Jak 2 Retrospective

Introduction

    Drastic change is something that rarely occurs in the gaming industry. Whether it be within the same series, a particular genre, or even a certain publisher, many new games tend to feel like a rehash of those that came before it and while many expand on existing systems to make the experience more entertaining, many developers are hesitant to break from an established formula.

    And this makes sense given that games can cost millions of dollars to develop and sticking to the old, “ If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality can still result in a fun, exciting end product, even if it is a bit derivative.

Enter Naughty Dog. With the release of Jak and Daxter in 2001, they received critical acclaim, sold over 1.7 million copies, and created one of the most revered 3D platformers ever made. So where could they go next? 

Well, that’s where the change comes in. With elements from Grand Theft Auto, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and other popular games at the time, the development team decided to take the established series and flip absolutely everything on its head.

    This bright, cheery platformer transformed it into a dark-ish, mature-ish 3rd person shooter. Jak was given a gun, a goatee, and a voice, Daxter was given a furry for a love interest, and the entire game takes place in a hopeless totalitarian society taking more from 1984 than a Saturday morning cartoon. 

    So the question now is whether these changes had a positive impact on the series as a whole. With so many new ideas crammed in and two years of development behind the project, there was a lot riding on this title’s success.

    When it comes to my personal history with the game, it’s pretty similar to the first. My friend had a PS2, so I would go to his house and we’d take turns playing. Our parents were vehemently opposed to letting us play any kind of Grand Theft Auto game, so as a couple of ten year old boys playing Jak 2 felt like getting away with a crime.

    However, despite all the time we spent playing the game, we never actually finished it. After failing one particular mission over and over again for hours on end we just gave up. Years later I gave the game another shot with the PS3 remastered collection, but for some reason it never really resonated with me, even if I did finally end up finishing the campaign.

    Which is why I consider this video my chance to take an in-depth look into this game and see if the younger me was right and this game is as good as critics said it was or if it’s just another game that doesn’t hold up against the test of time. Welcome to Haven City, this is Jak 2.

Development History

Jak 2’s development wasn’t really documented all that well. Seriously, that section on its Wikipedia page is two lines long. What we do know is that development started in 2001, prior to the release of the first game. Which makes sense given that game’s 100% completion bonus cutscene teasing its own sequel.

From the start the game was meant to take on a more serious tone, with a larger focus on the story and characters. This was partially due to the release of Grand Theft Auto 3. Naughty Dog held focus groups that discovered their primary demographic of young kids preferred more mature games.

Originally the team wanted to scrap the series altogether and work on a new IP, but Sony convinced them to continue with the already successful franchise, allowing them to give it a darker tone as a compromise. So with a mix of GTA, Mario 64, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater swimming in the ideas pool, the team got to work.

Most of the development was similar to the first game, but the team did manage to improve the graphics by using Insomniac Games’ polygon occlusion code to allow for more efficient polygon rendering.

Two years later, Jak 2 was released to the public in October 2003, receiving universal praise and going on to sell over 2 million copies. The reception certainly went well back then, but the question to answer now is whether this radical departure still holds up.

Opening Sequence

Normally I’d skip this, but let’s start with the title screen. A dark foreboding camera sweep through some credits hovering in the city accompanied by a dramatic score. We see Daxter plug in some lights and… the music cuts out… Yeah, I don’t know the music just kinda stops for no reason.

I swear I didn’t edit that at all. I mean, I understand every game has bugs and this is only the title screen, but… This is the fucking title screen! The introduction, the thing that welcomes players into the experience of playing your game and there’s a bug stopping the music from playing. It’s not detrimental, but I did find it kinda funny so I figured I’d share. Anyway, onto the actual game.

We open on another bit of narration from Samos a short time after the events of Jak 1, with him, Jak, Daxter, and Keira getting ready to open up the portal unlocked at the end of the first game. How they rolled it all the way back to Samos’s hut I have no clue, but Keira’s got everything set up and they prepare to head inside using the rift rider found along with it.

However, upon opening the portal, a bunch of monsters fly out, prompting the team to go full speed ahead in an attempt to escape. The vehicle gets destroyed, the team gets seperated, and everyone flies off into the void. Why this monster didn’t pop out at the end of Jak 1 I have no clue, but let’s ignore that for now.

Jak and Daxter manage to stick together and crash land in the center of the futuristic Haven City. They’re immediately confronted by the city guards, who give the impression of knowing the two would land here. Jak is taken to prison while Daxter runs away promising to save him while starring in his own spin off.

Two years later we see that Jak’s been tortured this entire time, being pumped full of dark eco by Baron Praxis, the city’s dictatorial ruler, and Erol, the leader of his Krimzon Guard, in an attempt to create a super soldier. 

The Baron is tired of waiting for Captain America to emerge and tells Erol to kill Jak later, who responds by giving Jak a slightly erotic goodbye. The two leave and surprise surprise, Daxter appears ready to save his friend. He begs Jak to wake up, to which Jak, this lighthearted child forced to grow up in a torture chamber for years, responds by finally uttering his first words in the series: “I’m gonna KILL Praxis!”

Daxter then tries to free Jak, but transforming into a superpowered dark eco creature, he frees himself from his bonds and almost attacks Daxter before regaining his senses and changing back. The two then join together and begin on their journey as the player is given control.

Okay, let’s unpack this intro really quick. The lovable cast from the first game is separated because a giant monster came through a portal built by the precursors and they drove straight into it. Then somehow the baron knew Jak would crash land in that exact spot on that exact day, and that he’d be a promising candidate for his dark warrior project.

Then conveniently on the day that the Baron gives up and decides to kill him rather than experiment on him like he has for the past two years, Daxter happens to show up and Jak happens to unleash his dark powers… Yeah, that’s both a lot of coincidence and a change of pace so sudden it could give a player whiplash.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to taking a series into a new direction, but the team seemed to have forgotten the entire transitionary period here. Rather than having the series evolve into this new dark setting, everything just kinda turns out that way because of random chance, making for a massive tonal shift with very little reasoning behind it.

    There may not have been much to Jak’s character before, but as an audience we don’t get to see him become this darker version of himself. And while the end result makes sense given what’s happened to him, it’s not a very satisfying character arc as the only meaningful change his character goes through over the course of the game happens during the two years we don’t get to experience.

    Imagine if Sonic were to be defeated, locked in prison, and tortured within the first few minutes of a game! Oh wait, right… Well, at least Dark Jak looks cooler than the werehog.

Moving forward, we get started with the game and of course the first thing I do is switch the horizontal camera controls back to the way humans use them and begin in this empty room. I know some of you mentioned that this is your preferred way of playing, and that’s fine. We’re all wrong from time to time.

Daxter instructs the player on how to jump and roll and perform all of Jak’s basic maneuvers from the first game, but there’s one small issue. You can die in the opening room. Okay look, did I do this just for emphasis? Yes. However, it’s still bad design to start the player off in a room with a bottomless pit if you’re also going to assume that some of them can’t figure out how to jump. It’s not really awful, but it is indicative of the poor design choices going forward.

Anyway, before the end of this escape sequence players will likely come across one of the hidden precursor orbs. Upon which Dax will say that they’re much more rare and valuable than they were in the first game. It’s not too difficult to find one before escaping the prison, so this is a decent way to introduce their new purpose. More on that later.

There’s some light platforming, simple melee guards to kill, and crates to open, which brings me to the first positive change in the series- the health system is much better now. With Jak able to take more hits, there’s no way 50 green orbs was going to do the trick anymore. Instead, crates can contain a health pack capable of restoring one bar of health to Jak’s meter. A solid improvement that’s much appreciated.

We then move on to some more platforming, guards, a short swimming area, and a room with a grated floor above a bunch of shooting guards where we learn that they not only look like stormtroopers, but aim like them as well. Seriously, the only way I could get them to hit me was to stand still for a few seconds. 

After this, the duo escapes the prison to an alleyway where they encounter an old man named Kor who explains that they are in Haven City, controlled by Baron Praxis. Kor begins to explain that he’s escorting a young boy when guards come to take literally everyone to prison for being in this particular alley when we get this gem.

The duo begins fighting and Jak transforms again, allowing the player to control Dark Jak and kill all of the guards. And despite Jak saying 

He never once loses control of the power again since from here on out,the player gets to decide when to activate it. Then, since the scriptwriters couldn’t think of a way to bring this fact up in any other way, Kor says.

Why they couldn’t have just had Daxter tease the kid beforehand to make this less ham-fisted I don’t know, but a guard commands them all to move along and Kor informs them of the location of an underground resistance hideout, run by a man named Torn. 

Why that guard wasn’t interested in arresting everyone within eyeshot I also don’t know, but from here the world opens up. Players are free to roam the city, punch civilians, steal cars, and get into chases with the Krimzon Guard and we’ll talk about all of that soon, but for now let’s wrap up this intro.

