/she also underestimates Jak and Daxter at first but comes around to them like everyone else.

There is also a new villain stinking up the bureaucratic forces in Haven City. Count Veger is the head of the judicial council of Haven City and the man who sentences Jak to a dry, sandy grave at the story's beginning. We’re supposed to pretend like we’ve seen this man before as all of the characters seem familiar with him, but anyone who has played Jak II knows that this man was nowhere to be seen. Veger references past events involving himself in the previous games, so I guess he’s not a new official. His main goal is to find the ultimate precursor power hidden deep in the catacombs. He believes this power will make him a god, giving him the power to stop the war in Haven City and reform the world in his own image. He’s another egomaniac with a position of power in Haven City. However, he’s nowhere near as imposing as Baron Praxis was, or even Erol for that matter. The power dynamic has shifted in the favor of Jak and his friends that even a councilman doesn’t pose as much of a threat even if he has the authority to throw people out of the city. Ashelin even dissolves him of his position at some point which ultimately trivializes his role as a threatening villain. He more or less comes off as an annoying inconvenience more than anything else.

The more menacing villains of this game are the darkmakers who fit the role of the lurkers/metalheads as the enemy species Jak fights in great numbers. They only appear near the end of the game, and they are actually pretty formidable due to their shield that can sustain a lot of firepower and their dark orb attack that can do a lot of damage. According to Seem, darkmakers are corrupted, disgraced precursors with a lust for the destruction generated by dark eco. These anti-precursors come with their own set of technology and the most foreboding of which is their darkmaker ship. It’s illuminated in the sky with a purple glow and is the harbinger of doom for any planet across it. Jak’s mission in the game is to stop this ship from destroying the planet using the power of the precursors.

Like in Jak II, Jak 3’s story is divided into three different acts, each one with a different overarching mission making up a whole of the game. The first act is Jak’s banishment to the wasteland and his getting acclimated to the wasteland life of Spargus. At some point, Ashelin comes back and begs Jak to aid them with the war effort in Haven City, but Jak naturally feels betrayed by the city that threw him out like a piece of trash. After gaining his new light powers, Jak, Daxter, and Pecker make their way back to Haven City through a series of old passages designed by Mar. They encounter Veger at the edge of Haven City, who reveals that he destroyed the Baron’s palace to access the catacombs and used Jak as a scapegoat.

The second act is aiding with the war efforts in Haven City. Jak is back to performing odd jobs for Torn and unlocking parts of the city to get Torn back to HQ in the new part of Haven City. In the process, you learn who the real antagonist of Jak 3 is. After colliding into a dozen huge barrels of dark eco and meeting his untimely demise, Erol has apparently been resurrected like Darth Vader. He’s now part cyborg and hell-bent on destroying the planet. Somehow, he’s in control of the KG bots, the metalheads, and the darkmaker armies and is rallying all of them to further the destruction of Haven City and the entire world. I much preferred Erol as Jak’s sadistic rival in the second game than as a diabolical, inhuman world-destroyer in this game. His multi-faceted role is reduced to the common comic-book villain trope we’ve seen so many before, even in the first game with Gol and Maia. Perhaps Erol is using this position of unspeakable power as a means to match Jak’s new god-like abilities, sparking up the rivalry to a greater degree. Either or, Jak fights him at the end of the second act in the floating KG factory.

The third act is a race to the necessary units needed to unlock the path to the catacombs. On the way there, Jak calls Damas to escort him down the ruins of Haven City. A catapulted fireball hits the vehicle, and it flips over. Jak and Daxter are fine, but Damas is crushed under the weight of it. In his last dying breath, Damas tells Jak to find his son Mar in Haven City, where Jak realizes that he is referring to the young Jak from the second game and that Damas is his father. It’s a cliche moment, but it is touching given the relationship Jak and Damas formed throughout the game. It’s also given plenty of foreshadowing, making the revelation believable. Damas used to be the leader of Haven City. Up until the reign of Baron Praxis, the leaders used to be heirs of Mar, which we already knew Jak was. Veger catches up with them to tell Jak that he was the reason he was separated from Damas as a child and mocks this revelation like a total assface. They both race to the catacombs.

The following moment pisses off most of the fans, myself included. Jak, Daxter, and Veger all make their way to the depths of the catacombs to find the center of the precursors. All of this biblical pondering about these phenomenal beings for three long games and our heroes (and Veger) find out exactly what they are...three ottsels doing a Wizard of Oz routine. Yes. That’s exactly right. The most powerful beings in the universe, the gods who created the universe are three orange, scrappy rats just like Daxter. Apparently, turning into one was Daxter’s own heroic destiny explaining why the dark eco pool didn’t kill him, which is good to know, I guess. Veger also transforms into one after being “blessed” with the precursor's light. Is this supposed to be a joke? We’ve spent all this time marveling at the superbly immaculate technology and rich, magnificent lore of the precursors, and they’re all tiny rodents? Is this taking inspiration from The Holy Mountain, in which searching too deeply for spirituality and using it to transcend our being turns out to be a farce? Some fans are keen on treating this as a joke and think this reveal is brilliant, but I’m in the other camp who feels like I got slapped in the face. This reveals practically ruins all of the mystic elements that make the lore and background of these games interesting and unique. The precursor lore is tying the integrity of all of these radically different games together as a cohesive trilogy, and to just sweep the rug under us is just insulting.

Anyways, Jak destroys the darkmaker ship and has a final showdown with Erol, who is piloting a gigantic darkmaker walker in the desert. Jak uses the Sand Shark to blast off the kneecaps of the walker and then climbs it to fight face to face with it. It’s by far the easiest final battle of the trilogy, but the scale of it is so epic that it doesn’t matter. After destroying it, Jak and Daxter walk back with a confident stride as the desert sand blows on them. Jak also gets some well-deserved tongue action this time, but with Ashelin instead of Keira. The precursors hold a ceremony celebrating Jak and Daxter’s victory, and Sig has taken Damas’s throne as leader of Spargus. The precursors grant Daxter a wish for his coveted pair of ottsel pants, and Tess inadvertently gets transformed into an ottsel in the process. It’s a win-win situation for Daxter. Daxter and Tess try to kiss, but Jak cockblocks Daxter for a change (HA!) as he is off to see the universe with the precursors. He decides against it to stay behind with his friends. I never pegged Jak for the sentimental type.

