Ratchet & Clank Future Retrospective & Development Deep Dive

one of the first features developed for ratchet and clank future tools of destruction was the groovatron a bomb that was part boombox and part laser light show throw the bomb force your foe into spontaneous dance and then kill him to a disco soundtrack it was hilarious to watch and just as fun to play but the music almost died when insomniac realized that it would have to give every character enemy and creature a set of unique dance moves the grubatron would require hundreds of animation cycles special case programming and extra work across the entire project in many ways this reflected the challenge of bringing our heroes onto new hardware the complexity sophistication and power of working on a new platform meant that insomniac would need to perform at an equally complex and sophisticated level we had our work cut out for us but we felt we had an opportunity to create the ratchet and clank game we'd always imagined john fiorito ceo insomniac games the fresh hardware of the playstation 3 represented a chance for insomniac games to finally materialize old shelved ideas like the groovatron a weapon initially conceptualized as far back as ratchet and clank 2. it represented a new beginning the softest of reboots and the birth of a new saga of games that would attempt to grow up with its audience it represented ratchet and clank's chance at becoming the playstation's mario transcending the barrier between console generations that had already killed off a number of mascots before however it also represents a fulcrum a turning point that very few players recognize because the trajectory of the future saga and truly of every ratchet and clank game that's come since can be pinpointed back to a single eager promise that insomniac made to sony here to promote this new hardware to promote the playstation 3 for this game for tools of destruction since 2007 ratchet and clank i would argue has been answering for one broken promise this is what was at the time far and away insomniac's most ambitious game to date this is where ratchet and clank depending on who you ask either soared to new heights or where it may have started to fly off the rails this is the dangerous ambition of ratchet and clank future tools of destruction [Music] [Applause] [Music] for the longest time ratchet and clank's first outing on the playstation 3 had the longest development cycle of any ratchet game period longer than ratchet one longer than two about as long as three and deadlocked combined in fact only two ratchet games have had a longer pipeline than tools of destruction's 23 plus months one of those is all for one which is a completely different style of game that required a ground-up rework of everything that ratchet and clank was at the time so that's a bit of a unique story and the other is the playstation 5's rift apart which like tools of destruction is the first ratchet game on its respective system considered the first big system seller of a new console generation and as you can imagine that requires a lot of ground up work too but while insomniac fun fact may very well have had the first games ever in production for both of these consoles like before either console specs were even finalized neither of those first two games they worked on were ratchet games in the latter's case we saw sony showcasing spider-man on ps5 hardware before sony would even call it the playstation 5 and here on the ps3 ratchet followed in the footsteps of resistance fall of man one of the only highlights of the ps3's awful 2006 launch although today resistance certainly doesn't look like much at the time it represented the culmination of insomniac's decade of work prior that's because it was proof that the studio could work simultaneously on multiple games with multiple distinct teams rolling on and off of projects seamlessly without too many hiccups and without too much down time i've seen developers refer to such a feat being a one office multi-project studio as one of the most difficult leaps that any game studio can take and this took insomniac a long time to truly get right by the end of 2003 around the time that ratchet and clank 2 had released and while 3 was just beginning production some of the studio's more tenured members had already started developing tech separately for a first-person shooter for what they thought the ps3's hardware might look like remember that this was three years before the system released the idea to return to the fps genre after their first ever game disruptor video here by the way was something that insomniac set in motion as early as when ratchet 1 had released and they started resistance's pre-production process so early so that by the time up your arsenal was finished most of its team could roll seamlessly onto the new project all the while a smaller second team would stay behind on the ps2 hardware to develop a fourth ratchet game and once deadlocked was released in 2005 much of its staff also floated over to resistance to push it across the finish line leaving about a dozen insomniacs to begin rebuilding everything that was ratchet and clank from scratch the jump to the ps3 meant that as the company's chief operating officer john fiorido wrote we were lacking hardware and engine game code and even assets we were truly at ground zero so looking back to square one with tools of destruction insomniac began retracing its steps from the first go-around before pre-production had even properly begun the team built a new in-engine diorama using resistance's engine showcasing the city of metropolis one of the very first vistas conceptualized for ratchet and clank 1 the vista that led to that first game even being greenlit by sony to say this little test overachieved might be an understatement as the teaser received an overwhelmingly positive response when shown at 2006's game developers conference it began everybody's favorite trend of comparing ratchet and clank to pixar films and it set the expectation within sony that insomniac had to quote drop jaws every time they showed the game off after this from here the skeleton crew of just 15 people that were working on tools of destruction began building out the pardon the pun tools needed to facilitate an easier production pipeline for the staff once resistance was finished they spent months and months creating new visual assets models trying to get things like movement speed and animations just right so that it all felt like the ps2 games and figuring out what ratchet would even look like on ps3 after dozens of different attempts they eventually settled for weird fuzzy neckbeard ratchet there was even brief talk of using the ps3's hardware for things like procedurally generated platforming challenges freeform space exploration all of these new ideas to utilize the stronger hardware which they quickly realized wouldn't be possible if the game was going to come out in 2007 as planned instead they focused their ambitions away from new mechanics even stripping back features that would be hard to recreate from the old ps2 days like the spherical moons or races and they shifted gears towards a leaner more polished core gameplay experience with a more fleshed out narrative to follow shifting industry trends it was during this time that creative director brian allgeier began shaping a larger multi-game story ever so briefly alongside writer adam moore who was replaced not long after that by tj fixman fixman would go on to write the rest of the ps3 games the first draft of the ratchet and clank film the comics he was tasked with unifying the universe and the lore wherever possible to make it easier for future ratchet teams to tell new stories and so on and while they were hashing out what kind of plot the tentatively named ratchet and clank future would be the team outlined the game's broad scope which would aim to be far and away the largest in the series featuring 25 unique planets five star fox esque space combat levels an hour of cinematics and there were promises of co-op gameplay and some sort of online multiplayer made to sony sony was allegedly especially interested in those last two as the company was looking for more ways to flaunt the playstation network in an attempt to catch up to the xbox's stronger online offerings most of this didn't happen with the exception of that procedural generation stuff which was shelved really early on and later tested for 2009's a crack in time before again being shelved the rest of these ideas were the plans at the end of pre-production 11 months after first beginning proper work and about 12 to 13 months after putting together that initial teaser but by the time that resistance had shipped with another 70 full-time insomniacs about to roll over to bring tools of destruction into full production the pre-production staff had put together one planet out of 25 kind of it didn't really work it crashed all the time and only part of the level was really actually finished so after a year they had an idea of what they were in for and that ambitious outline was simply not going to happen within scope 15 minutes of cinematic cutscenes nine planets and two of those star fox space levels had to be scrapped before any work had ever begun on them which in turn would feasibly require rewrites since that's a quarter of the game's cinematics and a lot more of its levels just gone and as for those co-op and multiplayer components even though they were according to one of the programmers that i spoke to either never discussed with the programming team at all or were shot down immediately by that programming team because they would have pushed the game well out of scope somebody promised sony that there would be a sick co-op mode and an awesome multiplayer mode that they could promote and slap on the back of the box that didn't happen sony's representatives may or may not have been very annoyed and somebody then promised to make it up to sony for the promise that they made before we'll get to that the reason i mention all of this is that it's all crucial to understanding what tools of destruction became what it sought out to become and why every ratchet game since exists either as a reaction to or as a consequence of this one this wasn't just one game this was the bellwether for a series that would continue to chug along even though it started to fall out of vogue as industry trends shifted a series that would experiment out of a necessity to stay relevant as was the mantra with the series up until this point it's adapt or die and insomniac needed to keep changing so that ratchet didn't go the way of the rest of the lombax's as so many of you already know those long boxes are the focal point of tools of destruction story as i mentioned in the ratchet deadlock retrospective the team considered making antagonist ace hard light a lombax in that game to bring a more personal stake to the story to heighten the drama during his interactions with ratchet but even that early on it was decided that the lombaxes should be a special plot point one that could be better utilized as its own dedicated story rather than a throwaway story beat here in tools of destruction that's exactly the story that we're getting except you know that 14 years later we still haven't exactly seen that story finished or or really started i'm not bitter i swear ratchet and clank future opens with an excellent primer for articular duo introducing newcomers and reminding returning players of their characters and their relationship as well as a reminder of our other major returning cast member the ever cowardly captain quark richard clank i've got a bit of a situation here at the planetary defense center as ratchet and clank are putting together a new hoverbike they receive a distress call from quark across the city metropolis is under assault by an army of heavily armed robotic commandos when aren't they heavily armed after a fast-paced cutscene featuring the duo weaving through traffic at breakneck speeds well it wouldn't be a ratchet game without the duo crashing a vehicle now would it [Music] it's that cutscene the gorgeous opening view when we start playing and really the tech showcase that is this metropolis prologue that hammered home that yes insomniac would definitely be able to keep dropping jaws like sony expected after that first teaser i mean we've got whole buildings crumbling into rubble and collapsing behind you as the backdrop to these cinematic grind rail sections we've got ratchet bouncing all across the city as this mysterious invasion is in full swing we've got our usual flippy jumping and shooting all in a crisp 60 frames per second that never chugs it's no hyperbole to say that tools immediately proves itself as the first game that shows what the ps3's hardware could really do it's an incredible feat given that tools of destruction was made on half to two-thirds of the budget of other contemporary aaa games and it's no coincidence that rift apart takes some clear cues from this game when it comes to starting your game with a high octane city invasion to start us off once the duo fights their way to the planetary defense center they end up surrounded by the army and first encounter tools of destruction's main villain emperor percival