From a gameplay perspective, it’s a pretty solid opening. It reminds old players how the controls work, teaches new players everything they need to know, and every movement feels smooth as butter. From a design perspective there are some minor flaws, but it gets the job done.

On the other hand, from a story perspective so much of this introduction feels like a rush job to get players into the new setting as quickly as possible. Ham-fisted explanations, plot points that make no sense, it’s a complete mess.

Look, if the team wants to make a more mature story, that’s totally cool with me, but if the tone is supposed to be more mature, then you have to earn it. You have to show how and why the tone is changing in a natural way and Jak 2 just doesn’t. So let’s dig a little deeper and see if the writing improves moving forward.

Story

    A quick drive through the city later and the duo arrives at the underground hideout to meet Torn, former leader of the Krimzon Guard and the only character in the game who’s somehow more brooding than Jak. 

He doesn’t trust them at first, tasking them with retrieving the Baron’s flag from the top of a structure outside of the city. They head out of town, capture the flag, and return to Torn who tells them that if they continue helping the resistance, he’ll grant them a meeting with their leader, the Shadow. 

From here he instructs them to go help his contact to the city’s seedier side, Krew and oh my god if this isn’t the best character design I’ve ever seen I don’t know what is. He’s somehow disgusting and adorable at the same time I love it.

    Krew sends Jak on a few odd jobs before giving him a gun to use in the field. Jak then aids Krew and Torn with a few more tasks including guiding Krew’s bodyguard Sig through a dangerous pumping station, rescuing a scientist responsible for keeping the city’s shields up named Vin, meeting up with the baron’s daughter Ashelin, and uncomfortably watching Daxter flirt with this furry convention reject.

As these missions go on, Torn tells them some Haven City’s history. How it was founded by a man named Mar, a friend to the precursors who, according to legend, drove off an entire metalhead army and established Haven City as a safe hub to keep the metal head army out.

But over time his heir was lost and the Baron took over. Ever since, he’s been using the Krimzon Guard to keep the city safe from the metal head army, but became a ruthless dictator in the process. Now their only hope lies in the child from earlier, who just so happens to be Mar’s true heir.

Along the way, they’re sent by Krew to race in the city’s stadium where they meet up with Keira, now a racing manager. They try to keep her identity a secret for a while, but anyone with a functioning set of ears could tell it was her from the start. When she finally is revealed the reception is… less than warm.

Still, she gives Jak a hoverboard to use and as the story continues he and Daxter go on to win in all three stadium races in an attempt to gain entry into the Baron’s palace. Oh, and there’s a whole thing with Erol and Keira, and Jak being jealous, and Keria kinda respecting Erol’s racing ability, but all that really comes of it is Keira having some relevance to the plot and Erol going ka-bluey in a poorly-thought-out drive straight into a bunch of dark eco barrels.

    As this is happening Jak and Daxter discover Samos’s dilapidated old hut and realize that they’ve been flung 500 years into the future and Haven City was actually built on the old Sandover Village. They’re eventually granted a meeting with the Shadow who turns out to be a young-looking Samos, though he has no memory of them.

After a quick sneak around the palace, they learn that the Baron actually has a deal with the metal heads to supply them with dark eco in exchange for only attacking the city enough to make Praxis look like a protector. He’s also planning on double-crossing the metal heads at some point. They get noticed when Daxter sneezes, but although the duo manages to defeat his giant robot and he escapes.

    The Shadow introduces them to a mute oracle named Onin and her interpreter, Pecker. She tells Jak to collect some artifacts that will open up Mar’s tomb. They grab everything they need and open up the tomb so that the child from earlier can perform the test of manhood that only Mar’s true heir is capable of completing.

    However, they’re told the boy is too young and Jak hops into the tomb before the door closes, trapping himself inside this chamber with a supposedly impossible challenge ahead. Of course Jak succeeds and makes it to the center, just in time for the Baron to break in. Another fight ensues and while the duo gets him on the ropes, he escapes with the tomb’s treasure- the precursor stone.

    Upon exiting the tomb, they discover that their friends have been imprisoned. Torn confesses that he sold out the underground in order to save Ashelin. The two head out, save their friends, and even find the older Samos in the process, giving us this gem.

    Intent on destroying the metal head nest, the Baron works with Krew to create a bomb out of the weaponized precursor stone, unaware that the bomb would destroy Haven City as well. Jak and Daxter set off again and continue their work to stop his plans. 

First, they retrieve a life seed and protect Young Samos as he uses its power to give himself the same abilities as Old Samos. Next, they stop Krew in a boss fight that concludes with the chubby bastard blowing himself up. 

Unfortunately for them, this is followed by a full-on metalhead invasion. The metal heads manage to get into the city and an all-out war rages on while the team finishes retrieving all of the pieces needed to build a new rift gate and send themselves back to the past.

    With this, they begin plans to take on the metal head army and save the world. First they meet up with Sig, who gives a rousing speech and is promptly killed by a giant metal head centipede. Next, Vin warns that Kor is the one who allowed the metal heads to attack the city and is subsequently killed in the chaos.

    The two gear up and head to the construction site per Vin’s last words and find the Baron. As they prepare for a fight, Kor falls out of the sky and reveals that he’s the true evil mastermind… By wearing blackface! ...Oh, and I guess by transforming into the metalhead queen and killing the Baron.

    Jak and Daxter use the power of the precursor stone to blow open an entrance to the metal head nest and fight their way to Kor’s lair, where he reveals that not only does he have the child, but also that the child is actually a young Jak, untainted by dark eco, and the precursor stone is really the last remaining precursor egg.

    As it turns out, Jak was hidden away in the past in an attempt to train him for his eventual fight with Kor, but now Kor intends to use young Jak’s body, untouched by dark eco to do… something? It’s not really clear. It sounds like he wants to eat the egg in order to defeat the precursors once and for all, but I guess he needs young Jak to activate it first? Not too sure.

    Doesn’t really matter though since the two heroes defeat Kor, causing him to fly into the portal and explode like a bug hitting a zapper. Young Jak activates the stone which releases a precursor projection, who balances out Jak’s inner darkness with light and leaves him with the ominous message that they’ll meet again.

    Young Samos then takes young Jak through the portal in order to begin the cycle as Daxter tries to write off any time travel confusion by telling Keira, and in turn the audience, not to think about it too hard.

    Torn and Ashelin share a moment, Daxter takes over Krew’s bar and dubs it the Naughty Ottsel and manages to interrupt Jak and Keira’s kiss again, Sig reveals himself to be alive and the entire team celebrates along with the rest of Haven City as Daxter and Pecker get into a fight, concluding the story.

    And god damn this was a shift. To think that after the fun, friendly world established in the first game the group would travel to a dystopian future with a ruthless dictator! And you know what? The story itself is pretty good.

    I like the twists and turns in the plot, the creative use of time travel making for an interesting mystery to unfold, and the introduction of a more rigid story structure allowing characters to develop rather than being simple caricatures for handing out missions.

There are even some pretty great moments that show inklings of the writing talent Naughty Dog would go on to implement in later games. The comedic dialogue can be particularly laugh-out-loud funny, with great moments like Sig’s speech before his supposed death.

Then there’s my favorite moment in the game when the Baron attacks metal Kor and gets blown away. For the entire game, he’s been portrayed as this seemingly all-powerful villain, a cruel, ruthless, unstoppable force with an iron grip on Haven City. 

And in two seconds we get not only his death, but also establish an even greater threat. And while some people might find his defeat dissatisfying I personally found the subversion of expectations to be refreshing and ballsy on the part of the writers.

All that said, there are a lot of problems with this story. Not so much in the plot itself, but in the way that it’s told. Some minor issues include the hand waving of time travel paradoxes, confusing character motivations, shoe-horning in the racing subplot, and the fact that Samos didn’t reveal any information despite being aware of everything that would happen, but these are small compared to what really brings the story down.

At its core, the storytelling has three major issues- pacing, plot holes, and tone. First, the game paces everything out by having players learn about the world and make advancements in the story by completing certain missions. The problem comes in with how long it can be between meaningful interactions with the world.

Half of the missions have nothing to do with the central plot and many are simple fetch quests. Go to this person, they tell you to do a thing, you do it, and you gain their favor. And the overly long quests filled with dozens of deaths and ungodly long travel times don’t help the situation.

Imagine if the fetch quests were relegated to side activities. Players interested in unlocking more precursor orbs as a reward could pursue them while those more interested in the story could make their way through without having to do things like race in the arena or collect some pointless trinkets.

As it stands, this doesn’t ruin the story, it just means that there are a lot of uninteresting plot points in between the good stuff. Every mission starts off with the hope that it’ll be relevant to the plot, but many simply aren’t. And while it is true that you need to give the player room to breathe every once in a while, Jak 2 just takes that concept too far.

Next on the chopping block is the pointlessly vague or conflicting plot points. I’ve already mentioned some instances of this such as hiding Keira’s identity for no reason, Daxter ignoring the time travel paradoxes, or Jak’s lack of self-control being forgotten about after the first two minutes of the game, but that’s just the beginning.