The first Jak and Daxter game used inspiration from the platformers of the previous generation to make something that surpassed them in a myriad of ways. The second game was built upon the first with a radically new direction inspired by Grand Theft Auto to make a brilliant open-world and platformer hybrid. The third game merely uses the previous two games as its main inspiration, which is common when a series is set in its ways, and the developers have run out of ideas. Jak 3 is guilty of many common practices that third entries often use; accessibility in the form of easing the difficulty, reusing the same settings and characters, and wrapping up the overarching story hastily, in this case, a fucking joke at the expense of the integrity of the game’s lore. Jak 3 is still a great game because its backbone is set by two incredible games, but it’s a meager sequel because it doesn’t offer too much new content and a lot of it feels watered-down compared to the first two games. However, perhaps the way Jak 3 was directed was essential in wrapping up the series. If Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is a wide-eyed childhood, Jak II the bombastic teenage years, Jak 3 is the finer-tuned, post-adolescence adulthood. Jak II was rough, and Jak 3 did buff the cracks to make for a less jarring experience. I subjectively prefer all of those cracks from Jak II, but I can’t deny that Jak 3 did a great job with its refinement. Like the titular character, the game needed a beacon of light in the dark to achieve balance.

Jak II Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 5/10/2021)

[Image from igdb.com]

Jak II

Developer: Naughty Dog

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Genre(s): Open World, 3D Platformer

Platforms: PS2

Release Date: October 14, 2003

Jak II was most likely a difficult transition for Naughty Dog. After practically perfecting the 3D collectathon platformer with the first Jak And Daxter, the franchise immediately risked peaking at just the first game. How does one surpass something that is arguably the most exemplary piece of media in its respective field? Does one just try to replicate it by trying the same thing and hope for the same results? No, and that’s definitely not what Naughty Dog did. Naughty Dog took two years of development to rebuild the series from the ground up, going in a radically new direction. Naughty Dog set out for the sequel to Jak And Daxter to be bolder, more ambitious, and much more mature than its predecessor. Naughty Dog succeeded with flying colors as this game was praised by every outlet at the time. Most critics lauded this game for its story, presentation, and smooth gameplay calling it one of the most impressive games on the PS2 at the time. However, the contrarians to this praise were just as vocal and consistent with their discrepancies with this game. These critics wrote off Jak II as a “Grand Theft Auto clone”, cynically alluding to the open-world direction the developers took as opposed to the collectathon 3D platformer style of the first game. While the GTA influence in Jak II is very noticeable, the game is anything but derivative. The critics that wrote these shallow claims failed to see the nuance of Jak II. It’s a sequel that is much more inspired than just copying a template. It’s a sequel that manages to offer something different without straying too far from its platformer roots.

The opening cutscene starts us off in the familiar Sandover Village with another voice-over from Samos introducing us to another adventure. Immediately as the characters from the first game are in view, you’ll notice that the character animations have improved significantly. The jagged edges present in the graphics of the first game have literally been smoothed out. Subtitles can also be turned on for every cutscene, giving them much more impressive, cinematic quality. Remember what I said about the first game looking like it could be a cartoon series? The presentation in Jak II could practically be an animated feature film. That’s the caliber of what Jak II immediately has to offer.

The opening cutscene might be confusing to those who didn’t get the true ending of the first game. If you collect every power cell, you open a gate at the top of Gol and Maia’s Citadel with all of them, and the characters are awe-stricken by a blinding white light emanating from it. Somehow, they managed to drag this gate down the entire map of the first game to Samos’s hut. It must be the heavy lifting Daxter refers to in the opening cutscene. The characters from the first game are ready to go through the gate with a machine that Keira built when the sky turns an ominous purple, and a giant, hideous beast appears from it, threatening Jak. Once the machine blows up during the warping process, Jak and Daxter are separated from Samos and Keira and are spat out into an urban area with a giant tower and flying zoomers everywhere. A group of armored goons knocks out Jak with the butt of a gun. Daxter escapes, promising Jak that he’ll come and rescue him. Two years later, Jak is tortured in a murky, dark prison by two menacing characters. Before Jak is disposed of, Daxter finally comes to his rescue. They escape from the prison to find themselves in Haven City, an industrial cesspool of a city led by the ruthless Baron Praxis, one of the menacing figures torturing Jak from before. Throughout the game, Jak becomes the acting figure force in a group referred to as “the underground”, a group of rebels whose mission is to overthrow Baron Praxis and put the rightful leader of Haven City in his place. Jak’s motivations for working for them are more like a revenge story ala Oldboy, getting back at The Baron for experimenting on him for two excruciating years.

As you can probably tell, things are a little different in Jak II. Once you retrieve the banner from Deadtown after the first real mission of the game, our heroes do the victory dance from the first game with the familiar jingle. The structure under them collapses into the mud, and their victory becomes a perilous escape, swiftly reminding them that they’re not in Kansas anymore. Jak II’s setting, tone, and overall direction are a far cry from the first game's inviting, fantastic world. Haven City is essentially the video game equivalent of North Korea (although North Korea is shockingly even worse). The city comprises many unique areas like the docks, the bazaar, the slums, etc., but all of them look like they are drowning in a depressing sea of famine and pestilence with a total lack of morale. This contrasts with the Baron’s tower, a behemoth of a building that eclipses every part of Haven City like the moon in Majora’s Mask, with just as much of a foreboding presence. The Baron’s tower signifies an absolute imbalance of class, resources, and stability. Haven City is destitute, and it’s hanging by a thread. There were more hostile areas of the first Jak And Daxter, but none of them felt as depleted as Haven City as a whole. There is a monumental depression throughout the entire city.

In terms of the new gameplay mechanics, several of them do warrant the Grand Theft Auto comparisons. The primary way of traversing Haven City is via zoomer, but it’s not the same as the first game. Zoomers have become the commercialized car model of the future; whether it be because Keira was a technological innovator or they are now cheap motor vehicles for the impoverished citizens of Haven City is unclear. Some are light and fast, and some are more durable and compact. I much prefer the durable ones because they can take more damage. Considering how many obstacles there are in Haven City to run into, picking a lighter one will normally result in the thing exploding and damaging you. Eventually, Jak will get a jet-board to ride around on, but doing this greatly increases the chance of hitting someone with it and altering the Krimson Guards. The vehicles are the only practical option. The vehicles aren’t the aspect that reminds me of GTA, however. It’s the fact that the only way to get into one is to steal it. Jak leaps from the ground to snatch a bystander’s zoomer like a frog’s tongue to a fly. Vehicles are lying around many of the popular mission spots, but these zoomers are probably parked there by someone else, which doesn’t help Jak’s case. Fortunately, the real owner of the car always complies with Jak, jumping out of the vehicle even if it’s over a body of water. If they didn’t, Jak might have to boost this game’s rating with his new arsenal of toys.