tachyon tachyon is the last of the cragmites a violent species that ward with the lombaxes for generations and generations far away in the distant polaris galaxy and according to tachyon ratchet is the last of the lombaxes hello aren't you forgetting someone oops as the emperor dispensed of the species in an act of revenge for his own species being wiped out immediately after such a great opening level we've got a really interesting parallel that we can see taking shape the final two descendants of their species two races that fought an endless war an air of mystery as we might finally start getting answers to questions that fans had had about just who ratchet actually was but in what might be my least favorite trend throughout the future saga these games can't decide whether they want to lean into the deeper narrative or break the tension with a joke at the expense of our villain when in doubt the future saga's writing takes away any heat from our villain without fail in this case it starts with a cute little callback that clanks intimidating kung fu skills from ratchet 1 onward but immediately jumps to i i just this goober single-handedly expelled the lombaxes and all it took was a thunk of ratchet's wrench to get past him and hijack his ship are you kidding me way to neuter your intimidating main villain immediately our grand theft heroes take a lengthy nap thanks to the ship's cryo sleep slash punch-out mode as the ship autopilots to the polaris galaxy clank even has a concussed clairvoyant dream where he's flying through a mysterious city with some weird little aliens although he's awoken when the duo crash lands on the swampy planet kobalia with no ship and no idea where they are even though i just called it kobalia they don't know that yet [ __ ] you before we go any further let me just get this out of the way no we're not going to talk in detail about angela cross yes her being a lombax threw a big dumb hilarious wrench in the hole where did the long boxes go story it would have been infinitely easier to just say that this evil emperor attackion hunted her down before tools of destruction began or even a single line of dialogue where ratchet and clank wonder if angela was far enough away that tachyon didn't know about her or hell just say that she's not a lombax problem solved why didn't they do that it's still a vociferously debated subject to this day to the point that in the ratchet and clank art book all insomniac really had to say about angela was we're really really sorry to our fans about this one seriously we mean it look i'm gonna be real with you it's that's fine it's good enough for me like half of the people that even worked on the future games had no hand in ratchet two those that did have a hand and two story had to deal with angela being rewritten several times because her characterization took forever to get remotely decent i i don't blame them for just either forgetting in a crunch-induced haze we'll get there too or ignoring her it's not all that serious to me now their explanation as to her whereabouts later in the future saga different story different day one of the things that i love most about tools of destruction is that it doesn't only try to return to the platforming combat balance of the first two ratchet games which up your arsenal and deadlocked had started to inch away from in the name of more gunplay it also returns to those earlier games balanced between futuristic sci-fi locales and the natural wild unknown cabalia is a great blend of this starting with a short trek through an undeveloped swamp as ratchet and clank fight some of the local fauna like a centipede whose acid vomit you can see flowing up through their gut before they spit on you alright that's kind of uncomfortable to watch i don't i don't very much like that but at least there's no way they can make anything more disgusting than that is that munch from odd world you know what no never mind they made it worse can i get a taxi back to the solana galaxy please tools of destruction's attempt to translate one to one the ratchet and clank style from ps2 to ps3 is probably its clearest here as the green underdeveloped first level is a series trademark especially if it's a swamp or jungle you could see the pieces in just these opening steps where the team looked back at ratchet 2's uzula or especially florana from the third game then once you've gotten a taste of one of the flying leviathan mini boss enemies the level opens up to showcase that vision that insomniac wanted to push with those earlier games but simply couldn't do to memory limitations the second half of gabalia features a bustling spaceport full of movement with little robots floating across the walkways on their own little roots a few optional paths for ratchet to take our first taste of the game's three count em three different vendors that are equal parts machine and living creature shouting at you to buy something and our first of many interactions with the smuggler and his rowdy little parrot who are fun fact both voiced by the same person there's so much passive background motion in this little hub that it's kind of a shame that we're only here for a few minutes and only have a couple things to do when ratchet and clank talk to the smuggler he offers the trade a few minutes of their time for a ride off planet oh come now sell i'll admit that these two characters might actually peak right here in the first cutscene they appear in although they end up being featured in just about all of the ps3 games after this they don't really ever have much interesting to say or do the smuggler is just kind of there on some planets saying yeah what i'm doing is illegal what about it and giving you some flavor dialogue about some lore where they couldn't find better spots to toss in exposition more often than not he would serve as a stand-in for the plumber offering to pay you in bolts for bringing him crystals or the game's equivalent to crystals in this game those are leviathan souls in one of the later games it's just straight up the ivory from a monster's horn they don't even try and hide it occasionally the smuggler will also act as the capitalism paywall which also returns from ratchet and clank 1 and 2 selling you an item that he illegally obtained which you conveniently need at exactly that moment to progress in the level for as often as he's featured i don't know overall he's not really a super interesting supporting cast member as much as they really try to make him a thing which is something you'll be hearing a lot today anyway in exchange for giving ratchet to clank a ride off the planet the smuggler gives the duo a gelinator gadget and asks them to reactivate the port's gelatonium plant the gelinator is a personal favorite gimmick of mine one that i'm always a little disappointed never got to return this gadget is sort of like ratchet 1's hydro displacer sucking up gelatonium from the mark dispensaries but once you have gelatonium you can shoot out little bouncy gel pads anywhere in the level at least until you have to deposit the gel when you jump on the gel you'll get an extra high vertical bounce that you can use to leap over large gaps find hidden secret areas hell in some areas the game never actually makes you deposit the gel at all in order to progress meaning that you can just mess around and find ways to break the game or get out of bounds pretty much every time the game makes me use the gelinator i'll go out of my way to see if i can bypass the game's intended path why use a gravity boot walkway when it's faster to just bounce right over it it's such a fun simple little gimmick that brings me endless joy before we leave cabalia with a smuggler though let's take a look at those vendors here in polaris rather than returning the gadgetron or megacorp there's a new weapons monopoly in town and that's grumblemen this company's defining feature is that it's run by the last grummel in existence the final of his species just like ratchet and tachyon now that i think about it whatever the dude just cloned himself thousands of times to make them run the different vendor shops with the clones getting dumber with each new generation it's not really important i just kind of really like that detail tools of destruction naturally brings back the distinct weapons and armor vendors from the previous games and it also introduces a third vendor and a new sub type of weapon the device throughout the game you'll unlock the ability to buy up to 8 different devices a set of secondary weapons that can't earn experience or level up but do provide a more passive or less traditionally useful effect these include a morph bomb that'll turn enemies into penguins a helicopter drone two different leech bombs that let you sap health away from enemies a bomb that'll set enemies to attack one another a a death slinky and of course the two standouts that you all know and maybe still love the gruvatron and mr zircon the latter is a floating companion robot in the vein of ratchet 2's synthenoids who will follow you around and shoot at enemies zircon of course goes above and beyond by trash talking the entire time with awful deadpan jokes puns and insults in his monotone robot voice look i'll say it i love zircon he's so ridiculous and even if he ended up being a bit overexposed because he's appeared in almost every game since generally they've made it work by either adding in new lines or twists to his gimmick and although i already detailed that the gruvatron was one of the game's first suggested gadgets what i haven't mentioned was that that suggestion came because of a damn good reason when the idea for a dancing weapon was tossed out as far back as the second ratchet and clank game it would have been an overwhelming task for the animation team to add one or multiple unique dance animations for each and every type of enemy in the game however the animators were now coming off of the heels of resistance a game where they had to animate dozens of different poses to account for any and every possible turning motion that the enemies could have i'm talking a 45 degree turn to the left a 30 degree turn right a 270 degree turn clockwise okay now one counterclockwise okay now one where the enemy steps backward and turns 180 it's the kind of mind-numbing work that needs to be done but that not many people are thrilled doing for eight hours a day for months on end so when somebody brought back the idea of giving a bunch of stupid dancing animations that apparently was a vacation compared to the resistance grunt work and you can tell that the animators had fun because the animations are so fun both the krugatron and zircon were upgraded from devices to full weapons and have returned in almost every game since they've become the most transcendent weapons in the franchise with the groovatron at one point being used against you as a boss weapon and zircon has a whole ass family and they're recurring characters rather than just a weapon and that's perfect meanwhile none of the other devices or the pure concept of devices made it past this game they were a cool idea but it turns out that leveling up the weapons as you use them is kind of important who would have thought and having some b-list weapons that were mostly secondary effects that regular weapons used to have before like health leeching yeah not super popular hey credit for creativity i suppose and you know what i still think they should bring back the death slinky one day i would like that very much tools of destructions items in general run into an interesting territory because quite a few of them are just thrown at you as random pickups in the middle of a level now ratchet's no stranger to randomly finding a new shiny thing out in the field but usually in the past it would be at the end of an optional route like the morpho ring but here in tools they'll just be floating in the middle or the start of a bustling city like in our next level strata city the smuggler ejects the duo from his ship when the emperor's forces detect a lombax pulse on board and mere moments after landing on the ground ratchet finds the shock ravager a whip weapon just sitting right at the start of a bridge there's no fanfare at all no unique inspired little cutscene when ratchet picks it up it just kind of happens and it's really weird because even the really uninspired gold fold pickup animation in this game has the classic fanfare [Music] i i don't know it just kind of feels a little bit off like you got an item for the sake of getting it strata city aside from this weird little hiccup is a blast of a level to run through another large scale city-wide battle in the same vein as the opening featuring ratchet swinging through traffic with the swing shot among other things this is also where we get a more proper look at tachyon's army of draffids these little fish creatures armed in giant robot suits i've always had a soft spot for droplets as enemies because not only are there a good number of suit types that you'll go up against throughout the game most of them when defeated will feature that little fishbowl helmet cracking open and shooting the droplet out onto the ground where ratchet can then squish them by stepping on them no i'm not a sociopath thank you for asking