For as much exposition the game likes to throw our way, it seems to gloss over some of the bigger questions about its world. How did Haven City come to be built over Sandover Village? Who exactly was Mar? If Mar came around after the events of Jak 1, how did he come into contact with the precursors? 

Was Samos always the green sage? If so, who are the blue, yellow, and red sages in the future? If not, was there just no green sage until he showed up? What about the tons of metal heads that burst through the portal when Jak opened it? Did they destroy the world or is that when Mar defeated them and founded Haven City? 

How about the wasteland outside the city? If that’s all desert, what happened to the massive ocean that was there before? And who the hell was that guy introduced as Jak’s uncle in the first game? Why does no one in the Krimzon Guard try to arrest Jak in the streets even though no one else in this world looks remotely similar to Jak? 

Okay, okay, I think you get it. I know this may seem like an over exaggeration, but there are just so many inconsistencies and overlooked elements that contradict the existing lore and make this world feel poorly thought out that I couldn’t help but list them out..

Look, it’s not like these plot holes are particularly damaging to the story at hand. In fact, it’s probably best that the writers didn’t get into the nitty gritty too much, but just some explanation or backstory told in a flashback would have been really helpful for contextualizing the current struggle.

Hell, it wouldn’t even be that hard to implement. Just have Onin give Jak a vision or have Samos show something using green eco magic or something. Just so we can better understand the backstory by experiencing it rather than having it told to us in passing statements that are easily missed or misinterpreted.

With all that said, these don’t even come close to the most prevalent issue with the story. That being its completely inconsistent tone. It’s very clear that the developers wanted to go for a darker vibe, but that’s incredibly difficult to achieve with a mute super saiyan and his furry little sidekick.

Originally Naughty Dog wanted to make a brand new IP for this game, but with Sony convincing them otherwise they decided to makdee the game they wanted anyway and it shows. The entire plot feels really forced into this new setting and it never quite comes together.

You have Jak being tortured, the deaths of both major and minor characters, drinking, swearing, beastiality, violence against innocent civilians, and car-Jak-ing (hehehe see what I did there?) all next to Daxter’s banter, the cartoony visuals, skateboarding, and whack-a-mole. None of it ever comes together into a solid structure and the story is less investing as a result.

This just feels like the developers didn’t know what direction to take the game, so they threw in everything they could think of hoping it would somehow work out. It never fully commits to the dark mood like The Last of Us and never truly embraces the light-hearted adventure narrative like a cartoony Uncharted. It’s just stuck in the middle.

The end product is one where the serious moments feel less impactful due to the character’s silly reactions and can even be a bummer after a more light-hearted scene. On the flip side the comedic sequences often feel like cheesy distractions from the plot rather than offering the levity that they aim for.

As a result, enjoying the story of Jak II is kind of subjective. Much like the rest of the game, it’s a real mixed bag when it comes to overall quality. And while there are a lot of objective issues, I can’t fault someone for being charmed by its setting, bold new direction, and of course, the characters.

    

Characterization

In the first game, there were really only 6 characters that did more than sit around handing out missions. And with Gol and Maia dead, the cast was looking a little slim, making the new setting of Haven City the perfect place to introduce new characters for the team to interact with, but first let’s see how the returning cast works in this new environment.

One item of note is the title. Daxter has been completely removed showcasing that Jak is now the sole focus of the series. He’s the main character and driving force of the story, and with that the team decided to give him something brand new- a personality. And that personality is… kind of a dick.

I’m not gonna sugar coat this- Jak is an asshole. Look, I get that he was tortured and experimented on for 2 years, but looking at this brooding teenager that treats everyone with contempt just makes him seem like an arrogant kid more than a hero. Even the excuse that he’s being affected by the dark eco doesn’t really make sense given that he never really shows remorse for the way he acts, even after the story concludes.

On top of that, as soon as the player is set loose in the world, one of the first things they’re able to do is steal someone’s car to drive around the city. And when you get a gun Jak is fully capable of shooting up any civilians in his way. And while these might be staples of the open world genre, it makes Jak really hard to root for.

In a game like Grand Theft Auto, the main characters aren’t good people. They’re often horrible, selfish individuals and it makes sense that they’d get into trouble with the law by stealing and killing as it suits their means. 

We aren’t supposed to root for them so much as go along for the ride while Jak 2 portrays its protagonist as some sort of hero, which doesn’t mesh with the gameplay. Just look at how he reacts when seeing Keria after two years of being apart.

However, I do have to give the writers some credit. While Jak may fall short as a hero, he’s still a pretty fun character to control and his disposition does improve by the end of the game. We’re not really shown how or why, but Jak becomes more relaxed and kind-hearted as the game goes on and I’d say that by the end he’s a pretty enjoyable protagonist.

Daxter’s character on the other hand is nearly identical to the first game. He’s still quippy, funny, and sometimes irritating, but this time around he’s much more enjoyable. His jokes are still hit and miss, but he’s become much more entertaining due in part to being a lot less sleazy.

Not to mention his fast-talking New York-style attitude fits in pretty well with the big city aesthetic. Unfortunately, that’s only way he fits in. As I mentioned before Daxter’s quips and jokes don’t really gel with the darker tone being set here and as a result while I like his character more this time around, I almost feel the game would have been better off without him.

Yeah, I know, I know. But think about it. Imagine if Naughty Dog fully committed to the darker tone and had the Baron or Erol kill Daxter in that first scene. Not only would this have a huge emotional impact on both Jak and the player, but it would have made Jak’s furious demeanor and unwillingness to get close to anyone make a lot more sense while at the same time removing an element from the first game that doesn’t work in this darker world.

But let’s say we keep Daxter in. How do we fix the issue? Simple- have a little self-awareness. While Daxter does quip about the dark stuff going on from time to time it always feels like the writers are doing it out of necessity rather than because they think a joke would lighten the mood.

Instead, I would have suggested a more light hearted tone with Daxter pointing out just how ridiculous it is to have all of these cartoony characters acting all serious and tough. Make fun of Jak and Torn for being brooding. Allude to the future reveals by pointing out how obtuse Samos can be. Instead of having Tess turn him on have him ask what’s wrong with this woman who wants to bang an animal. 

Either of these solutions could have helped bring Daxter into this world in a more natural way, but just like with the story as a whole the problem here is with Naughty Dog’s refusal to commit to a solid tone. It’s a shame, but at least we get to see some improvement in Daxter as a character in his own right. Not to mention he’s still pretty damn funny.

As far as Keira and Samos go, they’re pretty much exactly the same as in the first game. Keira is a mechanic/love interest and Samos is a grumpy old sage. Both are surprisingly absent in the first half of the game, meaning we don’t really spend time to getting to know them any better.

I suppose Keira gets a sort of love triangle with Jak and Erol, but that doesn’t really serve any purpose outside of giving Jak a racing rival. But Jak already hates Erol so that plot line doesn’t really go anywhere.

And although it is sweet to see Samos turn out to be a man who gave up years of his life to raise Jak, we don’t really get any bonding moments between the two except for the final scene in the game, which I see as a real missed opportunity.

Now we can move on to the new characters and for the most part they’re great. As far as simple characters go we have Torn’s dark brooding nature being a bit overdone, but occasionally he does get an effective scene when talking about Ashelin. 

Speaking of whom, Ashelin is a pretty badass character and her conflicting motivations make a good fit for this more mature narrative (even if her acceptance of her father’s misdeeds is a little too sudden). Tess may only exist to be an inexplicable love interest for Daxter, but she gets some funny lines.

Brutter, Sig, Onin, they’re all great ideas for characters and well executed. And while Pecker’s feud with Daxter is a little too silly for the story at hand, he’s still got some great one liners and his name is pretty damn funny. I mean… he’s a bird with the face of a monkey. The one bird-like thing he can’t do is peck. Hilarious writing right there Naughty Dog.

...Oh and it also sounds like a penis.

Anyway, when we turn our attention to the villains, we have some fantastic adversaries. Krew is such an interesting character. Not only is his design fantastic, but he somehow manages to dole out missions, balance his funny attitude and design with a foreboding presence and threatening demeanor, and make for a solid ally-turned-enemy that perfectly fits this new setting. Just a really solid job here.

Then we have my favorite new character, the Baron. Crafting a more mature story doesn’t just mean that everything needs to be dark, bleak, and violent, but also that characters need to be more three dimensional and the Baron is an exceptional example of this.

While yes, he definitely comes off as a simple, evil villain of the week in the beginning, what we learn as time goes on gives him a lot more depth. He tortures Jak, but it’s because he’s trying to make a soldier capable of defeating the metal heads. 

He gives the monsters eco in exchange for making him look like a protector, but he’s also stalling for time to figure out how to defeat them and doesn’t want to look bad to the public and lose power because he thinks he’s the only one capable of preventing this threat.