If the carjackings in this game don’t remind you of GTA, the guns certainly will. After the first few missions, Jak will receive a gun from the underground mob boss, Krew. Jak starts with one weapon but acquires new mods for it as the game progresses. Each gun mod is different, and utilizing all of them in certain scenarios is the optimal way to succeed in the hefty, combat-based missions of this game. Jak starts with the scattergun, a weapon that acts as a shotgun that is great for killing enemies at short range, killing a large number of smaller enemies, or pushing an enemy off of a cliff with sheer force. Soon after, Jak gets the blaster, which is pretty self-explanatory. It’s a long-range rifle great for shooting at enemies from far away. It can also be combined with Jak’s punch, and spin kick moves for some effective combos. The jumping spin kick move seems a popular way to dispose of many enemies as blaster bullets will fly from five different directions. It’s effective most of the time, but I wouldn’t use it as a crutch. The Vulcan Cannon disperses a large number of bullets at a breakneck speed and is probably the most useful weapon in the game for a large number of enemies and for the sturdier enemies. Last but certainly not least, the Peacemaker is a high-powered missile launcher that blasts big balls of energy at enemies. It’s the most powerful weapon in Jak’s arsenal, but it, unfortunately, appears very late in the game and the ammo for it is always very sparse. Personally, I think the guns in Jak II are much too fictitious to be comparable to the authentic models of firearms in Grand Theft Auto. Come to think of it, so are the flying cars. Grand Theft Auto’s graphic nature comes with its sense of fair realism, whereas Jak II is still too fantasy-based to be comparable. I guess anything with guns and a moral grey is the pinnacle of mature content in gaming.

Jak also has an internal weapon. Because Baron Praxis experimented on Jak with dark eco for two years, Jak sometimes transforms into what is known as “Dark Jak.” After collecting a certain amount of dark eco from crates and enemies, the L2 button will trigger Dark Jak. His hair gets bigger, he erects giant claws from his hands like Wolverine, and he radiates a dark purple color that clings to him like static. Dark Jak is a tougher, faster, temporary boost to Jak’s primary moveset. He moves much more erratically and takes less damage when he gets hit. Once you turn back to normal, the Dark Jak gauge completely resets, and you’ll have to collect enough dark eco to trigger Dark Jak again, which can take a while. I recommend using Dark Jak conservatively, only using it in tight sections with many enemies. There is a place in the Water Slums housing an oracle from the first game that can upgrade Dark Jak and give him a few new moves like the Dark Jak bomb and the Dark Jak wave. Both are super moves that wipe out every enemy in the vicinity and drain your entire gauge, so using them in a pinch is the right way to utilize them. As cool as Dark Jak is, I never found myself using it. This isn’t because the gauge has to charge up after using it, but because the guns are useful enough to deal with anything in the game. Dark Jak is more of an aspect of Jak’s character arc than a useful tool for combat.

It’s very helpful that the game gives you all of these tools at your disposal because one thing Jak II is remembered for is its notorious difficulty. A slight criticism I made about the first game was that it was a tad easy, but this is definitely not the case for Jak II. Jak II will do its best to bombard you with enemies, give green eco health cubes parsimoniously, and sometimes forget to implement checkpoints during missions. Jak II’s difficulty curb feels like having a chronic illness. Sometimes, the difficulty is merciful and manageable. Other times, it hits you like a punch to the kidneys. This inconsistent range of difficulty is present throughout the game. One of the hardest missions is as early as just the fourth mission in the game. Jak runs through a factory getting chased by a tank, but the player’s perspective during this mission is the green visor, the first-person perspective of the tank. It’s constantly targeting Jak while it tries to mow him down, and there are other laser-guided turrets on all sides. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few people quit this game this early on because of this mission. This is even before Jak gets his first gun. Contrastly, one of the last missions in the game is a simple route on the jet board to get on a large crate to crush some metalhead eggs in the strip mine. Debating on the hardest mission in the game is not a uniform choice for those who have played this game. It could be the sewer escort mission with Haven City’s Three Stooges gawking the whole time. It could be racing Erol through the entire city and hitting every accelerator ring along the way, or any of the other racing missions, really. It could be any mission with the clunky titan suit that controls as stiffly as a paralyzed cat. In my opinion, the pinnacle of difficulty is the water slum mission in the middle of the game. Jak has to retrieve an artifact from the water slums and carry it out in one piece. Jak only has a little way to get out of the slums, so it should be easy, right? Wrong. Every Krimson Guard the city has on-call ambushes Jak with everything they’ve got. Hordes jump out of their ships to shoot you from all directions. Jak can’t get past them because the ships are guaranteed to shoot you. Jak can’t use the jet-board in the water because a bot will kill you on sight. This is the only mission in the game that requires a concrete strategy to get past. It also might catch you off guard because the mission doesn’t have a beginning cutscene to give you an idea of what you’ll be up against. If you don’t have enough ammo before this mission, you’ll need to pray to get past it.

Even with all of these radical changes from the first Jak And Daxter, labeling this game as “adolescent Grand Theft Auto” still doesn’t ring true to me. This game still balances plenty of elements from the first game to keep it in the realm of the 3D platformer. As Jak escapes the prison, Daxter reminds him of his old moves. Jak can still punch, spin, kick, double jump, roll, and uppercut like he could in the previous game. In my experience, the characters in open-world games, especially around the PS2 era, were not as acrobatic. Jak still plays like a platformer character. Does the gritty world of Haven City accommodate the old platformer moves from the first game? In the hub of the city, it’s debatable. The old platformer mechanics shine in the sub-levels of Haven City. Most of the missions take place in areas that branch off of the main Haven City hub. It’s in these places that Jak II embraces its platforming roots. The aforementioned Deadtown is a crumbling ruin of a previous Haven City settlement, now infested with metal heads. The eroding platforms here will test your jumping abilities. The dig site is a volcanic cave where you have to climb and swing your way to a piece of an artifact. The Pumping Station requires using the pumps to jump to higher areas. I don’t think I’ve seen any of this in a Grand Theft Auto game, but this is certainly reminiscent of what you do in the first Jak And Daxter. My favorite sub-level in Haven City is the Mountain Temple/Forest area because they both feel like an area from the first game. This level feels far removed from the grit and grime of the rest of Haven City. Precursor architecture makes up the foreground of these green hills, making it seem like this area hasn’t been adulterated by the corruption of the time. If not for the camouflaged metal heads, this place would seem like a great place to have a picnic. It will also test your jumping abilities, namely the falling rock part.