strata city's got a little bit of everything too with some gelatonium platforming that allows you to just totally break the game like i mentioned earlier this may or may not be how i discovered that the missiles crashing onto the rooftops of buildings nearby yeah those are real and they will hurt you after fighting their way through the city clank sees those little alien creatures again pointing towards the hall of knowledge ratchet though doesn't see whatever it is that clank's seeing but these little guys are definitely real because they modify clank with a glider upgrade yet again you can see the game's inspiration on its sleeve because the glider is a callback to ratchet 2's glider although at least in that game this gadget didn't need motion controls ah the mid-2000s what an innocent era some of you may recall that in the early 2000s sony and microsoft were both taken to court by a company named immersion the company that owned the patent for the vibration technology used in both the playstation and xbox controllers microsoft immediately settled up and bought stake in that company but sony decided to drag the lawsuit out which led to them paying close to 100 million dollars and in a totally unrelated move they promise the early ps3 controllers replaced the gimmick of dualshock vibration with the even more gimmicky 6-axis motion controls as an early ps3 title you can be damn sure that tools of destruction had to make use of these gimmicky gyro controls thankfully they're not super invasive and you can turn them off but they're certainly here and they are here often to name just a few uses of the gyro controls we've got these glider sections the game's hacker gadget which is a combination of a gyro ball puzzle and completing an electrical circuit challenge the dancing pirate hollow guys which requires you to occasionally shake the controller to shake your booty and one of the weapons that you can buy in the game the tornado launcher which we'll talk about a little bit later after infiltrating the hall of knowledge and taking down an onslaught of tachyon's troops the duo obtains the coordinates to the lombax's original home world fastum and with more troops on the way they rush into a nearby escape pod and head right to that planet when they land though ratchet discovers that the planet has long since been abandoned the only remnant left of ratchet's species of his family is a damaged longback ship clank please i need to fix her perhaps some of this is down to preference but where tools of destruction really nails those bigger set-piece moments and bringing some awesome scope to the ratchet and clank series there are just as many points where the game almost seems to expect the player to fill in the blanks at no point prior to this game does ratchet seem to have a huge interest in finding his family and honestly even in the first hour of the game up to now that still holds true the smuggler gives us a bit of backstory on the way to strata city telling ratchet that the lombax has vaporized the entire cragmite species before tachyon wiped them out and took over the galaxy but ratchet himself doesn't actually respond to this at all it feels like a sudden jump here for ratchet to have a deeper attachment to his species to his past and it's a leap that could have been easily smoothed over with even a little bit of dialogue sprinkled in throughout the first few levels a comment of i wonder what tachyon meant when he said i was the last lombax some mid-gameplay dialogue between ratchet and clank which tool started introducing anything like that could have gone a long way towards easing ratchet into this moment here sometimes these smaller hiccups betray the big budget feel and show that yeah this game was operating on a tight timeline and a tighter budget and as the sixth large scope big budget game in six years by this studio eventually it had to catch up to insomniac the shock ravager just being given to you here at the very start of level 2 right after level 1 opened up with three purchasable weapons in the shop as well as a few devices plus the two weapons you start the game with it feels off like there was meant to be another level somewhere in here to sprinkle in the content more evenly and the thing is i know that's not the case but that's how jagged tools of destruction's edges can be instead of some big moment that emphasizes the mystery and the intrigue surrounding the lombax's disappearance a level that gives us some environmental lore or storytelling what we get is some basic ruins a strange little collectathon style level as ratchet and clank seek out six components nearby to repair the ship we don't get any sort of dialogue as they walk around where ratchet could i don't know ask clank what else he read about the planet moments ago it's like they're a few hours into a car ride and have nothing else to say the only story beats we get here on what should be one of the most consequential planets in the entire first part of the story come at the end of the mission and just before it when we get a taste of this game's clank sections the clank gameplay is fundamentally pretty close to the ps2 games gadgebots but this time featuring the zoni those weird clairvoyant creatures that clank's seen a couple times by now i mean i say there are story beats but the zony talk in vague prophetic codewords throughout the game the kind of stuff that's only really decipherable during a second playthrough and even then it just tells you what's coming up a bit later on it's never really a hint towards future games the zoning do at least have some neat powers compared to the gadgetbots allowing clank to slow down time fix bridges attack enemies or levitate so that we don't have to deal with this awful little jump like we did back on the ps2 but these sections tend to overstay their welcome even more so than the ps2 game's clank levels often did they're just too long for what's fundamentally the same thing still holding triangle and selecting the only available move for your minions to execute but it's the end of level story stuff that i think really sours me on fast tune the most looking back after finding all of the parts ratchet fixes the longback ship with a little musical flourish in the background that seems to reference the very first piece of music that we ever heard in ratchet and clank 1 back when ratchet was on his other backwater desert homeworld putting together a ship ok i think we have all the parts we need it's a touching moment that passed me and probably thousands of others by the first time around but since i'm playing these games in succession it's not a stretch to say that it's an intentional nod by composer david bergeaud in what would be his second to last soundtrack for the ratchet series but then once the ship is fixed it's just kidd the knight rider one the car from knight rider it's a sentient talking a little bit sassy spaceship to whom we then talk and ask questions in the dumb over-the-shoulder flavor conversation camera angle it's just it's almost parody how funnily this shot comes off but it very much feels like this ship named ophelian is meant to be a proper character in the game a way for ratchet to reconnect with the species that he's never known on one hand i appreciate the kit part of it a little bit more with the context that writer tj fixman is apparently a huge night rider nerd who's now writing a knight rider film that's you know what i can't knock that part too much i would probably do the same thing but i can knock that the talking spaceship gimmick is then barely acknowledged again after this game as far as i recall aphelion gets a grand total of 30 seconds of dialogue across the five subsequent games that she appears in and all of that 30 seconds of dialogue is as a generic ai rather than one that contributes any substance or character at all now of course i cannot blame this game for actions that were taken in its sequels but i can sure lament that this isn't the only time nor is aphelion the only character to whom this happens and given that so much of those later games production was dependent on the choices that were made and the things that were set up in this game i feel obligated to point them out when they pop up see tj fixman as i'll end up repeating many times throughout this retrospective and onward was kind of dealt a rough hand based on my research by his own admission he took over writing duties after the levels and the cast were already designed and in many cases implemented into the game animated what have you we've as far as i've found never gotten an indication of what the original tools of destruction writer adam moore had in mind all we know is that he left and that fixman who had been working in quality assurance for resistance was given a chance thanks to his background in writing and some promising spec scripts in other words tj fixman was given the mother of all trials by fire throwing together a story based on designs for villains and secondary characters that were already in place with a handful of months and likely several hard deadlines left to get all of the dialogue finished and ready to record all while writing a series bible to address all of the fan questions that insomniac hadn't had time to address while throwing together the first four ratchet games year after year after year after year and while setting up teasers for plot points or characters that he wanted to address himself in ratchet and clank future 2. and at some point he was also brought on to have a major hand in writing for resistance 2 which was due out the following year after tools in 2008 so between 2007 and 2009 on any given day there was a strong chance that this guy was writing for two game projects at any given point between tools of destruction resistance 2 2008 suddenly thrown together future saga mid qual quest for booty and 2009's ratchet and clank future 2. so while i can fully understand why any of these issues are present in any of the future saga games and while it sort of comes down to the same overzealous production goals that the studio has always had just this time it was hit harder due to the hardware jump hiring issues and other potential shortcomings and as a result we've had a smoother production than any we've experienced at insomniac despite all that these are all still things that i must address to give you the most complete picture of this game which heretofore not many folks have cared to do be they journalists youtubers anything you name it not many people have gone this deep into this game's production issues anyway whatever her deal is aphelion gives you some basic lore if you want it and then allows you to play a video sent to you by captain quirk who's been forced to work with tachyon as a promoter for the emperor's fight festival i'm gonna say that again what we did here all of our initial time on this planet that's suddenly meant to mean so much to ratchet boils down to an excuse to get a new spaceship so that we can jump into our next questionable distraction from the main story angle and speaking of distractions and characters that tj fixman seems to have been saddled with let me tell you a little story i promise it's related when i was in high school i took latin as my language class throughout all four years our professor's classroom was full of books written in latin once we got into latin 3 he would only speak and teach in latin most of the time it was a trip to say the least but the thing that sticks out in my mind most even a decade later from these classes wasn't learning how to fasten a toga yes we did do that at one point it wasn't learning what a gerund is or about the roman senator who ended every speech by saying that carthage must be destroyed although that one is close it was a single quote among many that he had printed on pins pins that he would give out to students to put on their backpacks or whatever that quote was from the story of apollonius a possibly fictional king of the city of tyre this quote represented to the professor the point at which the story completely went off the rails where the long since forgotten writer needed something to keep the plot going something so ridiculous that one could argue that this was the point at which it was clear the story was likely fiction that phrase when translated into english is loosely and suddenly some pirates arrived so in what i have to assume was originally an attempt to add a secondary antagonist to this game in the vein of the thugs for less leader from ratchet 2 and suddenly we've got pirates now and the game makes zero attempt to explain why we don't even get a moment where ratchet scoffs and gets ready to fight the pirates like we've seen him do in the space combat levels in ratchet and clank 2. there's no debrief after where clank says that this sector of the galaxy is clearly dangerous they could have even just mentioned the space pirates in passing during conversations with the smuggler especially since not too long after this he tells us that he sells to those very same space pirates but instead it's just suddenly pirates we just have to fight these space pirates in an on-rail space combat section unabashedly inspired by star fox this is the first of three such space levels sprinkled