He wants to stop Jak in order to help his plan succeed, but upon realizing his death is imminent, he gives Jak the precursor stone in the hopes that he can stop Kor in his absence. The Baron is undoubtedly a bad man, but one who also cares for his city. 

While I do think his silly dictatorial lines blasting through the city are a bit over the top and only serve to counteract the character building put into him, when you think about it, Praxis is actually a lot like Thanos- a man blinded by his ambition to save the world, even down to his willingness to sacrifice his daughter to achieve his goals. If only every villain could be so well written…

Kor is… boring and confusing. His motivations are unclear, his methods make very little sense, and he’s not really a major enough player in the game to give his big reveal at the end any feeling of significance. It’s like, “Oh no! Not… What’s his name again? Eh, whatever. Not… the old guy! I’m so surprised by this and it gives me a whole new perspective on the deep impact he’s had on the story to this point!”

If they wanted to give this a greater impact, I can think of two alternatives. Maybe have Kor take Onin’s place as the oracle. Not only would this give us more time to get to know his character, but it would also mean that everything we did according to Onin’s directions was really playing straight into Kor’s plans. A solid set up and delivery.

On the other hand, what if Kor turned out to be Gol from the first game. Not only would this make the battle at hand more personal for Jak, but it would also make sense with the Dark Eco chambers giving him new powers while also transforming him into an insane monster. Both simple solutions to an otherwise boring character arc.

Now I’ll be the first to admit, Jak and Daxter never was a series whose strength lied in its narrative or writing, but when so much of the game is dedicated to it I couldn’t just leave it out. It’s messy, lacks focus, and is definitely a misstep in terms of the overall experience Jak 2 has to offer, but every once in a while it has that glimmer of clever writing that Naughty Dog would come to be known for. 

Presentation

And hey, at least it’s pretty. Comparing Jak 2 to the first game is practically unfair. Using technology offered by Insomniac, the team was able to improve the graphical fidelity of Jak 2 far ahead of its predecessor. The models look less polygonal, the environments have more detail, and the animations are much more fluid.

The character models in particular are really impressive. While I did mock that glitch with Kor’s face earlier, that’s really the only example of a graphical glitch I can think of in the entire game. Which is made even more impressive when you consider the continuous open world and flawless framerate.

The loading zones are a bit more noticeable now that we have to wait for a giant steel door to slowly open between areas with little variation on entryways for each new stage, but none of these load times are unbearably long and the consistency does fall in line with the totalitarian regime the designers were trying to portray.

Aesthetically, the game’s grown up a bit as well. While the characterization and plot may have been wonky in terms of tone, the art direction is still fantastic, hitting a perfect balance between a darker, more brooding design and otherworldly cartoon characters.

Jak’s got his new goatee, a more modern outfit to fit the new setting, and he’s even powered up to Super Saiyan 3. Plus Dark Jak manages to look threatening and cool at the same time without feeling cheesy like a certain other dark transformation I can think of.

 Ashelin and Torn have these interesting tattoos that mark them as members of the Krimzon Guard. Pecker’s monkey-parrot combination looks great and suits his character well, and of course, Onin’s saggy tits are juuuust over exaggerated enough to be fucking hilarious without being a cheap joke.

Of course, there’s one character who stands above the rest in terms of design and I know I’ve brought this up before, but come on. LOOK. AT. KREW. Look at this big beautiful hunk of man. The tearing clothes, the single blind eye, the little, tiny, stick, feet, oh my god it’s amazing.

The environments are also a treat. A diverse collection of areas to shoot up keeps things feeling pretty fresh for the majority of the game. I think the color palette is a bit too washed out for the art style, but aside from that the set pieces and environments in which they take place are impressive, especially for 2003.

But graphical fidelity isn’t the only element of impressive visuals. The animation is just as, if not more important and I’m happy to say the game delivers here as well. The cutscenes have a much smoother feel to them along with improved cinematography that’s much appreciated.

And remember the squash and stretch technique I mentioned in the first video? Where the characters’ limbs will become misshapen during an animation for emphasis? Well Jak 2 has that as well, but the effect is less extreme, ensuring that the impact of each action is still there, but much more grounded to suit the more mature tone.

Then there’s the voice acting. Jak has that generic dark angsty teen vibe going that was popular at the time and Mike Erwin did a fantastic job giving a voice to a character that previously had none, which is no simple task. Although I do miss Jak’s spin move scream.

For Daxter, Max Casella tones things down this time around while still delivering on that wise-cracking attitude we’ve come to expect from the character, resulting in a much more enjoyable performance. 

Krew, Keira, Samos, Erol, Torn, and Ashelin are also voiced exceptionally well, with characters like Baron Praxis and Sig being voiced by known talent Clancy Brown and Phil LaMarr respectively, who obviously give stellar performances.

So with all of this good there’s a lot to celebrate, but it’s not perfect. While I do like the enhanced detail of the overworld, most of the environments are kinda drab. I get that this is supposed to be a run down city, but even when escaping to the outer areas there are only like one or two where color really takes hold and even then it feels undersaturated.

While I can always appreciate a game that goes for a consistent art direction, Jak 2 just goes a little too far and becomes boring as a result, leaving many areas of the map feeling less distinct and memorable. Plus even the variety in lighting isn’t as present with the removal of the day-night cycle.

Even the massive hub world of Haven City feels uninspired. While there are clearly varied districts with their own designs and even color palettes, none of it comes together to feel well defined as a cohesive whole or a thought-out city.

Yes, the districts exist, but why does the market district have its own sectioned off area for carwhile the citizens walk below? Why do the water slums exist in the first place? While there’s this hustle and bustle everywhere from the abundance of NPCs walking around, this feels more like an obstacle course for missions than a real city that people might actually live in.

Then there’s the music. And yes, it’s pretty neat that the soundtrack has three different versions of each song depending on whether the area is safe, dangerous, or if Jak has his gun equipped, but cute details don’t really make for a good soundtrack. 

Now I do like how the more metallic and mechanical sounding drums suit the environments, but aside from one or two tracks everything is just so forgettable. Worst of all is the Haven City theme. It’s not a bad song by any means, it’s got a catchy bassline and the tone suits Haven City just fine. No, the issue with this track is just how often you’ll be hearing it over the course of the game.

I’ll come back to this point later, but Haven City is where you’ll be spending most of your time in the game and despite it having 3 or 4 unique districts, they all have the same theme song. No matter how good a song is, if it’s all you hear for about two thirds of your playtime in a 12 hour game, it’s gonna get old.

All that said, Jak 2 is still a massive step up from its predecessor in terms of presentation. It’s more pleasant to look at, the voice acting has improved, and the animation is well done. Despite a few shortcomings, this is one of the best looking games on the PS2. So now the question we have to ask is, how does it play?

Gameplay

The controls in the precursor legacy were smooth, intuitive, and responsive- everything a player could want from a game. And Jak 2’s core movement follows this up magnificently. All of the base platforming and attacks are functionally identical to the first game- double jump, high jump, roll jump, spin attack and dash punch all work as expected.

So seeing as how the core was nearly perfect to begin with, what else could be added to improve the experience? Well apparently Naughty Dog thought of a few different possibilities and decided to ADD EVERYTHING. Gunplay? Throw it in! Dark Jak? Why not? Driving? Let’s make that a major focus this time around! Skateboarding? Totally radical dude!

With so many new mechanics the team was faced with two new problems- execution and cohesion. Ensuring that each of these mechanics is fun to play and that each fits into this new world. And the result is… well, for now let’s say it’s lesser than the sum of its parts. And here’s where this video takes a sharp turn into negativity.

Let’s start with the simplest addition- Dark Jak. In effect, he doesn’t really change up the gameplay all that much. When activated, Jak moves a little faster, does a bit more damage with his attacks, and exudes lightning. Though I’m not sure if that last one really does anything.

The true power of Dark Jak comes from his unlockable abilities. The first two are attacks, a lightning storm that does damage to a bunch of enemies in the area and the dark bomb that deals a ton of damage to the surrounding enemies. Both of these also immediately revert the transformation.

There are also two enhancements that make Dark Jak invincible and grow him into a giant. On the whole, these abilities don’t really add much to the game and that’s for two simple reasons- accessibility and application (or lack thereof).

First up is the difficulty in acquiring enough dark eco to make Dark Jak available. For one, it takes truckloads of the stuff to give Jak enough energy to transform. But more importantly the transformation is an all-or-nothing deal. Once powered up, Dark Jak is used until the eco runs out, no exceptions.

The timer is so short that in the rare event that I actually activated Dark Jak, I’d just use the dark bomb and instantly transform back just to avoid the risk of running out of eco before using his most powerful ability.

Not to mention that if you use these powers and then die, the meter isn’t refilled upon loading the checkpoint. This means that even experimenting with him in a tough situation is impossible without grinding for more dark eco over and over.