The obligatory platformer collectibles also make a return in Jak II. Like the first game, it restrains itself to only a few collectibles, but none of them are really worth much. Whenever you kill a metal head, an incandescent egg pops out of its head. This is a skull gem that is used to upgrade Dark Jak and give him new moves. Considering I seldom used Dark Jak, the skull gems become worthless after the first few upgrades. It doesn’t help that you can’t farm for the skull gems because they don’t reset, and the oracle requires a substantial amount of them for the later upgrades. Precursor orbs make a return, but not as a form of currency. Precursor orbs unlock fun extras like “big head mode” and “unlimited Dark Jak”. It’s a good thing that precursor orbs are made trivial in this game because collecting all of them is even more taxing than it is in the first game. Instead of 50-200 scattered about across a level, they hide in the crevices of the sub-levels, and there is no way to know how many are left. The completionist scavenger hunt is definitely not worth the trouble.

The hybrid nature of Jak II’s gameplay, combining platforming and an open-world shooter, gives it a unique style that hadn't been seen in too many other games of the time. The game balances both styles of gameplay fluidly with spectacular presentation accentuating it. I still don’t buy the argument that Naughty Dog implemented all of these features out of left-field because of the impact of GTA III. Open-world gameplay was the logical evolution from the first Jak And Daxter. If you consider the world of the first game, the seamless nature of it is practically an open world as it is. One could pinpoint every area of the first Jak And Daxter without any geographical blindspots. One could argue that there were barriers between the levels, but the same could be said about the areas of some of the most popular open-world games. Is San Andreas not an open-world game because you can’t go to San Francisco immediately, or Mexico in Red Dead Redemption? Jak II also has these barriers as you need a colored clearance to access many areas of Haven City. It’s all a matter of how the world in the game is organized and presented. The aspect of Jak II that furthers its identity in the open-world genre is the missions.

The open-world direction also comes with many aspects usually lacking in the 3D platformer genre. Open-world games tend to be story-driven and feature an eclectic cast of characters more fleshed out than the frequent figures you meet in a 3D platformer. The ensemble cast of characters in Jak II is one of my favorites in gaming. Each character, old or new, good or evil, human or animal, is appealing in its own unique ways. The new characters in this game wouldn’t have found a place in the first game, and the old characters have matured gracefully.

Jak is obviously the character from the first game that has had the most radical transformation (literally). The 3D platformer is often a silent protagonist as a simple character to envelope the player into being a relatively faceless avatar. This does not work in the open-world game because of the cinematic nature of the genre. Jak II gives Jak a voice and a relatively brooding one to compliment his confident, aggressive demeanor. Jak is motivated by anger and seeks retribution for the two years of torture he had to undergo in the Baron’s prison. To do this, he’s willing to wade through the muck of Haven City by doing difficult odd jobs for the underground and making deals with the seedy mob boss, Krew. He’s no longer the clean, hopeful prodigal being that Samos made him out to be. He’s a man now with his own agenda, which can verge on the morally grey side at times. I wouldn’t label Jak as an anti-hero because everything he does is for a greater cause, whether his intentions to do so are or not. He also still cares deeply for his friends and the world he lives in. Fleshing out Jak’s role as the protagonist to deviate from the 3D platformer avatar made him so much more interesting.

Daxter may have been cut from the title, but his presence is just as constant as in the first game. Daxter was a bit hard to stomach in the first game, but he’s my favorite character in the sequel. The developers took the time to refine his role as the comic-relief sidekick. He’s much less shrill in this game than he used to be, and his comedic prowess is more well-tuned. His role as the comic-relief character is elevated because of the contrast between the dark world of this game and the serious characters. He banters well with every character, including Jak, but my favorite scenes with him are when he’s bantering with Krew. Daxter turns into Jeff Ross whenever he’s in Krew’s saloon. Daxter certainly has plenty of material to work with, considering Krew is a disgusting blob who has to breathe heavily every five seconds after he speaks. The first game didn’t need Daxter because the foreground was bright and hopeful. In the sequel, the game probably would’ve been too drab without him. Samos and Keira are launched in different directions from Jak And Daxter, so both characters are separated from the two. Samos is the same stern, patriarchal figure he is in the first game. His role in this game is an origin story that explains how he became the green sage and how he became Jak’s guardian. Keira is still the vivacious wiz-kid she was, but she’s a little more cynical because of the setting she’s been placed in. She’s veiled behind a curtain as a racing mechanic for most of the game and doesn’t recognize Jak because he can talk now. How Daxter refrained from flirting with her is an uncharacteristic move on his part, but she eventually reveals herself after she realizes it’s Jak And Daxter. She’s a bit perturbed about Jak’s transformation and dealings with Krew, so her role as Jak’s love interest is challenged, making her place in the series more interesting.

From the perspective of Jak and the player, meeting the new characters in Jak II can be an anxious affair. They are much different from the folksy characters from the first game. The armor-clad, gruff-speaking, tattooed, determined characters can be intimidating at first, but they become endearing as the game progresses. Every character’s quirks and personality are the sum of the charming whole of the game. Torn is the first character Jak meets after breaking out of prison. He’s the prime tactician for the underground movement, motivated by the atrocities he witnessed while serving the Baron as a Krimson Guard. He looks, sounds, and probably smells like a walking cigarette. This is probably because he conducts his plans out of a dingy bunker in the slums, where the lighting is dim, and the pipes give him sludge instead of water. He’s a no-nonsense guy, and the fact that he’s still motivated while living under these conditions shows his strength as a character. He gives you most of your first jobs and progressively grows to admire Jak. Assisting Torn in the movement is a whole cast of great characters. Kor is an experienced old man who looks after a kid, supposedly the real heir to Haven City. Vin is the technician assigned to keep an omniscient watch over the metalheads and keep track of the city’s shield walls. His anxious energy and elevated paranoia are always a joy to experience. Tess is an underground spy who takes up a bartending position at Krew’s saloon. She’s a flirty girl who takes up a bizarre love interest for Daxter. Is it Daxter’s confidence that won her over? 