throughout the game and they're all pretty okay i don't i don't hate them or anything they're not bad they're just again very long kind of like the clank sections and kind of boring compared to star fox from what we know of how much time these sorts of gimmick levels took in earlier games enough work to essentially design an entirely separate game it makes sense i get it and i do appreciate that this game's space levels according to some of the ex-insomniacs i've spoken to are the finished vision originally planned for and then cut from ratchet 3. but i just i just can't get over how suddenly these pirates show up and how these levels are pretty much an excuse to feature the pirates more than they already are throughout tools of destruction now far far later in the game there are a couple blink and you'll miss some hints as to why there are space pirates that play a focal point in this game's story but i'm gonna call this one like i see it these had to have been characters that were meant to play a huge role in original writer adam moore's vision for this game a game that was originally going to be titled ratchet and clank future quest for booty i don't know this for sure as moore didn't respond to comment and fixment wasn't available for comment when i reached out to them respectively but there is no other feasible reason for these characters to exist and i am going to die on that hill clearly they became popular as for some reason they reappeared throughout the rest of the future saga to the point that of all people rusty pete the meekly drunk second mate of this battalion is one of the only characters from the franchise that returns in rift apart 14 years later undeniably they're one of the best parts of tools of destruction as a video game because the pirate levels tend to be some of the most fun the most complete and the most iconic levels in the game not really the space ones but the times we fight them on the ground one of these pirate levels ardolis was clearly considered a high watermark for the entire ratchet franchise as the main path of that level was recreated nearly one to one in rift apart but once you think about it you have to wonder why they're actually here if you miss the lyrics of one of the pirate shanties some of the random goons will sing and unless you scroll down and select some hidden dialogue later in the game when talking to an all-knowing super computer essentially google you would have no idea why they exist besides plot convenience if you do catch either of those things you'll learn that the space pirates were created by emperor tachyon himself in order to search for and bring him lombax technology that's kind of an important plot point but the closest we get to it being properly elucidated just involves them stealing a lombax artifact for themselves no mention of tachyon so we deal with these space pirates almost every other level which takes away from the time that we're dealing with tachyon and the empire that he's building we barely deal with tachyon to begin with as for much of the game he's sort of just a background presence but unlike say dr nefarious in ratchet 3 or drek in ratchet 1 he is not one step ahead of our heroes every time he's chasing the same goal at the same time as they are on top of looking like he needs his widow type be changed every time we see him in his stupid highchair he's consistently neutered despite being what probably should be the most menacing villain in the ratchet and clank series thus far this guy was smart enough savvy enough and powerful enough to wipe out the entire lombax race and we've seen what one lombax can do so imagine what it takes to take out the entire species this guy should be the biggest of big bads that we've ever encountered and yet we either barely deal with him or when we do we see him fumbling or falling over under the weight of his big [ __ ] head and then we also have to sprinkle in occasionally dealing with speaking of big heads quark or our secondary hero and ratchet's eventual love interest talwin there's just so much going on and although this is the longest ratchet and clank game of the mainline series besides all for one it feels like there's too much going on and it feels just bloated captain quirk serves nearly no purpose in tools of destruction we see him a couple times at the imperial fight festival where he clues us into some of what tachyon is searching for and to his credit he does attempt some heroics at one point in his usual foolhardy way that causes more harm than good but overall it feels like he regresses after his character arc was basically completed by the end of ratchet 3 and that has always sat wrong with me if this were a true reboot rather than a soft starting point for new players that could work but in the context of the entire series as written by a writer who even in 2007 name dropped major ps2 characters like skid mcmarks and sasha as important cast whom he wanted to use to tell new expansive stories for quirk to fall back into being a feckless buffoon rather than being at least a somewhat self-aware buffoon i don't know it doesn't work for me he's still really funny and jim ward absolutely kills it in the role as he always did but it's this game that starts quark's flanderization where he starts to be defined solely by being a bumbling idiot and that is a shame we do get the return of his amazing hand-drawn plans at least so i guess i can't be too critical sword doom prison a dangerous dungeon of dastardly denizens death and destruction a deadly den of devious desperados damaged by decades of death let's just say those criminals in order to meet quark ratchet and clank first must tackle the arena challenges which i'll say in this game are fine they're fine they're all fun but the arena design itself doesn't exactly translate well when brought from the ps2 to the ps3 it just kind of looks and feels smaller scale than the awesome gladiator games with a ravenous bloodthirsty crowd and a high-energy announcer and the lava sitting around this arena's edge is just it's just cheese it doesn't even glow or look dangerous it just looks like burnt cheese also while in the arena despite tachyon's empire having the ability to detect lombak's dna on apparently every ship coming into a planet ratchet can just wear funny mustache glasses and successfully disguise himself it's ah it's just at every single turn they make tachyon and his forces look like morons it'd be amazing if it wasn't so sad after ratchet finishes some of these challenges quark passes along intel that tachyon is looking for some mysterious lombak secret supposedly the superweapon that the lombaxes had used to disintegrate the cragmite race and he's looking for it at the apogee space station this station was once the home of max apogee an explorer who searched for the rarest most interesting antiques in the entire galaxy and despite being a key plot point throughout tools of destruction after this game he's completely tossed aside and barely ever mentioned again we never meet max at any point in any of these games but we do meet his daughter here in this game tauwin as well as the two warbots that he left behind to protect her named kronk and zephyr of these three i i like tauwin i used to like prank and zephyr a lot more they're still okay but the humor of old cranky grandpa robots hasn't exactly aged well for me on the other hand talwin's story has aged far better over time even though they've done her dirty in almost every game since her story being told in the background alongside ratchets her holding onto the hope that her dad is still alive the last family she had besides the two robots it's another compelling fold to compliment ratchet's isolation from his own family she's cold at first having essentially not seen another living creature in years ever since her dad disappeared but thanks in part to clank she warms up to ratchet well and also thanks to ratchet being the very species about whom her dad was researching at the time that he went missing ratchet is the final clue that she has left and she just so happens to have some of the clues that he needs as well they both bond implicitly because this is damn sure never outright said around the fact that all they have as family are robots that are more human but you know what i mean not exactly human than anybody else that they've dealt with they bond around becoming each other's only family left she also receives probably the third or fourth most screen time in the game besides ratchet clank and maybe slag making her a clear tenet for the rest of the future saga to come well at least in theory in practice another story another day as for cronk and zephyr i think they sort of fall into the same boat as the pirates where i feel that the development team enjoyed them more than many players did as time went on which is totally fair they need to have fun too the main purpose for these robots is to act as battlefield allies in the same vein as ratchet 3's galactic rangers with their combat dialogue and all their dialogue in general really focusing around the two bickering about the good old days remembering information wrong telling taller and taller tales about walking uphill both ways to school or about how carthage must be destroyed you want to know just how dated and poorly aged kronk and zephyr are today they were designed to bicker like this because they each represent one side of the xbox 360 ps3 console war zephyr's name is even a reference to the code name for one of the 360's models and there are also references sprinkled in about their third brother willy who liked to flail his arms around all the time i happen to be a renowned expert in lombard's history and this doom hickey is a zombie death beam emitter that'll wipe out all life in the galaxy then why are you trying to put batteries in it today ooh guys just give me two seconds to think and also like the pirates these two very much feel like a holdover from the previous writer from the previous version of tools of destruction characters that were already going to be in this game no matter what since they had assets created and insomniac really likes to hold firm to the use everything you ever make policy but the problem is if something's not good or it's not working out super well or it's not meshing it's okay to not finish it this video that you're watching right now was me jumping to a new project after the one i had planned before wasn't working out well obviously my projects are measured in hundreds of hours at most not thousands and tens of thousands across hundreds of people obviously i'm not as constrained by tight deadlines issues hiring enough staff to finish these games without crunching we've had a smoother production publisher requirements etc but that publisher is the entire reason that ratchet and clank exist because they nudged insomniac to scrap the ps2 game they were originally working on because it was not working it's not like kronk and zephyr are make or break to the plot they don't ruin anything by being here but it's emblematic of the game and the studio's apparent insistence at the time to never concede a point and this is what it boils down to there's always just a piece missing from tools of destruction to me and that's coming from somebody who looks very fondly at this game like let me say this loud and clear i really enjoy tools of destruction as a game i enjoy its story when i don't think about it too deeply it's about as polished as ratchet had ever felt up until this point and because the journey was so focused gameplay wise despite it feeling a bit long in the tooth sometimes it felt like the most complete ratchet game at the time of its release the combination of two's exploration and three smoother experience and level up system that i wanted whenever i played either of those and [ __ ] i didn't play this game until about 2011 because i was too young to get a job at the time and the ps3 cost more than kidneys i for the longest time compared this game to the legend of zelda twilight princess two early seventh generation games with some iffy graphical stylistic choices that although a bit bloated in length ended up being to me the most complete and mechanically sound games and the under-appreciated gems of ratchet and clank and 3d zelda respectively they were never my favorite games in either series but their foundations were so rock solid that i couldn't find much room to knock either outside of some pacing issues now whether i still feel that way about twilight princess today is another story for whenever i decide to give the zelda games this sort of retrospective treatment i've barely played that game in the last decade so i don't know but as for tools i don't know maybe you could say it's the new insight from all of my research maybe you could argue that it's doggedly comparing this game to the story beats it sets up for sequels to never pay off again we'll get there but really it's just that if you put this game under a microscope it it's fine but you start to see the alarming number of cracks in the foundation and as such this is going to be the point where i'm going to perhaps start glossing over some of the game for the sake of time and preventing repetition the game so often fails to get itself