This means that players are likely to hold onto Dark Jak until he’s absolutely necessary, hoping that the opportunity for him to be useful will present itself, just to avoid being left without him for a tough fight. Unfortunately, this brings us to problem number two, application.

See, while most enemies in the game stick to melee combat at first, once Jak gets his gun, so do most enemies, with the only exceptions being the metal heads. And given that Dark Jak’s powers are almost entirely melee-based, he’s not incredibly useful against the legions of Krimzon Guard the game sends your way.

Even against the metal heads it’s usually more efficient to just pop out your gun and shoot them since you can keep your distance to stay safe while also avoiding the possibility of losing your powers in the midst of a field of enemies.

These two design choices are likely to cause most players to sit around holding onto Dark Jak for just the right time without ever actually using him save for one or two moments of desperation. So what could they have done to fix this?

I would suggest sections of the game where Jak transforms against your will. Make Dark Jak as much of a handicap as he is a power up. In the early missions it’s a blessing due to his increased strength, but eventually becomes a curse when enemies are able to shoot back from a distance. It would even fit into the theme of Jak being unable to control his powers.

Or, if you don’t want to design more missions and instead want to fix the mechanics, why not make the Dark Jak meter grow over time instead of when collecting eco? Combine this with unlocking invincibility from the start, fixing the checkpoint bug, and adding the ability to cancel the transformation at will and players may be able to find more use for this ability instead of ignoring its existence.

So if you’re not going to be punching stuff for the majority of the game, what will you be using to murder the waves of enemies coming your way? Well that’s where the most significant change to the series comes in because it’s time to grab your gun.

After the first couple of hours, Jak is handed a morph gun that’s capable of changing the way it fires depending on which upgrades have been equipped. At first it’s just the scatter gun, a shotgun-like short range weapon good for crowd control, but eventually you’ll unlock more mods that have various applications.

There’s the blaster, a long-range semi-auto weapon useful for sniping at a distance, the vulcan fury machine gun capable of firing tons of rounds in a short time, and the peacemaker used to deal large amounts of damage in a single shot.

Given these descriptions you may think that these firearms would lead to a ton of variety in the game’s combat, granting both depth and versatility. You would be wrong. Like dark Jak, there are two major issues with the gunplay that make it more tedious than fun- the controls and dominant strategy.

Starting with the controls, Jak 2 plays kind of like a top-down twin stick shooter, but with an over-the-shoulder camera. See, once again moving the right stick up and down zooms the camera closer to or further from Jak rather than aiming a reticle up or down. In fact, there are no reticles in the entire game!

Instead, Jak aims his gun in whatever direction his body is currently facing, with auto aim taking over for the z-axis. And honestly, the auto aim in this game is pretty stellar. For the most part, the bullets go where I expect them to when I point Jak towards an enemy. Unfortunately, getting Jak to point towards the enemy is the real issue.

This problem is twofold. First, Jak is unable to strafe, meaning that you can’t reposition yourself to get away from enemies while still firing in that direction, leading to a lot of combat encounters that devolve into shooting a couple of times, running away, shooting some more, rinse and repeat. If I wanted to play red light green light I’d fucking play red light green light, but this is not how your design shooting controls.

Even worse, turning Jak even the tiniest amount can have a drastic effect on where you’re currently aiming. While turning Jak 15 degrees may not make a difference when firing at an enemy three feet away, with the difference only being about three quarters of a foot for the bullet’s end point, if an enemy happens to be about 30 feet away this simple turn means the bullet travels nearly 8 feet further than the original spot.

And when aiming relies on turning the character themselves to face enemies you’re trying to dodge, it becomes exceedingly difficult to hit a target precisely , no matter how good the auto aim is. When you get down to it, the controls for this game are designed more like a platformer than a third person shooter and it really shows.

So how about the second issue of dominant strategy? Well for 90 percent of the game there’s one move that most players will be using- jump, spin, and shoot the blaster. That’s it. The winning strategy. And once you realize it’s the winning strategy, it makes all versatility the other guns might have offered completely worthless, but let’s go through them one by one to make sure.

The scatter gun’s issues are similar to those of Dark Jak where its short range limits its usefulness to immense hordes of metalheads, meaning that once the blaster is unlocked there’s rarely a situation in which it’s useful. Maybe if it were more powerful than the scattergun or had more ammo it could be a worthy part of the arsenal, but as is it’s only practical application is to teach shooting mechanics before the better gun comes along.

The vulcan fury could be useful for dispatching large groups of enemies when surrounded or dealing massive damage to a boss, but it runs out of ammo so quickly and deals so little damage that its use for crowd control is limited and takes so long to charge up to full speed that you’re likely to get hit by an attack if using it in a boss fight.

    Then there’s the peacemaker. This weapon would be perfect for dealing huge amounts of damage to enemies and bosses right? Absolutely. However, most enemies go down in a few hits anyway, meaning it’s better to save your peacemaker ammo for one of the few boss fights in the game. And even then this mod is only unlocked in the final hours of the game, making it barely worth talking about.

    Meanwhile, the blaster can fire at a long range, has no charge up time, deals a decent amount of damage, has plentiful ammo, and can even be used for crowd control thanks to the spin move and the game’s fantastic auto aim. All leading to this weapon being the only one players are likely to use for the majority of the game.

    It’s a shame too, as each one does feel unique to use and there’s a lot of potential here. Swapping between mods is seamless and each one feels fantastic to fire, like it really has a kick. I just with there were more of a reason to actually use them all.

    Plus, like most shooters, each gun comes with a clip and an ammo count. The ammo is important and can eventually be expanded with an upgrade, but the clip size is completely pointless. Running out of ammo in a clip just means you move onto the next one with no reloading, no time wasted, and no clip management and while that makes everything convenient, what’s the point of showing the clip size if it serves no purpose? 

I can only guess that it’s because the developers saw it in other shooters and included it in the game without understanding its functionality. And while it’s not to the game’s detriment, it does go to show just how poorly thought out this combat system truly is.

    But hey, combat isn’t everything. This is an open world game modeled after Grand Theft Auto and that can only mean one thing- driving around and causing chaos wherever you go. That’s right. The first game may have had it’s cute little zoomer, but here we have an entire city full of cars and civilians at our disposal.

    And there are some really cool ideas at play here. After stealing a car Jak can still fire his gun, making for some cool combat on the go, even if the lack of auto aim can be a bit taxing at times. Then there’s the feature where different styles of cars have different stats for health, handling, and speed meaning that choosing the right car for the job can be just as important as driving it well.

    So how does the driving handle? Not great. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not awful or anything, it’s just kind of mediocre. Despite these being flying cars, Jak can only fly in one of two lanes on the vertical axis, either with the other cars or the civilians. 

And no matter what you do you’re either gonna crash into commuters, cops, or walls, all. The. Time. Because despite different cars having different stats, none of them really control the way you want them to, with each having its own issues that makes none of the choices ideal.

The smaller bikes are quick, but explode if you look at them the wrong way and have a massive turning radius when moving at a decent speed. The two person car has much better handling, but it’s kind of slow and still prone to destruction. And the massive purple cars are as tough as tanks, but also control like them and move about as fast.

If the cars were all just a bit more forgiving in their health and just a tiny bit faster, I may be able to excuse the insanely slippery steering, but while I acknowledge that the developers were trying to make the hover cars feel unique in comparison to real cars in other games, the end result is a huge missed opportunity that’s more frustrating than fun to control.

I’ll speak more on how the world design contributes to this frustration soon, but for now let’s move on to the final addition- the Jet board. And I gotta say, this one is super close to being a blast, and with just one or two tweaks it really could have been a ton of fun. Could have been.

See, the Jet board is inspired by a game series I used to love back in the day- Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. There’s even a side mission where you can skate around to get enough points and win precursor orbs. It’s pretty fun. The tricks, flips, and extra speed granted by the board are super cool and I almost had a lot of fun with it, except for a couple of issues.

The board itself controls really well, it’s somehow as responsive as you’d expect a skateboard to be and as lightweight and floaty as you’d expect a hoverboard to be, so what could possibly be the issue here? Grinding.

And no, even I’m not petty enough to be bothered by the idea of a hoverboard somehow grinding against a surface. Instead I mean that without the Tony Hawk-style balance meter, it’s nearly impossible to see how well Jak is grinding on a rail, and even landing on one can be a crapshoot. 

It’s not a major issue in the arena, but when used in missions this can lead to a lot of frustration with missed jumps causing you to fall to your death, only to wind up at a checkpoint five miles back from where you fell. It’s really disappointing that they came so close to getting this mechanic right, but must have run out of development time to give it a proper test.

And there’s just one more problem that makes the Jet board an all around missed opportunity... That’s right, with cops littering the environment, if Jak hits a civilian in their sight or runs into one of them, rather than just bouncing off like a wall, this starts a chase scene. And I mean, I know this is intentional and more realistic, but from a gameplay perspective it makes riding through the city on your Jet board more dangerous than driving since Jak also takes damage in the collision.