Playing both sides on the field is Ashelin, the Baron’s daughter, who has a different sense of diplomacy than her father. If this game wasn’t rated T because of the guns and the swearing, Ashelin is the teenage boy’s masturbatory fantasy that makes it so. She’s also strong-willed and as passionate about changing things as Torn is. Other characters such as Onin, the blind soothsayer, and her Spanish parrot-monkey hybrid assistant Pecker come into play to give Jak guidance in finding the secrets of Haven City. Pecker is hilarious, and so are his fights with Daxter, a contested rivalry between two obnoxious animal sidekicks. My favorite new character is Sig, a wastelander who finds treasures and artifacts for Krew outside of the city walls. He’s intimidating at first, but he proves to be a softy on the inside, and I love that he uses different fruits as terms of endearment for his comrades.

The foreground of the open-world game naturally fleshes out each character. This is definitely the same for the villains of this game. Gol and Maia were villains with cliched motives and weren’t so fleshed out because the game’s simplicity didn’t call for it. The villains in Jak II are cruel, cold-blooded sociopaths that mirror the worst characteristics of real-life people. The Baron is one of the greatest villains in video game history because of how mighty his presence is in Haven City. It’s also because of how despicable he is. He’s a compassionless ego-maniac who is always on a rampage to bolster it, always at the cost of the people he rules. He took a young Jak off the streets by force to torture him for two years under his “dark eco-program”, an idea to create a powerful warrior by experimenting on civilians. The fact that he took a kid by force to torture is bad enough, but the more unnerving picture is that Jak probably wasn’t the first person he abducted for this project, and the ones that succumbed to being injected with dark eco and dying just proved to be an annoyance for him. He also makes clandestine deals with the opposing side of the war to have the metal heads attack the city, giving his rule a fabricated reason to continue. He’s a dictator without the charismatic facade. He rules with an iron fist that will crush anyone who opposes him. When he dies during the third act of this game, he doesn’t atone for his mistakes with his final breath. He rather tells Jak that he’s proud of himself because he thinks he gave Jak the potential to stop the metal heads with his experiments. He thinks that if Jak succeeds, he will be credited for his ingenuity. His unscrupulous attitude right up to the end is why he’s a fantastic villain. The game makes you hate The Baron as much as Jak does. The Baron’s right-hand man Erol is a sadistic lunatic with an ego that rivals his leader. He’s the one who ambushes Jak and takes him to jail by force which is a huge part of Jak’s dark transformation. He’s not conducting experiments with the Baron to make a weapon but because he gets pleasure in torturing others. He forms a symbiotic rivalry with Jak once Jak becomes a beacon of hope for the people of Haven City. He salivates at the opportunity to defeat Jak while Jak’s at his peak of popularity, not just to dash the hopes of the city. He wants to crush his relationship with Keira, his pride, and his confidence as a hero and then flick him away like a crippled ant. He’s as twisted as they come.

Backing both of these monsters are the Krimson Guards, the police of Haven City, and the force of the Baron’s reign. These guards are everywhere in Haven City and will dispose of Jak at the drop of a dime if you cause any problems in the city. Unfortunately, doing so is pretty easy because they are hard to avoid while driving or using the jet-board. The drive to every mission will likely accompany the intense Krimson Guard chase theme. They will ambush Jak with sheer numbers, blasting him with their guns and shocking him with their short-ranged electric beams. They come in red and yellow armor, which is appropriate considering the Krimson Guards act like wasps. They come in large numbers, they are aggressive, and they will stop at nothing to protect their territory with force. In some missions, the Krimson Guards will make small talk with each other about trivial things like sports games and complain about meetings like they’re having water-cooler conversations. It almost humanizes the enemy's forces and makes you wonder about the morality of these men, like the Nazis serving Hitler.

The other enemy faction is the metal heads. They are vicious creatures that look like komodo dragons, attack like tigers, and come in various forms like the lurkers from the first game. To give you a scope of how dangerous these things are, the lurkers are now low-class slave labor in Haven City, making the enemies from the first game pitiable compared to the beasts in this game (the Krimson Guards included). Haven City is at war with them, which has apparently been the case for eons, as the war in the middle east. The metal heads are so beastly and formidable that the Krimson Guards are afraid of them. If the Krimson Guards are like wasps, the metal heads are like termites. They are an invasive species that tear apart the infrastructure of a city like clockwork, cementing themselves as the imminent nightmare of every citizen of Haven City.

Lastly, the open-world foreground gives way to a more fleshed-out, richer story than in the first game. While the story is more interesting, it’s also much more convoluted and confusing. The story of Jak II is divided into three acts that focus on a slightly different narrative per act. The first act is Jak’s introduction to Haven City, doing odd jobs for Krew and Torn to climb the ladder to his revenge. There is also a figure known as “The Shadow”, leading the underground movement. The odd jobs Jak does will prove his worth to The Shadow so he can converse with him. A mission in Deadtown at the end of the first act leads to an alarming surprise for Jak and Daxter; the place radiating energy is none other than Samos’s hut from the first game! They realize that the warp gate took them far into the future, and the oppressive, industrial Haven City is their world. It also turns out that “The Shadow” is a younger Samos in his radical revolution days. His younger self is the master of another green plant here if you know what I mean.

The second act is about uncovering the secrets of Haven City, namely a fabled precursor stone in the Tomb of Mar, the founder of Haven City, and this game’s biggest source of lore. Mar apparently was a driving force in the fight against the metal heads long ago but died before he could use his weapon against it: a cannon with an unbelievably powerful source. Now, that power source is hidden in his tomb, and Jak retrieves all of the artifacts to conquer the challenges of Mar’s Tomb. Before he gets the precursor stone, Praxis ambushes him and takes the stone, giving the underground’s mission a grim outlook.