sorted so i'm not going to extensively and exhaustively point out every detail that it messes up because that doesn't accomplish anything other than tearing the game down and that's not what i'm here for that's neither fun nor constructive now that i've already expressed why the game ended up this way and why that context is important to understanding the entire future saga to breaking down the whole playstation 3 era of ratchet critically and then raising all of these games back up in the same no punches pulled manner that i did with the playstation 2 games it just so happens that as these games started to take themselves a bit more seriously they opened themselves up to more serious analysis despite not being able to shine under that brighter spotlight that the games so desired to have and also frankly i'm not going to go super into detail level by level because many of this game's levels don't say all that much story-wise they're kind of in an unintended callback to the first two games just fun levels while that may be in part due to late production scrambling it works rather well to just take us back to that simple explorer vibe at which ratcheting clanks 1 and 2 excelled the plot may start to matter a bit less as the game starts to feel like it's stringing you along just to give you an excuse to go from level to level and you can definitely tell that the reasons to go to some of these planets get paper thin but that's how the early games often were so even though this game was attempting to be more than that even when they missed it kinda hit a different bullseye there are many levels and tools of destruction about which i don't have much to say besides yeah they're fun this is ratchet and clank gameplay done very well look we're five games in here folks the wheel ain't getting polished much more than it already was a level like the pirate base on ardolis for example our next level after meeting talwin and the robots stands out because it excellently weaves an environmental story into the gameplay for one it's introduced in a neat and more importantly organic way when the smuggler mentions the space pirates in passing when you talk to him that is solid world building if i'm gonna point out when the game trips i've gotta give it some credit when it sticks a landing and that's the kind of thing that should have been done to introduce these same pirates to begin with this level is a fantastic combination of seedy pirate coves damp caves a massive scale war right on the pirates home right where they eat sleep drink grog and probably dance definitely dance ardolas has a fun little side path that uses one of the game's new gadgets this little helipod that raises platforms out of the water lifts gates and so on it's not the most interesting gadget in the world but it is one that often leads us down some of the more interesting paths aesthetically like riding an actual pirate ship not to mention this is a rare return of having a separate gadget-based path from a main combat path we haven't seen that in a good while in the ratchet and clank series by this point even notwithstanding the cinematic journey through this pirate base itself which is absolutely nothing to scoff at the pirates themselves send several different types of troops at you as if they're learning over the course of this massive battle exactly how to best deal with you what starts as basic sword-wielding goons quickly escalates into the enemies blocking your heavy attacks with shields forcing you to use some of your more situational weapons to try and hit them from behind there are giant electrified pirates that are immune to your electricity-based weaponry there's a boss encounter that shoots cannonballs at you in a one-on-one fight where you can target specific parts of his body to do extra damage and these guys are so pissed that you stole back talwin's lombax artifact from them that they chase you into space immediately afterwards and send their whole armada at you at least until they realize they're late for their yoga class there's a reason that so many levels throughout the rest of this franchise strive to be like ardolas there's a reason that we got a whole pirate game to try and capture the same magic and it's because this level is just the complete package hell even later in this game the other pirate levels try to chase this same dragon and although they're okay they're not even close to as good as this one ardolus is such a good level that it makes you think the pirates might be more important to the plot than they actually are they may end up being not much more than a minor nuisance sure but this final level gets you so invested in the fight against them and so invested in the vistas you may see while fighting against them that you'd almost rather captain slag be our final boss than diaper boy and you could see exactly why insomniac hung onto the pirates for as long as they did afterwards even to this day because if nothing else they make for an excellent opponent and beyond just the spit shine of the gameplay mechanics as i mentioned before in my opinion based on my multiple playthroughs of every game in the series this is the longest ratchet title besides all for one and that's because where games like going commando and up your arsenal did come close to matching the total game length they had far more optional content the same sort of content that was intentionally cut out of tools during pre-production besides the arena there's no real side course to the main dish in the same way that those earlier games had things like large crystal hunting sandboxes or ranger missions tools of destruction's 9 or so hour adventure is almost entirely main plot or rather critical path whether it's all important plot-wise is again a different story and up to debate so for a game that also aims to mostly recreate that ps2 magic without leaving the ps2 template too too much well i've already talked in exhaustive detail about almost all of this game's mechanics before in those earlier retrospectives the only difference here is that it feels a little bit slower sometimes as in ratchet himself literally feels a step or two slower in terms of movement speed and he's running on much larger and longer levels ratchet feeling a bit slower is partly due to insomniac shifting their gameplay programming from a frame based system to what's called delta time for many ps2 games such as ratchet every animation walk cycle etc was designed so that it would look good both at 60 frames per second but could also be quickly adjusted to fit the pow region's 50 fps without having to redo everything from scratch or just slowing the game down by 17 like for example sonic when it came time to rebuild everything on the more powerful ps3 hardware though the team aimed to avoid this issue by just using delta time which would track the amount of time between frames rather than the frames themselves so if there was ever a slowdown or some regional frame rate changes those no longer needed to be handled by hand as far as animations would go but as former insomniac programmer mu yoo told me not everything was directly transferable and so it took a long time to get everything feeling rather close the result in tools of destruction is a game that ever so slightly feels like you're running through ankle high water much of the time it's not a thing you'd necessarily notice unless you're playing these games back to back to back to back to back as i have but allegedly at least a few of this game's 16 000 logged bug reports were qa testers complaining that the game didn't feel the same as the good old days so if you did notice you're probably in good company speaking of bugs and things that don't feel good our next planet after ardules is called reikan 5 a planet home to a lava refinery whatever that is as well as our first real fight against emperor tachyon's troops since around the start of the game well not counting the arena but he didn't know it was us so i'm not going to count it either alongside kronk and zephyr ratchet clears the battlefield of hordes of drafted soldiers searching for the lombak secret before buying a gyro cycle from the smuggler in order to find a path through to that very same secret now the phrase gyrocycle should inspire terror knowing that this game has motion controls and that's for good reason this super monkey ball power up initially was going to use the six-axis motion but insomniac eventually thank god had a change of heart and realized that this dumb hamster ball should at least be a little bit fun to control that simply wasn't happening with gyro not in 2007 the gyrocycle areas are fun if forgettable but i'll take them over another 6 axis gimmick any day of the year but aside from the occasional 6 axis controls and other new features like the over the shoulder zoom that complements the usual strength buttons this is exactly what it sets out to be the ps2 games but more you can see that the team called back to so many facets of the first four ratcheting clank games from tiny things like the little bomb seeker bots being reimagined from ratchet 1 to the aforementioned glider the charge boots to ratchet 3's jackpot crates to the cameos and callbacks throughout the story ryken 5 is another good example of this with a wide open battlefield calling back to up your arsenal's ranger battles at least a smidge kronk and zephyr talking about old wars and events brings back the same energy that the rangers themselves did too tools of destruction's weapons are mostly beefed up revisions of things we've seen in the past your blaster shotgun bomb glove turret rocket launcher they're all here we have a whip weapon just like we did in ratchet 3 and we've got the new razer claws to add to the melee arsenal these things will start glowing from yellow to red as you land hits on enemies leading to more damage and a faster attack speed they could even do a dive kick or break the game by climbing walls if you know what you're doing we've also got the buzzblades a faster replacement for ratchet 3's disc blade gun which by the time you buy it will take over as the rapid-fire pistol type weapon for the combustor which will long have since been outclassed thanks to the enemy armor scaling the predator launcher sort of acts in the same way that the tempest did in ratchet 3 as well although here it's on the weaker side so i don't tend to use it too too much you can really tell that this game's main arsenal was just a greatest hit of the ps2 guns by now huh well let's keep it going then there's a flamethrower too and the plasma beasts are just a gooier glove of doom dropping the titular beasts on the ground to tackle any enemy that comes into their attack range really then the only new guns besides the rhino are the razor claws that i mentioned earlier the magnet launcher which traps enemies in place via an electric net and the tornado launcher which if you really think about it is just ratchet 2's hoverbomb gun but more useful since you can move around while controlling the projectile's path the 6-axis motion controls on this thing are super finicky so i don't actually recommend using it while moving but if you set up shop somewhere safe and rain the tornadoes down onto your foes from a distance you'll see just how powerful and visually impressive this thing is as it ragdolls enemies crates even pieces of terrain anything in its path just like you know a real tornado and then finally there's the alpha disruptor which shares a similar functionality to the spartan laser introduced in halo 3 a month before this game came out at first you might even think that this spartan laser is one of the lombak's secrets that the game keeps teasing because of how powerful it is and because it's a lombax weapon found at a lombax testing facility where the duo is led to believe the big lombak secret was hidden according to a long-lost tape they found the big lombac secret is a device called the dimensionator a gadget that the lombax has built not to disintegrate the cragmites and save the galaxy but to send those cragmites to another dimension entirely and peacefully exile them talwin is supposed to meet the duo at this testing facility but i guess she hits some traffic because we never see her instead we do see the plumber who returns here on the ps3 as some sort of omniscient god figure he cryptically tells arduo that the weapon they're looking for doesn't exist which i just spoiled because i already explained what the dimensionator actually does i i don't care and then he throws them chekhov's hexagonal washer which they definitely won't need later to fix something before flushing himself down a toilet yeah you know what i'd rather have the spartan laser anyway hell give me a couple more of those penguin morph bombs or the confusion gas i don't even care that there are effects reused from some of the ps2 game's weapons it's better than a washer that's been marinating in the plumber's toilet bath water speaking of at first you might wonder why those effects were moved over to devices rather than kept as weapon effects like the usual upgradeable morph gun or ratchet 3's infector or why these weren't just effects attachable to any weapon like in deadlocked before it in this case hindsight's 2020 because they