    Authenticity is nice, but the game experience should almost always come first, and if you can suspend your disbelief about the super saiyan elf brushing off damage from laser beams with his talking animal sidekick, I think just having the cops shout a voice line or two would have been sufficient here.

    There’s also a robot suit that moves far too slow to be fun to control, making for long boring slogs through relatively linear missions, with little feeling of increased power since it’s mostly used to move around blocks. And the turret sections have a reticle that moves way too fast, making accuracy a frustrating issue.

    And while there are other problems, such as the jet board being frustrating in small corridors because of how much it bounces around or the insanely short invincibility frames after getting hit leading to a lot of moments where players will get overwhelmed and be powerless to stop an attack, in the end it’s just no use, the controls in Jak 2 feel half-baked.

    Everything from the first game works just as well if not better than before, but it feels like the team tried to add too many new mechanics into the game without the time or resources to finish them all or make sure they fit into the missions at hand, an issue that becomes even more obvious when you look at how they’re put into action.

Level Design

Missions on the outside of the city are similar to the levels in The Precursor Legacy, with each area having its own design and layout while still being connected to the central hub. There are around 17 of these areas in total across the 65 main missions, although as you can see from this chart, over a quarter of the quests take place in the city, so we’ll start there.

As a level, Haven City is odd. Half of the time it’s used as an open world sandbox and the other half it’s where various missions take place. Given that these are different scenarios with different goals in mind, let’s just discuss how the city works as a level for now.

And in that regard, it’s a mixed bag. See, the city itself doesn’t really have many issues. There’s a decent amount of variety in the districts with the market separating walking from driving and the slums introducing an area for swimming to create unique opportunities for varied missions design, and other areas can be just as conducive to fun, interesting missions.

Some are really cool like the spot near the underground hideout with its slightly open space and figure eight design making for an interesting environment for missions and the skate park at the stadium that makes for the perfect place to try out new moves.

My favorite spot in the city has to be the port outside of Krew’s bar. This massive area is great with minimal traffic and plenty of room to drive or skate around and try out some new tricks. I wish the game had more places like this.

Unfortunately, it really doesn’t. And with the other areas there are a lot of problems that keep most missions from being any fun. For starters, most of the more unique locations in the city don’t really utilize their designs in the mission structure. 

There’s nothing that has you racing between support beams in the water slums on a Jet board, hardly any reason for the market district to split foot and vehicle travel, and the farming district is just a bunch of long corridors with nothing interesting about them.

It just feels like most of the missions could have taken place in any part of the city without changing much. The developers put so much time and effort into making the districts have unique layouts that it feels like a waste when they aren’t used to their full potential.

Outside of this there are two major issues with the city map that really bring the experience down- the randomized NPCs and tight corridors. And on their own, these aren’t necessarily bad things. The first game had tight corridors in the zoomer races and Grand Theft Auto has random NPCs. The issues only crop up when you take these two elements and put them together, making for some really frustrating situations.

In a game like Grand Theft Auto the NPCs aren’t an annoyance because of the large margin for error and wide open streets to dodge any potential threats the game presents during missions. In Jak 1, the tight corridors are fine because each section within them is heavily scripted and always allows for players with enough skill to be successful.

In Jak 2, there are missions where success is either nearly impossible or literally impossible simply because of the cars or civilians that get in your way. One run might be perfectly fine or even easy while another could have blockades in place that are completely unavoidable.

And don’t even get me started on the Krimzon Guard. These motherfuckers are everywhere!! The police are so prevalent and so easily provoked that this game would seem unrealistic in North Korea. It takes many of the missions that could otherwise be fun and makes them unbearably frustrating.

Hell, there are certain missions like the race against Erol that took me and my friend so long to beat as kids that we actually gave up and resorted to going outside, and the same mission took me hours to beat when I played it again in college, but on this recent playthrough I won in only two tries because I got lucky enough to have the city empty out in just the right way.

This not only makes each failure feel unfair, but it even takes away any feeling of accomplishment that could have been gained from finally achieving your goal since you never know whether the win was due to your own skill and self improvement or simply a massive stroke of luck.

It’s a shame that the tiny hallways and massive crowds manage to take this otherwise intelligently designed and well thought out map and make it one of the most disappointing aspects of the game.

With all of that said, nearly three quarters of missions take place outside or beneath the city. and as obstacle courses the player is meant to run and gun their way through, they’re well designed for the most part.

The locales are varied and many feel unique from one another due to their differing layouts and mission structures. They even change over time. Whether it’s by adding new elements to the levels or opening up other sectioned off areas, the stages usually have something new to offer upon repeat visits. This goes a long way to keep the same locations feeling fresh upon each new mission.

The new use for precursor orbs is also a clever change. In the first game these were collectables, but also had the purpose of guiding players through open-ended levels and marking which paths a player has already taken. 

Here, the levels are much more linear so the number of orbs was reduced, making for a fun side quest to collect them in order to unlock new cheats and secrets such as big head mode. Although their placement does border on sadistic from time to time, which brings me to the major negative at play here.

As far as platforming is concerned, very few of these pose an actual challenge, but that’s fine. It just means the designers steered the level layouts towards a run-and-gun playstyle and as long as it’s built well for that, the complete lack of platforming isn’t an issue. Unfortunately, it’s an issue.

While these levels are generally well designed, they do have one problem permeating throughout each of them and that’s their relative similarity to one another. While each stage varies in terms of aesthetics, their layouts don’t tend to differ much more than being either a wide open area or a bunch of narrow corridors.

And none of these stages has any kind of mechanic unique to it. It’s mostly a bunch of platforms. Some move, some you can grind on, but aside from that the only differences are where obstacles are placed and which enemies are encountered.

Despite some levels having open areas, the missions tend to lead players down straight lines with no unique mechanics to the stages themselves. When I think back to Jak 1, there were levels like the spider cave with its use of darkness, the lava pass and its cooling balloons, Boggy Swamp and its utilization of yellow eco, each containing elements that made the locales themselves unique because of the mechanics they introduced.

In Jak 2 there is some variation in levels that use existing mechanics in different ways, but rarely do those come from the environments themselves. I’m not able to distinguish most of the locations in this game from one another simply because they mostly feel the same while playing.

Just run, drive, or skate through corridors and shoot things, which would be fine if this game were designed like the third person shooter it desperately wants to be, but given the platforming-focused control scheme, these levels can wind up feeling empty, bland, and uninspired.

And it all comes down to a quantity over quality mindset. When you have so many unique game modes all crammed together the levels need to be designed to make any of those game modes playable. And when everything needs to be accounted for, nothing really gets done well.

You can’t have a ton of obstacles in case players want to skate around. You can’t have too many hidden nooks and crannies because players looking for power cells will be frustrated. You can’t have too much verticality to enrich the platforming because then long-range enemies would rain fire from out of sight. You can’t do anything well when you’re trying to do everything well enough.

When we get down to it, the level design in Jak 2 isn’t bad. In fact, for the most part each stage outside of the city succeeds at what it attempts to accomplish, but as the game proceeds these locales begin to blend together. Nothing stands out and there’s nothing truly memorable. An issue only made more glaring when playing through the missions themselves.

Mission Design

Before we begin to discuss them in depth however, I’d like to ask any of you who have played Jak 2 before to try something out for me. Just think about a mission in Jak 2. It can be any mission, but try to keep it in mind for now and I’ll explain why in a sec.

Now, when the missions are looked at as a whole, they seem pretty solid. A good amount of variety much like Jak 1. And yeah, over the course of the game, players will be shooting, skateboarding, driving, and playing minigames in a ton of different scenarios offering some decent variety. 

However, did you notice anything missing from that list? Because if you take another look at the mission breakdown you’ll see that platforming has become an incredibly minimal part of the game and exploration has been removed completely. And I get it, it’s a different genre, so adjusting the focus of the game’s missions makes sense, but the issue is that while the mission structure changed the gameplay didn’t. 

Remember earlier when I said that the game has the mechanics of a third person shooter and the controls of a platformer? Well when the platforming is all but taken out of the game, the shooting has to hold its own and while it has its moments, Jak 2’s combat is mediocre at best.

Let’s start with the enjoyable missions. Mar’s Tomb offers a diverse set of platforming, shooting, and puzzles that makes for one of my favorite parts of the game. It just has a ton of variety in a short period of time and feels really focused and thought out.

Similarly, the missions to find and escort Sig through the underground make for a good time with a few more puzzle platforming sections and a throwback to Crash Bandicoot featuring Daxter running from the giant metal head millipede to keep things interesting from start to finish.

There are also the races at the arena, which may surprise some people. I’ve heard a lot of comments dismissing these as unfairly difficult or cheap and while I’m not a fan of the rubberbanding that’s clearly going on, I think the use of shortcuts combined with the wide open lanes really make the driving feel fast and responsive, especially when compared to navigating through the cramped city streets.