The third act is Jak saving Haven City. The underground uncovers that Praxis is dealing with a power that he cannot comprehend. He plans to use the precursor stone as a weapon to blow a hole in the metal head nest, but he plans to crack the stone open to reveal its hidden power first. Doing so would cause a supernova of energy that would destroy everything. Meanwhile, Krew makes his own superweapon that blows a hole in the city’s walls. This causes metal heads to run rampant through the city, and the Krimson Guard forces fight to keep them back. Everything is in disarray on both sides except for one character, a “person” who has been playing for every faction in this game and whose own plan is falling into place. Kor, the old man working for the underground, reveals himself to be the metal head leader. To achieve his plan of ushering in the age of metal heads, he needs the precursor stone to unlock the last precursor inside and devour it. He kills Praxis to get the stone, but Praxis has hidden it in a bomb beneath the ground. Jak and Daxter take the stone to operate Mar’s cannon, blowing a hole in the metal head nest. They see the metal head leader with the heir of Mar, the mute kid he’s been seen with throughout the game. He reveals that this child is Jak and that Jak was hidden in the past by Samos to gain the skills to face him. Kid Jak is also the key to unlocking the precursor inside the stone, and adult Jak can’t open it because he’s been corrupted by dark eco. Jak defeats Kor, and the precursor is saved. Younger Samos uses the rift rider Keira built to take Jak to the past, thus starting the events of the first game. Haven City is saved, the characters celebrate, and Jak is again cock-blocked by Daxter, although this time it’s an accident. Time travel in fiction is already confusing, but there is a list of questions and continuity errors that come with this story: Didn’t Jak have an uncle in the first game? How could he be Jak’s uncle if Jak was born in the future? Was Keira born in the past? A younger Keira didn’t go through the warp gate, so I guess she was, but how much younger is she than Jak? Did Samos prepare the rift at the beginning of the game, knowing what would happen? If the metal heads were always this world’s enemies, then why weren’t they in the first game? Regardless, I love the high energy of this story. It’s paced incredibly well, and the way the story concludes feels magnificent and even a little bittersweet.

The convoluted story trying to weave back to the first game doesn’t make a good case for Naughty Dog. It shows that Jak II’s direction was obviously not premeditated. They saw the success of GTA III during Jak II’s development and decided to paint over their franchise with a fresh coat. The elements and story of the first game bubble up to make a case that Naughty Dog did this naturally, but the story reveals the cracks. After all, the 3D platformer was getting stagnant, and making the same game twice wouldn’t have had the same positive results. Everything from the gameplay, presentation, characters, and the overall pacing of the story makes up for it in spades. Still, I cannot deny Naughty Dog’s impetus for this radical shift. Is this just GTA for teenagers? It could be, but there is something to that. Through all of the events of this game, I realize that Jak’s character arc is an allegory for adolescence. In the first game, Jak is a promising child with a glimmer in his eye. He’s hopeful about the world he lives in, and the “bad guys” he faces aren’t very nuanced. They are just typical villains in a black-and-white moral world that a child lives in. Years later, Jak goes through changes because of dark eco, a metaphor for hormones. He becomes irritable, cynical, and rebels against the world that he feels undermines him. Now he’s in a world with real villains motivated by ego and malice. His younger self can only open the precursor stone because adult Jak has been corrupted, a loss of innocence that comes with growing up. The boy that used to do what his guardian told him to do for his own good is now doing things with a morally grey spectrum for his own self-interest. Jak went from an E to a T rating, just like we all do at some point. Yes, this game wears its influences on its sleeves just like the last one but is it so much more than a watered-down rip-off for a younger audience. It’s a game with so many incredible factors like the presentation, graphics, story, and characters that make it substantial and make it one of the best games on the PS2.

Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 4/29/2021)

[Image from igdb.com]

Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy

Developer: Naughty Dog

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Genre(s): 3D Platformer

Platforms: PS2

Release Date: December 3, 2001

I'm very thankful to have grown up in the PS2/Gamecube era of gaming. It took the early, primitive foundations of 3D gaming and vastly improved them with just one console generation. During that transition, the 3D platformer was still in full force and already established modern classics in the video game medium like Super Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie/Tooie, Crash Bandicoot, etc. I of course, did not grow up with any of these games because I was way too young at the time, but I constantly heard glowing reviews of them from people who were a little older than me. I went back and played all of these games eventually, and I have a certain sense of respect and admiration for them for laying the foundation for some of my favorite childhood games. I still think the games that I grew up with are objectively better, however, regardless of how many people will say otherwise. I don't think it's a matter of not taking off my perpetual rose-tinted glasses when discussing these second-generation 3D platformers. I could argue the same for those who fondly discuss the 3D platformers of the previous generation that influenced the games I grew up with. I still believe that the second generation of 3D platformers is better. The game that cements this claim for me is Jak And Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. This was an early title for the PS2 and the first of the "PS2 mascot series" to be released. Some criticisms I've heard about his game I grew up with is that it's highly derivative, some even harshly deriding it as a "Banjo-Kazooie clone." After playing the 3D platformers of the previous generation, I can't ignore that Jak And Daxter borrowed several elements from these games. If Jak And Daxter did anything, they took all of these elements from games like Banjo Kazooie and practically perfected them.

The world of Jak And Daxter is a fascinating one. The world's lore is established immediately from the first cutscene. The world has no specific name, but it has a particular premise. An old, gruff voice tells the player about the precursors, the gods of this world who created this world and have left their essence in the form of eco. The voice tells of a great prophecy involving a teenage boy named Jak, destined to align all of the universe's great essences and bring balance to the universe. At the start of the game, Jak and his obnoxious buck-toothed friend Daxter venture off to a forbidden island. They witness a suspicious meeting and are accosted by one of the bone-clad soldiers when Daxter falls into a dark eco pool. He is turned into a small, orange animal called an ottsel, a cross between a weasel and an otter, a fictional animal devised by Naughty Dog. They return to the home of Samos the Sage, the narrator in the opening cutscene. He claims that the only way to turn Daxter back to his normal self is to venture far to the north and speak to Gol, the dark eco sage.

Samos claims that the duo is too young and inexperienced for their journey, so he has the train on a nearby sunny island Geyser Rock. This tutorial level gives you a great feel of how the game plays. As you jump on the ledges and platforms in Geyser Rock, you'll notice that Jak is one of the most fluid characters to play as in any 3D platformer. He can double jump, roll, jump higher when crouching, and execute a rolling jump when timed correctly. This move is guaranteed to be used as the roll in Legend of Zelda for traversal. He can do a punch that propels his whole body, a spin kick that can also double as a means to go further after a jump, a slam down on the ground, and he can perform an uppercut while crouching. Jak has the most versatile moves out of any platforming character I've played, considering all these moves only require his body.