definitely should have just made the best devices into dedicated actual upgradeable weapons and let you attach the other one's effects to any gun that you use deadlock system was fantastic although i guess maybe it was too complex for a first game for possibly new players but really it's more so because tools of destruction introduced a secondary upgrade system for weapons using raritanium raritanium returns in tools as a not rare at all secondary currency like in going commando before it but this time the raritanium you obtain from killing some enemies or finding treasure chests sprinkled throughout most of the game's levels is used in an upgrade tree for each individual weapon so on top of earning experience for the weapons and leveling them up by damaging enemies you can spend raritanium to upgrade things like rate of fire max ammo count or even unlock special weapon specific upgrades for the predator launcher you can gain the ability to lock onto a single baddie multiple times which makes that thing instantly a little bit more useful the buzzblades will stick into an enemy and explode when they can't bounce any more times and the spartan laser just becomes rift apart's negatron collider when upgraded phasing through enemies and damaging everybody in its path okay look i'm gonna say it with how much clear inspiration rift apart took from tools of destruction and how many little nods there are i'm not crazy for thinking that there might be a remaster in the works for the series 20th anniversary next year am i although the raritanium system may not be as malleable or really as fun as deadlocked stellar weapon customization having a secondary currency in this game serves a good purpose and that purpose is encouraging exploration with these bigger or more often longer levels more specifically there are a lot of new corners and coves that curious players might find and rather than just giving out bolts or having to go overboard hiding gold bolts or other collectibles in every single nook and cranny raritanium is the perfect bonus to keep players wanting to dig around although it's not exactly rare you're never going to have more than you need during your first playthrough so finding it is always a benefit where bolts might have just been held in ratchet's pocket forever plus it's so damn satisfying to fill out these weapon trees and that's definitely a part of why the upgrade trees have returned in multiple games since to me it's more satisfying than using this game's underwhelming rhino in tools of destruction onward rather than buying the rhino for an absurd price like we had in the past insomniac gave us a different route and that's a good thing because the economy is kind of broken in this game anyway by the time you get the challenge mode you can earn a hundred thousand to a million bolts from a single crate stack from tools of destruction onward except for offer one because again that game is a weird case the rhino is now obtained specifically by finding all of the guns schematics a new type of collectible that's hidden throughout the game this actually means that you can get the rhino in most games henceforth without having to beat the game or grind for bolts although if you don't happen to dig around and find them on your first pass through each level you're gonna have to backtrack later and deal with the long ps3 blu-ray load times one of the coolest things that tools does by the way is that it pre-loads what should be your next level to skip as much of the load as possible and if you ever have to go out of order you'll appreciate that little under the hood trick even more because it saves you a lot of time once you obtain every last rhino hollow plan and bring them to the smuggler he'll make you the rhino4 for free in exchange for letting him keep the schematics for future use of course in the case of the rhino4 here it's i don't know it's not super satisfying to use it kills everything but at first it's missing that extra oomph it feels more powerful than it actually is i wonder what it might need now is also a good time to mention this game's weird scaling since i just mentioned the bolt inflation like in ratchet and clanks 2 and 3 purchasable armor upgrades return in tools of destruction although this time you can't actually see if there's another armor upgrade available beyond the one first on the list so you have to buy all the armors in order the thing is though enemies don't deal damage in a way that feels fair ratchet can upgrade his health to a whopping 999 maximum across several challenge mode runs of course but ratchet takes damage as a proportion of his health rather than a set value like previous games had gone for so even with the final challenge mode exclusive armor that allegedly absorbs 65 of all damage you take by the time you get that armor regardless of your max health value you're going to die in 2-3 hits from most attacks anyway this can make it one of the more challenging ratchet games to beat in challenge mode if not for the ammo vendors refilling your health the moment you access them yeah so not only does this game generally have a pretty forgiving checkpoint system likely to avoid those ps3 load times if you went back too far upon deaths anytime you have a vendor nearby you can just keep running back and forth to top off your health for free on one hand this is a good way to counter the fact that the enemies you fought in the game's opening now cheaply do hundreds of hits of damage to you despite being the exact same enemy on the other it's also a really game-breaking mechanic once you realize it's there the checkpoints are already so forgiving so there's no real reason to make the tougher fights trivial in this way i would much rather have had enemies that deal damage in a more fair manner than see the team create a new problem and then a haphazard solution to it that's also kind of a problem like this even if the game just charged you for health refills or something it would be better than what we have here back to our main story here captain cork calls to tell ratchet and clank about the iris supercomputer a computer so powerful that it clearly has to know just about everything about the lombax's the dimensionator's location max apogee maybe so hopefully it'll be less cryptic than the plumber was no no the supercomputer isn't super helpful at all it shuts down the moment we try to get any answers of substance i mean it's just a power issue so ratchet absolutely could come back at any point in the future and ask about what happened to the lombax's or what dimension they're in or how to get there but for some reason he never does that later in the series in fairness it's because he decides by that point in time that he's fine with clank and talon being his entire family but like i think talwin still wants to see your dad they could at any point go back and ask the computer exactly what happened to max apogee and just close that plot point entirely it would be a lot less messy a way to get answers than fluff dialogue in an in-game radio program or waiting for a comic series that only exists to retcon another plot point before doing it while we're watching these games tell their stories by the seat of their pants remember how talon was stuck in traffic or something and never met up with a duo back at that lombax facility they don't exactly say it but she was captured by tachyon's army and taken to the inescapable zordom prison our heroes only learn this because the zoni conveniently beam another vision in the clank's head while he's plugging the computer back in thanks to quark's brilliant plan and certainly nothing else ratchet and clank helped talwyn escape from that inescapable prison in record time but not before ratchet is kind of a dick to clank for the first time since ratchet won you know clank just once i wish you'd listen to your real friends instead of your imaginary ones yes so throughout the game whenever clank references his contact with the zoni ratchet doubts him he doubts their existence and eventually he's clearly so preoccupied with his own goal to find the dimensionator and hopefully his family or any answers that his frustration boils over and he just doesn't care to believe what clank's saying he forgets that clank is always right i mean he still does kind of listen he does go to zordom at clank's insistence but only because they have no idea where the next planet's coordinates are after this they don't know where to go and they only get those coordinates after freeing tauwin who then goes off to save kronk and zephyr off-screen as you finish the rest of the level yourself which by the way is a really satisfying way to end a high octane prison break just let someone else do it for you good good good game design from here ratchet and clank head to the homeworld of the kurchu a violent species that apparently almost all life in the universe is allergic to which is part of the reason that max apogee yeah remember him hid the dimensionator here on this planet but not before our final star fox level as the space pirates chase our heroes through the event horizon of a black hole and even into the black hole itself what a way to show the pirates determination and to keep them feeling badass even if ratchet delivers a dismissive almost bored line before fighting them this dude is really starting to annoy me way to take the edge off of what would otherwise be an awesome moment geez this level was the first one designed for tools of destruction and given its great blend of exploration focused puzzle levels varied combat setups against space pirates the new kerchu enemies and even three-way fights involving both factions at once and a set piece laden boss fight you can definitely tell that this was meant to be the showcase of the game after defeating the kerchief boss defending the dimensionator we get our big blow off with captain slag and the pirates which again feels more consequential and meaningful than most of our interactions with the main villain for one ratchet and clank don't just stand there when they could have fought back like they do when tachyon later in the game activates the dimensionator instead slag rusty pete and the rest of the pirates are proactive they grab and threaten to be head clank forcing the duo to let them grab the dimensionator and escape and in classic ratchet fashion the next level is our big difficulty spike further driving home to me at least that tachyon really does play second fiddle in his own game this level isn't quite as polished as ardolis was it's not the complete package but it could very easily have been the final level with how much the game throws at you we've got multiple mini boss fights including a sort of naval battle against some of slag's pirate ships flying through the sky there's a dark ominous atmosphere permeating the level we've got a mix of tight claustrophobic corridors and wide open arenas for constantly shifting fight strategies composer david bergeaud kills it with a driving bombastic score one of the strongest tracks in the game maybe the strongest of both of his ps3 ratchet scores before the studio tried going in a different more cinematic musical direction and of course ending in a massive fight against slag himself it's to the point that this three-level run of space pirate battles feels like the true mechanical climax of the game after this it's mostly basic fights and the game rushing to pay off the story that it's forgotten about half the time once slag's defeated rusty peak names ratchet the new captain although ratchet sort of passes but while he and clank are arguing over the ethics of using the dimensionator a device with the ability to rip holes in the multiverse a power that clank argues should never be used another captain shows up in his attempt to be a hero captain quark takes the dimensionator and departs in an escape pod that heads right to the nearest planet which is the cragmite homeworld the home of tachyon's extinct species essentially quark just walks the thing right to the villain by accident this is part of why the final few levels don't come close to the one that we just finished tachyon actually failed upward the entire time he didn't accomplish anything which i guess makes him the most relatable boss he could have pulled the supervillain trope of showing up right here to steal it himself the very same thing that slag did just a level ago and that would have felt better than quark fumbling his way right to our idiot bad guy i guess it still checks out that quark is arguably the most dangerous guy in any given galaxy since he helped direct destroy dozens of planets he almost destroyed an entire galaxy in the name of repairing his reputation his bullying is directly responsible for dr nefarious's evil ways and he's done more to establish tachyon as a real opponent than the emperor himself you can just tell the wheels are off the ride at this point since after several levels of talon and the robots not being a presence they're suddenly roped back into the fold here another sign of the game juggling way too many balls at once again by the way it's pretty funny how clearly kronk and zephyr are just galactic ranger stand-ins because we pretty much only see them on a wide open battlefield right