If I had to guess why these particular quests work so well I’d say it’s probably because they tend to take place in their own closed-off sections of the game with little room for deviating from the path. There’s no pressure on the devs to connect these quests to the open world, allowing them to design missions that are 100% focused on the gameplay.

However, that’s about where my praise ends. For the most part, the other missions are just passable. Minigames like the Onin game are popular to hate on, but I didn’t find it too annoying, just kind of odd. The power suit missions are slow, but I’ve already mentioned those and since there are only 3 in the game it’s not the biggest problem in the world. These are irritating, but nothing too bad yet.

Nope, the troubles come in when discussing the worst of the worst. You know the ones- escorts, poorly implemented design choices, and buggy or otherwise infuriating missions with unfair difficulty spikes and hardly any checkpoints? Yeah, let’s discuss a few of those.

First would be the escort missions in which Jak is tasked with protecting an NPC with limited health. These include protecting Samos in the forest, leading young Jak though the city, and holding off the metalheads while the sages lift a massive object onto Brutter’s airship.

While the enemy types and locations may differ here, they all boil down to the same thing. Jump, spin, and shoot until you finally make it through the waves of enemies headed your way. These hordes are relentless and even with a winning attack strategy fending them off still feels like a crapshoot.

The fight in the forest is particularly irritating because the flying guards are incredibly difficult to properly aim at without a way to aim upwards. Plus if you die at any point, you have to restart each of these missions from the very beginning, using only the ammo provided in the area, which is especially frustrating with the metalhead fight as they don’t drop any additional ammo.

Then there’s the escort mission through the sewer. Jak’s tasked with bringing these three annoying explosives experts through the city’s underbelly to excavate the heart of Mar, but gets attacked by metal heads along the way.

Not only does this massive mission need to be successfully completed in a single attempt, but the enemy placements along with the demolition guys shooting you for each stray bullet makes this particular quest a long, boring, and frustrating slog.

Another mission people tend to bring up is the race against Erol through the city. Although with this I’d lump in every single side mission involving driving through rings. I mentioned the issues with random NPCs and corridors before, but on top of that these missions also have buggy hit detection on the rings and in Erol’s case they have an AI capable of bumping you out of the way.

They’re long, unfair, and sometimes literally impossible to complete given the circumstances. And while I managed to beat this mission on my second try this time around out of sheer luck, I still remember the absolute anguish this race caused me and my friend as kids to the point where we gave up on the game entirely!

Do you have any idea how anger inducing a game had to be to convince me that going outside is a better alternative when I was a kid? And it doesn’t even end there! The worst mission in the game doesn’t involve escorting anyone or driving through rings. Nope, this is just a simple little walk along the pier.

Imagine this- you go to the water slums at the end of the map, grab the item you came for and expect to walk away with maybe a few enemies popping up. Instead, all of the vehicles and citizens are removed from the area, infinitely respawning enemies begin to swarm the place, and there’s a new robot in the water that instantly kills you if you so much as think about getting wet.

Let’s unpack this. It’s a mission that in essence only takes about 3 minutes to complete, but if you die you’re sent back to the beginning. You can’t just sit and wait for the guards because they never stop coming and you’ll eventually run out of ammo. Even if you manage to get past a few ships, stopping isn’t an option because you’ll get sandwiched in from the back.

Running through the guards could potentially work, but if one of them gets in the way, their ships have deadly lasers that are incredibly difficult to dodge. You can’t simply avoid them because jumping in the water and flying away have been removed as options. And since that makes no sense in-universe it just feels like a cheap way to artificially increase the difficulty.

Eventually I made it through by punching everyone, but even then I only barely managed to escape. It’s missions like this that really shine a light on Jak 2’s greatest flaws- a lack of playtesting and artificial difficulty spikes.

It’s clear from many of the game’s various mechanics and frustrating quests that the team either didn’t bother to ensure their own missions were fun or didn’t have time to fix them. And while I get that more mature games tend to be more difficult, the difficulty here doesn’t come from clever challenges or tricky situations, but from the missions having a lack of checkpoints, overpowered circumstances, or simply taking away options the player usually expects to have.

Remember earlier when I asked you to think of a mission in this game? Do you remember which one you thought of? Because when I asked the same question to my friends who had played through the series before, they all mentioned a level that they remember being frustrating or infuriating and only one of them could follow that up by mentioning a mission he actually enjoyed.

If the things that stick in your head after finishing a game tend to be the most negative experiences it offered, I’d say that’s definitely a red flag. It may have gotten a pass if some of the more difficult or miscellaneous missions had been optional side objectives since things like the Onin game and whack-a-mole could have easily been changed to grant a precursor orb reward instead.

Seeing as how there are only two types of side missions in the game between driving through rings or finding a hidden egg, it would have given the side missions more variety, filled the barren city map with more to do, and prevented the game from becoming too frustrating. Hell, even the overly long campaign would have been granted better pacing.

And honestly, most of the missions aren’t bad, but most of them aren’t memorable either. With only the most frustrating ones standing out because you have to play them over and over again. And given the kind of excellent experiences we’ve seen from this developer before and since I’d say this game feels under-tested.

With Jak 2, Naughty Dog clearly had high hopes for a game that could encompass everything that was popular in the industry at the time, but they clearly didn’t have enough time for proper development and testing to ensure everything worked as a whole and in the end a lot of the experience winds up being mediocre.

Bosses

And that mediocrity continues when it comes to the boss fights… Sort of... While the mechanics are usually pretty shallow, the big bads in this game do tend to have much more thought and originality put into their general concepts.

Much like the game’s better missions these fights take place in their own little arenas designed specifically for the battle at hand, allowing the developers to craft experiences that are completely focused on making the combat fun and for the first couple of bosses they really use this to their advantage.

First up is the fight against the Baron on top of his palace. This is a simple three phase fight with each new section introducing a new attack. In the first phase, Jak must shoot the baron’s robot while dodging lasers being fired in a straight line. When the baron is out of ammo, he’ll retreat to an electric grid to recharge.

After damaging the baron sufficiently, he’ll move on to the next area across a couple of platforms. Each of the next two phases is identical to the first, just with different arena layouts and a new weapon. In the second he fires missiles and in the third it’s lazer tornadoes. In the final phase he can also charge at Jak for a physical attack. Finishing up his last bit of health ends the fight and sends the baron scurrying away.

Like I said, this fight isn’t bad. It’s just a bit too easy. Dodging all of the projectiles isn’t all that challenging and the baron only takes a few hits to go down. In fact, it’s clear the developers knew this because they decided to arbitrarily lengthen the fight by only allowing the player one hit per attack phase and one per recharge phase, with the baron being otherwise invincible.

However, the robot is cool, the different weapons are neat (especially the tornadoes, never seen that one before!), and despite its ease, it doesn’t last very long so it’s a decent way to wrap up act one. I do think they could have added one more phase in which he uses multiple laser attacks at the same time, but for a first boss he’s passable.

Fight number two is also against one of the baron’s robots. This time attempting to extract the precursor stone. While the giant spider bot begins drilling, Jak has to deal with smaller bots sent his way. Upon their destruction, the baron shoots out bombs that can be sent back with a spin attack to deal some damage. 

These two attacks repeat until he’s taken enough damage to start phase 2. Here, the baron will start by firing a laser requiring Jak to run behind some destructible stone pillars. The spider and bomb attacks then repeat, this time with the baron combining the laser and spider bot attacks.

With phase three, the robot frees the precursor stone, granting it the power to destroy the fighting area, making his lasers harder to dodge. Now the baron will simply go back and forth between bombs, platform destruction, and lasers. Deal a bit more damage and the fight is won.

And this fight has some great elements to it as well. There’s a lot of variety in the phases, a dynamic element with the precursor stone, and the need to use melee, which is something rarely seen in this game. 

There are also some clever bits of design like the bombs spewing smoke in the direction they’ll fly when hit and the sparks coming off of them indicating an impending explosion. It’s nothing too difficult, but the destructible pillars definitely add to the tension as they put a time limit on the fight without resorting to plastering an arbitrary timer on the screen.

However, there are some issues. The spider bot phases are pretty boring even with the twist in phase two, and the bomb targeting in phase three is kinda tricky to nail down, plus the fight as a whole is incredibly easy.

    However, the fight as a whole is well designed and pretty fun. Nothing mind-blowing or monumental, especially when taking into consideration that this is the last time you’ll get to fight Praxis, but it’s an enjoyable battle that ends with a low note of the baron escaping with the stone, driving home the loss Jak and Daxter feel in that moment.

    Fight number three is against Krew and this one… eh. It begins with him giving Jak the new peacemaker gun mod to use, which… alright I guess? Kind of a weird tactic, but I’ll take it. This fight is the first in the game I truly dislike. It’s long, tedious, and really emphasizes the problems with the game’s combat system.

    It consists of three phases and two attack patterns. First, Krew sends out an army of holograms that deal damage on impact. When they’re destroyed, the big man himself descends to fire a few lasers and becomes vulnerable. Rinse and repeat three times and the fight is over.