Jak can also use four different types of eco that all have unique uses. Green eco restores your health. Your health is displayed in a heart with four green chambers, and you can get hit a maximum of four times before dying. Green eco is abundant on every level, usually stored in breakable boxes, but the problem is that each eco pellet is only worth one out of fifty to restore a chamber of your total health. Bigger pellets of green eco restore a full chamber, but they are found much less frequently. Thankfully, dying in this game is practically inconsequential. Blue eco helps you run faster, access some precursor doors and other devices, and can be used to activate jump panels. This eco is just as plentiful as the green eco and is arguably the most vital for traversing the levels. Red eco makes you hit harder and is fairly rare, but it's not very useful. Yellow eco makes you shoot fireballs for a brief period. Using it normally is always pretty cool, but anytime you have to use it for an objective, you have to aim accurately using the goggles. It kind of ruins the fun of being able to shoot fireballs, you know? Dark eco is everywhere, but it's used as a stage hazard instead of a limited power source. If you fall into a pool of it, it does not turn you into an ottsel, strangely enough.

The orange rodent, on the other hand, perches himself on Jak's shoulder throughout the whole game and doesn't do anything of real worth. I almost forget that the plot of this game revolves around him. Daxter is only used as the comic relief of this game, bantering with Samos, Keira, and every NPC you come across. I suppose Daxter had to compensate for Jak being an archetypal mute protagonist by being ostentatious. He'll scream obvious tips in your ear when you come across a more puzzle-based section, and he'll frequently roast you when you die. What a great friend he is! It makes you want to wring his yappy little orange neck. Besides the NPCs you'll encounter throughout the game, Samos and Keira are the other two main characters in the game besides the titular duo. Samos is Jak's stern guardian who is also the master of green eco. In terms of archetypal adventure story characters, he definitely fills the role of the wise old aid like a glove. He mostly badgers you to keep on your toes and do the various objectives the game has to offer. Keira is Samos's daughter and is a perky tech-wiz who is also a vague love interest for Jak. Also, she's only fifteen, you degenerates. She is also the curator of the Zoomer, the primary vehicle in this game that you will use for a couple of objectives and traveling across the four main hub worlds. The NPCs you'll encounter don't have the same weight as the main four, but they all serve the game well with their unique quirks.

The fluid movement of Jak is due to the phenomenal presentation of this game. Platformers of the previous generations had dodgy framerate and rudimentary 3D animation. 3D graphics were still in the early stages of development, so those games can be excused, but it's incredible how much more advanced Jak And Daxter looks and feels compared to those games. If every 3D platformer is relative to how long it came out after Super Mario 64, it's unbelievable that Jak and Daxter came out only five years after. It's hard to believe that Jak And Daxter came out in 2001. It must have been the most graphically advanced game at the time, and it still looks great today. This is thanks to the animated graphical style the developers decided to use. Every PS2 game with a more cartoony aesthetic aged much better than the games that didn't. Every character is incredibly expressive and backed by a full-fledged voice-acting cast that did a terrific job with each character (except for Jak, of course. Having a silent protagonist is probably easier to budget). PS1 3D platformers may have had voice acting and charming animated graphics, but the presentation here could be pitched as an animated movie or a cartoon series. It's that impressive.

The aspect that is even more impressive to me is the world of this game. Until I was exposed to the middle ages inspired world of Lordran, this was my favorite video game world. I guess I have a penchant for seamless, non-linear worlds in gaming. The game's world is divided into three hub areas with a couple of branching areas that act as their own levels and objectives. The branching areas are designed very similarly to the levels in Banjo-Kazooie. They are big open spaces without one clear objective but rather a several objectives that can be cleared in any order. The levels in Banjo-Kazooie seemed kind of closed off. Each level felt spacious and rich with detail, but it always felt like there were boundaries that made each level feel restricted. Not only are the levels in Jak And Daxter rich with detail, but the seamless nature of the entire world also erases those superficial boundaries. Every single part of Jak And Daxter's world is so geographically sound that I could map out every single speck of land in this game. To make the seamless nature of this world feel more organic, Naughty Dog opted out of loading screens in place of long elevators and cutscenes to take you to some of the individual levels. I, for one, easily favor this instead of loading screens and can't think of anyone who wouldn't.

It helps that the seamlessly crafted world of Jak And Daxter is so interesting. With the cryptic nature of the lore, the ancient precursors as an ambiguous force that encapsulates this land. The aspect of the precursors that is even more interesting than the eco is the bevy of ancient precursor technology scattered about. It gives Jak And Daxter a contrasting style between fantasy and science-fiction. It's not quite a steampunk world, but it has a quaint, old-world technology aesthetic. The contrast between these can be illustrated by the two vehicles you use in this game. One is the Zoomer, a hoverbike with a propeller, and a Flut-Flut, a fictional bird-horse animal that you hatch from an egg in an early level of the game. It can fly for a short period, break metal crates with its head, and it is as smooth to control as Jak is. I sometimes wish it would eat Daxter, and the Flut-Flut can be my animal companion like Epona from The Legend of Zelda.

The layout of the levels gives the player the impression that the precursors were intelligent beings and purveyors of radical ideas and burgeoning technology. The Forbidden Jungle has an ancient precursor citadel in the center of it that holds a hidden energy source. The Lost Precursor City is a technological wonderment submerged underwater. Almost every room showcases a different system of precursor innovations and is probably my all-time favorite water level in gaming. Gol and Maia's Citadel is the apex of precursor architecture, a precursor skyscraper so gigantic that you can see it at any point in the game. It's like the scope of the precursor technology and architecture tells the lore without using the narrative of the main story. Considering the sub-levels of most 3D platformers in the previous generation had simple themes for level variation, this comprehensive way of world-building was incredibly advanced.

As the game progresses, it doesn't really get any more difficult. The game maintains a consistent difficulty throughout. As I mentioned, dying is practically inconsequential because checkpoints are littered at every point, and health is very easy to find, albeit taxing to collect. The enemies are creatures called Lurkers. I don't know why they are the enemies of this world from a lore standpoint, but every character in the game speaks of them with disgust. At one point, a group of them attempt to blow up a large mountain area, so I guess they are intelligent and malicious enough to rationally dislike. The standard Lurkers are furry purple beasts that are proportional to something of a gorilla, but apparently, every single enemy in this game is a variation of the purple monsters. Some of them are blue and have bone armor, and some look like hopping ice crystals, but apparently, even the fish, frogs, and spiders in Spider Cave are Lurkers. The only distinctive feature they all have that defines them is their big, creamsicle-colored eyes. No matter what variation they are, they all die with one hit. Even the few bosses are an underwhelming exercise in waiting for an exposed weak spot three different times like we've seen in dozens of platformers before. I then realized that the progression in the game is not supposed to be in its difficulty but rather the way the world becomes expanded and less familiar at the start of the game.