after a halo jump that's actually not a dig though i'm being genuine here i know some players found tools of destruction too safe but i actually appreciate how much of it is adapted wholesale from the earlier games the battle itself is super bland though it's just a couple consecutive waves of drafted troopers while talwin tells you that she's helping find a way to cork while not actually doing anything before ending with comic relief villain failing to use the big dangerous device we've been told to fear the entire game in any other game the dimensionator being a goofy device would be fine but tachyon has had no wins whatsoever throughout the entire game and this is his only real major win and he still gets made out to be a joke the power of the dimensionator's blast knocks ratchet out and in a callback to ratchet one knocks the duo off of a cliffside with clank hanging on for dear life for the both of them this time though our heroes are separated as they fall into the abyss only to be reunited like 10 minutes later but hey it's something it there was an attempt the cragmites i will say live up to the reputation and the legend that the game gives them these guys don't necessarily take the most hits to defeat but they phase around the battlefield constantly making them nearly impossible to hit with many guns you've really gotta focus your shots around one of these guys at a time just to get hits in and so that you don't get overwhelmed by their often heavy numbers the cragmites are one of my favorite enemies to fight in this game in part because of another great play that was taken from ratchet 1. they're introduced in the same level as the weapon that's most effective against them the magnet launcher the easiest way to stop the cragmites in their tracks is by trapping them in one of the nets as they can't phase away when stun locked and this alone makes this gun one of my personal favorites in the game really one of my personal favorites of any of the series more situational weapons because they actually for once give you good situations in which to use it i'll also give credit where it's due the game does a good job of balancing the weapon experience as well even though it front loads itself by giving you so many weapons at once so early on it's not like i was maxed out well before the end of the game all the weapon level ups felt gradual and outside of maybe the combustor pistol not many weapons get classed out entirely by the end of the game due to being too weak for the enemy health scaling i do wish we still had those help desk pop-ups when your weapons hit level 5 and evolved into an entirely new weapon though it sort of lacks the flourish and the impact in this game when you're not told what the upgraded weapons actually do differently it's not a huge deal or anything but it's this sort of small touch that most of the ratchet games since have actually lost presumably as much of the old guard has moved on to different companies or left the industry leaving newer younger teams that might not think about something like that after reuniting with talwin cronk and zephyr a despondent ratchet finally says the thing that i've been trying to tell you throughout this whole series clank is always right remember that this cutscene here may as well be the only thing that's actually taken and properly developed throughout the rest of the future saga we get ratchet remembering that clank knows best when clank shows up a moment later because this game doesn't let anything breathe despite being 9 hours long we get to see the duo about to bro hug before they get self-conscious because talwin is staring at them outside of like one more scene at the end of the game the rest of this game's story could just be tossed away which on one hand is kinda sad but on the other hand the payoff that crack in time delivers on these moments is pretty worth it if tools of destruction and really the entire future saga does one thing well it's bookending itself for example in the penultimate level with the cragmites in tow tachyon invades the galactic capital in meridian city if you're wondering why he doesn't already have control of the capital this is the capital of the galaxy's last major resistance to the empire the game doesn't ever tell you that fighting the cragmites throughout this city and seeing the wanton destruction they leave in their wake does a better job of showing you just how dangerous the crag mites are than the game has ever tried to tell you and that's how it should be really the game needed this level to drive home that tachyon is kind of dangerous because we don't ever really get that sense from the rest of the game given that we only actually fight his army every three levels on average up until this final rush to the finish tools of destruction pretty evenly cycles between levels featuring tachyon's troops the pirates and miscellaneous endemic creatures on abandoned or isolated planets like kobali of fastun and sargasso again sure if you pay super deep attention to the lore that's never directly mentioned in the main story the whole game is tachyons doing under the hood since the pirates were his invention before they went rogue years ago but until this last few levels we genuinely spend more time and endure more levels fighting the space pirates than we do dealing with our main villain's army as well as this game bookends itself with references back to the start such as this city-wide battle the final fight's callback to ratchet and clank being shot out of the smuggler's cargo ship ratchet coming around to trust in clank when he mentions the zony clank waking up ratchet at the end of the game in the same way ratchet did the clank at the start as much as all these things are done well as bookends the game misses the layups when it comes to tying our path from start to finish together in a meaningful way perhaps the idea of tying the pirates to tachyon was itself a last minute decision and that's why it's never mentioned in the cutscenes and only in flavor dialogue it would make sense but it's a shame that it had to be that way hell even partway into the final battle after tachyon and the cragmites push to destroy fastune we still get this sort of haphazard storytelling i'm guessing this cutscene here may have either come into the picture late in the production or earlier on before they had finalized tachyon's ever-changing look because it's really weird hearing tachyon give his motivation for destroying the lombaxes and hunting ratchet down off-screen from a megaphone inside his dropship this cinematic is framed in such a way to limit as much animation and lip syncing as possible so it would check out that this was probably a rather late inclusion once ratchet clank cronk zephyr and tauwin reach the inner ruins of the lombak city tachyon gives the lombax a choice he opens a portal to the lombak's dimension telling ratchet that he'll spare him if he leaves if he goes to be with his family if i leave you with the dimensionator no one will be safe not the lombaxes not my friends i'm not going anywhere until it's destroyed our final battle starts here in the court of azimuth but very quickly moves into an interdimensional plane thanks to the dimensionator's power and tachyons not power i mean i say that but he's genuinely one of the tougher final bosses in the series if you don't use the rhino dude's got all the hallmarks of a ratchet final boss with the shockwave attack a barrage of guided missiles that'll stick into the ground for a moment before they explode small fodder enemies to distract you momentarily and of course the guided tracking laser that in this game will usually stun lock you if it hits you pretty much dooming you if you get hit by it once or at all thanks to how constant the barrage of attacks is thanks to this small asteroid crumbling into smaller and smaller pieces as the fight progresses and thanks of course to this game's enemies dealing damage as a percentage of your health rather than set values like i mentioned earlier it can be a lot to deal with and all things considered it's pretty impressive that this fight never really shows signs of slowing down the game or cutting into the frame rate at all once you've whittled down diaper boy's health to nothing tachyon will spew some more nonsense about how he knows ratchet's true name and his purpose in the galaxy i am your father or some crap like that it doesn't really matter he's a joke villain he gets sucked into a dimensional rift never to be seen again except for the end of the comics with space and time ripping around them ratchet and clank find that the dimensionator has been broken but chekov the plumber saves the day because the exact thing needed to fix the device is that hexagonal washer that the plumber tossed the duo earlier in the game dimensionator find home [Music] ratchet are you all right where where are we we are home ratchet once the duo is safely back home everybody lives happily ever after rusty pete tries to give captain quirk some pirate lessons this time add an inappropriate snur kronk and zephyr have a cosplay battle as ratchet and tachyon and clank gives ratchet a pep talk about his purpose in life and his accomplishments before the worst decision this series has probably ever seen this game ends on a cliffhanger as the zones show themselves to everybody in the room for the first time they kidnapped clank for a reason we weren't meant to discover for two more years and the game ends with ratchet and everybody else looking sad but it's worse than that because not only do cliffhangers not exactly work well for games where development times are so fluid and so far out in the future a future that's always more uncertain than in other media not only does this sap so much good will that players could have as they look forward to the next game because now this whole adventure has been kind of a slap in the face this sad cliffhanger moment as ratchet's only family is taken from him is followed by the credits blasting groovatron disco music it's so dissonant i cannot believe that nobody stepped in to say hey maybe no to any part of this last couple minutes it's not that a cliffhanger couldn't have worked for this game either it's that this is a bad cliffhanger rather than just sour a melancholy but mostly positive ending the game could have played with the literal cliffhanger moment a few levels prior where they teased ratchet and clank being separated during their fall off of the bridge rather than ratchet for some reason just falling asleep from the blast move that moment around a bit and save it for the end of the game after tachyon's been defeated but before they've used the dimensionator to get back home have ratchet realize that clank is always right in the climax of the game not before it it'll have more impact here have clank make some sort of heroic sacrifice that saves ratchet at the cost of clank himself falling off of that ledge into the abyss only for him to be saved by the zony in plain sight and then teleported away leaving ratchet completely shattered that his friend is not only gone he's gone for a reason that in ratchet's eyes is his own fault i just threw that together off the top of my head there's room to pick it apart already i can tell you for sure but this is just one of countless examples of how this sort of endgame cliffhanger could play far better with the book ending that fixman loved to set up from game to game let me be clear as much as i understand how rough of a hand this dude was dealt during his time as a writer for the entire ratchet franchise when he was there i don't adore a lot of what he's done i think he sometimes gets a bad rap when folks discuss the series online but really his fondness for setting up a quote or a moment early on in the game that's paid off near the closing moments is the best part of his ratchet work in my opinion everything in the middle more often than not just ends up being fluff if not worse but a ton of this is undeniably due to the growing pains that came with the leap that many developers took into deeper more serious storytelling around the start of the seventh console generation not too many studios were keen on producing stories that actually flowed between multiple titles rather than telling self-contained stories that advanced a more general plot thread let alone games that were aimed at a younger audience like the ratchet series had always been fewer still would dare to try such a story angle while playing from behind after scrapping one writer's work and bringing in another to try and throw something together on the fly and even fewer still would put that level of trust in a younger guy who had as far as i know zero writing credits to his name when he took over the fact that this story came together as relatively decently as it did despite all of this is a testament to tj fixman's ability to improvise and of course even though he was the writer this wasn't all his doing these ideas were certainly part of a more collaborative process with many members of the team no one person can really take the credit for writing a good game story unless that person is the sole developer likewise we can't throw the blame entirely on fixman for the boneheaded cliffhanger because that made