    That’s it. Each phase is pretty much identical outside of how many mini-Krews are sent out and how quickly they’re able to move. Aside from that just blast them with the scatter gun and then take out Krew with the peacemaker. Simple. And it should be easy too, but there are a few really irritating problems that can make this fight a nightmare.

    For one, the camera in this circular arena isn’t great. You can’t see behind Jak, making it easy for enemies to sneak up on you, and it constantly gets stuck on the central tower’s support beams. On top of that, the electric minions are a major issue.

There’s no way to tell how many more hits they have left before going down. A simple color change would have sufficed, but instead each shot just feels like a crapshoot. Then there’s the electricity, which is able to freeze Jak in place while he takes damage, and when combined with the lack of invincibility frames discussed earlier, it can cause a domino effect that takes away half or more of your health in a single series of attacks that render you helpless.

Finally, their spawn points are completely random and don’t take Jak into consideration whatsoever. You could be standing still taking shots at the mob, but if you happen to get unlucky, one of these little bastards can still spawn right where you’re standing, which gets really frustrating.

Still, the worst thing about this fight is just how boring it is. Just run in a circle to dodge the holograms, turn and shoot every once in a while, and take out the big guy with the peacemaker. Nothing complicated or creative, with the infinitely regenerating ammo boxes being necessary to ensure players don’t run out in this overly long, tedious fight.

Not too long after, it’s time to fight the final boss, metal Kor. he’ll start by releasing some metal head spiders while firing a laser from his forehead. With enough damage, the second phase begins, which is identical to the first but with the addition of some flying metalheads taking pot shots from the air.

In his final phase, Kor takes to the ground alone and begins chasing our heroes around the central pit, stopping every once in a while to fire a few laser beams or shoot out a laser ring that requires a well-timed jump to dodge. A bit of ring around the rosey later and the game is finished!

And this fight, ohhhh I reallllly wanted it to be good! It’s got everything- a solid challenge, different attacks, waves of enemies, Kor jumping at the portal like a fly to a bug zapper… It should be the best fight in the game, but it’s not. Instead, the final battle serves to showcase many of the game’s most significant faults all at once and ends up being a disappointment.

Honestly, phase one starts out pretty strong, although with the lasers dealing a ton of damage, Dark Jak’s dark bomb being glitchy on the sloped surface, and the lack of invincibility frames deaths can sometimes feel unfair.

The second phase has the same problems, but adds in the frustration of needing to hit a flying target without being able to properly aim upwards. The final phase is actually my favorite since it’s just between Jak and Kor at that point, but it still takes an absurd amount of damage to take this thing down, making the fight feel really drawn out at the end once you learn its two attack patterns.

Plus running around in circles feels pretty silly most of the time, like I’m playing with a dog. Hehehe you can’t catch me! Nope, can’t catch me! Maybe I’ll go this way… or maybe this way? Who knows? Can’t catch me!

Worst of all is how death affects this fight. Just like the rest of the game, a death here means the loss of all ammo used before dying as well as Dark Jak being taken away if activated. The final fight in the game, and you can;t even unleash your whole arsenal against it without risking a future disadvantage if you die.

Plus the lack of checkpoints means a death results in having to redo the entire battle, all three phases. And as I said before, this guy can tank a lot of hits, meaning that death can easily set you back 10 to 15 minutes if you’re not careful.

Not to mention most of the ammo crates only dish out scatter and blaster ammo which means the prominent strategy to defeat this boss is to, you guessed it, jump, spin, and fire the blaster- letting the auto aim take care of the spiders, the flying metalheads, and even land a hit or two on the big bug himself.

It’s just sad that the same tactic being used for the majority of the game works so well here and even feels encouraged given the circumstances. It’s even worse upon a death since this kind of combat isn’t engaging in the slightest as it lacks any kind of depth or strategy. All combining to make for a finale that falls flat on its face despite having some solid ideas.

Really when we get down to it, the bosses in Jak 2 are just like the rest of the game- a mixed bag. Some poor design choices bringing down excellent gameplay, some poor gameplay mechanics bringing down creative and intelligently designed fights. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

World Design

Unfortunately it’s now time to go over the one part of the game that doesn’t have much of a positive side. In fact, the final element we need to discuss is quite possibly the root of all my negativity towards Jak 2. 

See, while there have been good and bad design decisions made so far, the game is, for the most part, at least competent in most of these categories if not enjoyable. But the world design? That’s a different story.

Oddly enough the problems here are very simple in nature, mostly boiling down to a failed understanding of the open-world sandbox genre. These include long travel times, linear mission design, and an empty game world.

Let’s start with the travel times. Remember that pie chart from earlier showing how varied the mission structure in this game is? Well this is what it looks like when you factor in driving to and from each mission. 

Now look, I get it. Travel times are expected in most open world games, but Jak 2 takes it to the next level. I’ve already touched on how awful it is to drive through the cramped and overcrowded city, but in addition to that we have missions placed all over this giant map and a complete lack of any fast travel system!

Even the first game offered teleportation between the sage huts, but here? Nothing. This takes what could have easily been a 6 to 8 hour game and stretches it to about 10 or 12, making nearly half of the game feel like pointless filler.

It might not have been so bad if the game simply teleported you back to the starting point at the end of each task, but instead you have to drive all the way back the same way you came. And I can already hear people shouting, “But what about the mission choice? What if the player wants to go on a different mission from time to time?” Well, Let’s talk about that.

The mission order isn’t as open-ended as it appears. Take a look at this flowchart showing the different paths players can choose to take when tackling missions. It looks pretty fancy and seems like it offers a good amount of choice, but when put into action, this becomes more of a gimmick than a game mechanic.

While there is a certain degree of choice to the order players attempt these quests, the problem is threefold- first, the driving is so monotonous and boring that most players are likely to attempt the closest mission rather than the one that seems like the most fun.

Second, every mission still needs to be completed in order to finish the game, so there’s not much reason to choose one mission over another since they all need to be taken care of at some point or another.

Third, and most importantly, the player has no way of knowing what each mission will entail. The only things players know before starting a mission is which character is instigating it. However, the same character could give a racing mission, an escort quest, or a minigame. There’s simply nothing indicating what you’ll be doing next, so there’s no real point in choosing one mission over another.

Finally, the most egregious error made by the development team is just how empty Haven City is as a sandbox. There’s nothing to do! Okay, that’s not completely true, but the activities that do exist are either boring or repetitive.

There are side missions, but they all boil down to one of two types. I like searching for eggs and trying to reach them in time, but the ring races are either impossibly difficult or stupid easy. Even the way they’re handed out is boring with a complete lack of character interaction besides Torn yelling at you over the communicator. 

So what else do players do in an open world? Well they could mess with the Krimzon guard, but without a star system like in Grand Theft Auto you don’t really have an idea on how much havoc you’ve wreaked and the arsenal is too small to justify experimentation.

You could drive around or mess with pedestrians, but you’ll get plenty of that just going from mission to mission. The skate park and gun course are cool, but quickly lose their appeal once the mediocre controls and design choices sink in.

Lastly, there’s orb hunting. In Haven City, the eggs are completely relegated to side missions while in the outer areas they’re sitting around the environment. The problem is there’s no way to track how many eggs have been collected or how many remain in each area. Some can even be locked out if you make too much progress in the story before finding them.

It all combines to create a city that’s made to look lively, but contains so little to do that it’s not worth exploring, leaving the player to treat city traversal as an extra long loading screen between straight paths to missions.

Overall, the game world isn’t designed like Grand Theft Auto or Jak 1. It tries to find some sort of balance between the two and ends up falling flat on its face. It’s a real shame because I could see what the developers were going for, but as with the rest of the game it just feels like they were trying to do too much all at once.

Conclusion

    Jak 2 isn’t awful. It’s not even bad. It’s just… alright. And definitely dated. It fails to understand what makes the games that inspired it so great. It doesn’t have the exploration or freedom of Jak 1, the creative features or sandbox appeal of Grand Theft Auto, or the tight platforming shooter combat of Ratchet and Clank.

    In the end, it just feels like an unfinished mess of a game. A necessary step to reinvent Naughty Dog as the masters of narrative-driven experiences we know them as today, but a rocky one.

    Honestly, I can’t really explain the positive reviews that were handed out at release. Maybe it was the massive scope and impressive graphics leap from the first game or the ability to make each of the game’s mechanics at least function well enough to finish the game, or maybe I’m just missing something due to my own biases and lack of hindsight.

    Whatever the cause was, I know that there are a lot of Jak 2 fans out there, with many considering it the best game in the series. So whether you agree or disagree, I’d like to hear your thoughts on Jak 2 in the comments down below.

    Next time I’ll be wrapping this series up with a video on Jak 3, probably the least talked about game in the series. Until then, be sure to subscribe to see when it gets uploaded, check out my other retrospectives if you have the time, and as always, have a mighty nifty day today!