Sandover Village is the starting place of this game: a cozy, unadorned place with Samos's hut and a couple of townsfolk. The branching paths are only slightly off the beaten path in a few directions. Sentinel Beach hardly even feels detached from Sandover, and Forbidden Jungle could potentially be a hiking trail if you forget about the giant snakes. The exception to the relative familiarity of Sandover Village is Misty Island, the spooky area from the first cutscene of the game. You fully explore with just a short boat ride, and you can still see Sandover from the shore. The areas between the hub-worlds are passages you navigate through with the Zoomer. The distance between the hub-worlds through these passages can't be determined, but each passage gets longer after each series of levels, and they all direct you north. Rock Village is a dreary place in the perpetual storm, and it's also on fire due to being under attack by meteors. The Lost Precursor City can expand as much as it wants because its underwater nature isn't relative to the rest of the world. Boggy Swamp is much more miserable than the sunny Forbidden Jungle, and the Precursor Basin is large enough where it's strictly a Zoomer level. The third hub world is inside a volcanic crater. It's a neutral zone without any enemies like the last two, but only an eccentric like an eco sage would dare to reside here. The levels that branch off this hub are so big that the developers could only fit two sub-levels here because of restrictions.

The progressively bigger spaces make Jak And Daxter more difficult because this game is a tried and true collectathon, a staple of the 3D platformer genre. Fortunately, the game doesn't get too ambitious and restrains itself to only three collectibles. The main collectibles are power cells and glowing metallic orbs that look like golden atoms. These are the collectibles you gain to further the story, a MacGuffin in the scope of video games, but used as a power source for the Zoomer to withstand heat levels in the lava-filled passages and power a machine to lift a boulder. Every time you collect one of these, a short cutscene occurs with Jak and Daxter celebrating by doing the robot or alley-ooping it into Jak's backpack, accompanied by a victory jingle. Some say this gets old after a while, but I don't feel the same. Another collectible is the scout flies, drone-like devices made by Keira to search for power cells kept in boxes. Good job, Keira. They'll find lots of power cells confined that way. There are seven of them in each level, including all of the passage levels, and collecting them per level will reward you with a power cell. Fortunately, these little buggers make a lot of noise, so they aren't that hard to find. The collectible that acts like currency is the precursor orbs. These can be used to trade for power cells from the NPCs in the hub areas and by the mystical, Dr. Claw-sounding precursor oracles. There are so many scattered about in the game that you needn't worry about finding them to trade for power cells, but I don't recommend collecting all of them if you're a completionist. There will always be one missing precursor orb, and it will always be in a huge area like Snowy Mountain. Trying to find all of them will drive you insane.

Another MacGuffin the game implements is the warp gates between the three hub-worlds. In the language of video game tropes, these are teleportation devices making it easier to traverse through the game after a certain point of progression. In the language of the game's story, Samos claims that the other sages haven't turned on their warp gates in months, and it's not because they seem like an invasion of one's privacy. You discover that the sages have been captured by the two ominous figures from the first cutscene who intend to use their collective power to open the dark eco pillars to adulterate the entire world with dark eco. One of these characters is Gol, the sage of dark eco and the man who was supposed to bring Daxter back to his human form. Instead, he's been corrupted by dark eco along with his partner (wife? sister?) Maia. Of course, Jak and Daxter have to stop them instead of changing Daxter back. It's a good twist, but the game becomes another "save the world" type of story. This is par for the course, considering how many typical fantasy elements are in this game. By the time you get to the citadel, Samos has been captured, and Gol and Maia's mission to bring darkness to the world is almost complete. The last level is their citadel which acts kind of like Ganon's Castle in Ocarina of Time. It's a gauntlet that tests all the skills and eco powers you've been using to the fullest extent. Once you free all of the sages, they use their collective power as a shield, and you have to battle a precursor robot on the citadel's roof. Unlike the other bosses, this is an epic fight that proves to be a fair challenge. At the final stage of the boss, the sage's collective powers form a mythical substance called light eco. This is apparently the substance that could turn Daxter back into a human, but he opts for saving the world instead. It's the most admirable thing he does throughout the whole game. Jak uses the light eco to blast the precursor bot as Gol and Maia are sealed in the dark eco pillars forever. The heroes celebrate their victory on top of the citadel, and Jak and Keira almost kiss, but Daxter deliberately cock-blocks him mid-kiss. I swear to god, Daxter, I'm going to rip you off my shoulder and fling you into the mouth of a fucking Lurker Shark.

Saving the world is not the true ending of Jak & Daxter. If the player collects all the power cells, you can open a door on top of the citadel. Once you open it, it shines with a bright white light and apparently something so sublime that the characters can't even describe it. This ending is not worth the effort considering how ambiguous it is, but this is the true ending to the game considering the beginning of its sequel. Whether they initially had this in mind as a cliffhanger, I'm not sure, but that's how it turned out to be. The real ending to me is reloading the game at the start menu, which will automatically take you to the top of the citadel, but this time there's sunlight and no boss battle. From the top looking south, you can look at all the places you've been to. You can make out the citadel in Forbidden Jungle, the blimp in Boggy Swamp, and the mountains of Snowy Mountain and take in the scope of your journey. Jak and Daxter look at how far they've come with a sense of pride while the wind from the high elevation blows on them. The music is both triumphant and bittersweet. The spectacle of this view had me awe-struck when I was a kid. This right here is one of the most beautiful moments in video gaming. It's the perfect way to cap off this adventure.

Jak And Daxter is a product of years of refining and tweaking 3D platformer tropes. However, just because it's not the most original video game doesn't mean it isn't ideal. Jak & Daxter was a magnificent advancement for the genre and one of the first stellar entries that capped off the PS2 era of gaming. Every single element from titles like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie had been improved significantly from the seamless world design, the impressive presentation, and the elevating scope of the 3D platformer. It might just be the peak of the 3D platformer genre with the advancements it made and its influence on all of the 3D platformer games that followed it.