it through hundreds of people that was signed off on by sony representatives a lot of people thought that was a good idea and that says so much more about how far game storytelling has come in the decade and a half since and fixment had the backing of the higher ups at the studio like brian allgeier the guy who seems to have had that original vision for a multi-game story arc to begin with the guy who may very well have guided that story down the path it took as he was guiding fixman through the story beats that perhaps were already decided for the writer or as he was listed in some interviews the co-writer putting its development aside i want to say again that i do enjoy the game that is ratchet and clank tools of destruction i enjoy the story even if a magnifying glass quickly rips the whole thing to shreds and i enjoyed the game's grander scope and this setup of a wider deeper story that promised to pay off down the road even if it didn't pay off as well as i would have liked but i can't put that development aside because it's a part of this game's dna tools of destruction isn't tools of destruction without the rush story it isn't tools without the publisher being privately upset because insomniac got a bit too overzealous during the early game pitch and over-promised it isn't tools without being responsible for the rest of the games in the future saga the rest of that promised payoff being thrown together on the fly in the very same way that this game itself was and really that the rest of the series had been before it anyway for all the work that went into creating a series bible to avoid throwing these game stories together haphazardly in my opinion it took until rift apart for us to get a game that wasn't thrown together super haphazardly anyway in that vein not much changed from the ps2 to the ps3 huh the main change was that the future saga promised more and even though they delivered at about the same standard the ps3 games often feel like less because of the expectations they set up and then missed because ambition had to be measured in an era where games took longer and cost more to make while having to look even better than ever because the studio continued giving itself only just enough time to squeak by rather than taking a breather and really trying to hit that next level on their own terms rather than by a deadline and because their ambition continued to soar despite all of this an ambition that got so high that it tripped them up and saddled them down in the next game and beyond [Music] you thought we were done no sit back down i'm not giving the filler game its own video come on as i mentioned near the start of the retrospective somebody higher up at insomniac promised to throw something together as a sort of make good to make it up to sony for scrapping that overzealous co-op promise for tools of destruction this would be something that would still promote the next gen console's features like say a download-only playstation network game it'd be released in fall 2008 to cover the two-year gap between ratchet and clank future 1 and future 2 and it would be titled ratchet and clank future quest for booty a game that focuses on ratchet searching for clank while fighting a bunch of robot pirate ghosts you either die as satire or live long enough to become that which you lampooned apparently for the record i don't know who made either of these two promises either the one for co-op or the one to make up for co-op there's no implying here that ratchet's creative director brian allgeier who you're seeing on screen is responsible he's just the one that's spoken publicly about why quest for booty came to be this is also incidentally where my well starts to run dry when it comes to exclusive interviews because well not many people even worked on quest for booty fewer still have an online presence where a random dude like me could pester them and at the time of publish i've got a big ol goose egg that actually responded when tools of destruction finished development much of the team jumped back over once again to help push resistance 2 over its finish line ahead of its also 2008 release yeah insomniac released two games that year and that's how you can tell that this game wasn't meant to happen in the first place by this point insomniac had jumped once again in size to around 175 active employees many of whom would be seasonal testers for the resistance multiplayer meanwhile a chunk of the tools of destruction team would push forward with a bite-sized mid qual that would serve a few purposes one address the cliffhanger rather than leave players waiting two full years for answers as to what happened to clank two avoid creating too many new assets re-use as much as possible from tools to save time and keep the game under budget and three use this game's six or so month production as a springboard to test out new ideas and try to bypass the usual pre-production phase for ratchet and clank future 2. also yes you do keep hearing me correctly the next game a crack in time was internally considered future 2. that's how late of an addition quest for booty was now say it with me it didn't work ok i set that one up in the very same video i have to hope at least one of you said it with me this time but i know i shouldn't get my hopes up whatever trying to shave off pre-production with another game's production i would imagine is an unimaginably difficult thing to do and clearly the team was put into a very tough situation i'll go into more detail on this when it's time to talk about a crack in time but simply put quest for booties struggled to achieve two of its three main goals and actively hampered production of what was supposed to be the second game in the future saga like so much so that half of kraken time's written dialogue was cut it's pretty cool and remember that this is after tools of destruction had set up so many little plot threads to be answered specifically in future 2 because fixman took over writing future 1 late in the process so he had to rush together one script to set up a second script where he would finally hopefully have the time that he wanted and then as a nice little surprise he had to smush in a middle script too but at the very least the game did get away with reusing as much as possible so much so that many players consider this game a dlc add-on rather than its own game and hey fair although it did get a physical release in europe and later japan anyway so if you think about it it even failed to be dlc quest for booty follows ratchet and talon in the year after clank's disappearance as they search for the legendary space pirate captain darkwater according to the iris supercomputer darkwater had successfully figured out a way to make contact with the zoni ratchet and tauwin hit a rude awakening though as they discover that not only has darkwater been dead for years he was murdered by the very same captain slag that ratchet defeated in the last game which now that i think about it should mean that these remaining pirates consider ratchet their captain just like pete did in the last game when you killed slag but i guess because rusty pete has slags still talking heads slag is technically still alive so he's still the captain whatever the case ratchet is shot out of a cannon and stranded on hulafar island just based on the game's opening moments you can tell that if nothing else the game makes some improvements to the tools of destruction skeleton despite being pretty much the same for example ratchet's scruffy neckbeard model looks a little bit better to me here thanks to the moodier more dynamic lighting some of the games like six or seven fights have a little bit of extra weight to them because of this darker atmosphere and in fact the lighting reworks led to light-based puzzles and dark caverns that make up a decent chunk of quest for booty's new additions too aside from these lighting tweaks and the addition of a new wrench tether feature that allows ratchet to grab onto some items such as bioluminescent creatures to light up the area around him or move some platforms around or throw lava rocks at doors the core gameplay itself is effectively one-to-one tools of destruction with a slightly heavier puzzle lean the weapon selection features exclusively a handful of guns that return from the last game and here they all start at level 3 both to remind you that this is a sequel and because this game is only 2 hours long they want you to be able to max out the guns ratchet also already has all of the raritanium upgrades unlocked for each of these weapons although once he's shot off the hulafar island the upgrades have somehow fallen off and magically been scattered across the island it's a neat little precursor to kraken times constructo weapon mods that you would find scattered as collectibles throughout that game except here the game is only two hours long and they really don't have enough space to hide seven upgrades for example two of the seven upgrades are hidden back to back in a single underwater cavern in one i guess technically two rooms but really just one room and they both require you to just blow up a wall it's not some fun little zelda-esque puzzle like quest for booty likes to sprinkle in it's just pressing the fire button twice on a related note if you want an idea of just how much of an afterthought this game truly is ratchet can still use the hydro pack underwater despite not having clank on his back to have the hydro pack at all so it turns out this whole time that that clank upgrade was pointless because it's just ratchet's calves doing all the work and also making propeller noises how how does he do that since bolts aren't used for buying weapons and in fact they're only used a couple of times to pay the smuggler for things that he quote unquote found like an item required for progression or the alpha disrupter that ratchet lost when he washed ashore so i guess you do buy one weapon with bolts technically since the only collectibles are the so-so weapon upgrades and since there's no real need to work to level up your weapons since they're all more or less guaranteed to be maxed by the end of the game because each of them only have two levels quest for booties got a very strange feel compared to just about every other ratchet game the best way i've heard this game described was a long time ago from a good friend of mine who pointed out that it's often sort of a poor man's jack and daxter the precursor legacy here on this isolated island ratchet has to do a bunch of platforming challenges puzzles and little filler missions for the mayor and other citizens so that he can fix their line of communication to the outside world to try to get a hold of rusty p although the magna boot pathways grind rail tracks and the overall vibe of hulafar island is definitely distinct compared to other ratchet titles it doesn't feel like there's all that much urgency here the plot just kind of happens and even on your first playthrough you're already gonna know that none of this matters by the time we're done with the opening padding fetch quests on hulafar and we move on to the next of the game's three or four areas we're already nearly halfway through the game and even in the other few locations we explore afterwards ratchet is forced to jump through these same kinds of basic hoops and neat but ultimately meaningless puzzles to progress puzzles such as jump on these keys in the correct order to play the right music notes or solve a riddle and make the right drink for this pirate bartender or throw a lava rock at this door peak gameplay but somehow despite being again say it with me two hours the game overstays its welcome thanks to being almost exclusively one fetch quest after another if the game they gave us is this bland can you imagine what the rest of the year must have been like where ratchet was searching for a lead as to the whereabouts of his best friend like what was he doing sitting on his ass eating chips we had the iris supercomputer in the last game a thing that is supposed to know everything in the universe could it not have been possible to go up to that thing presumably sure after repairing it because it kind of broke at the last game sure whatever they don't care i don't care either could they not have gone to it and said hey alexa how do i find the zony was that not a thing could they have not did they think about that or did they go to the super computer after 11 months of searching and then realized oh yeah we have [ __ ] google it's just it's not as bad as daxter at the start of daxter it's not that bad because daxter forgets that jack exists for two years but it's pretty [ __ ] close and at least that one's played for laughs this is supposed to be a serious story i'm sorry once we fix up the communication array the mayor of hulifar shows ratchet the obsidian eye the device that dark water had used to study the zoning but the eye needs something called a fulcrum star to operate and dark water hid that somewhere off island it's at this point that rusty pete conveniently shows up to guide ratchet and tauwin to the cave where darkwater was killed talwin ends up immediately trapped in the cave and ratchet leaves her behind for a bit and takes rusty pete right to darkwater's corpse but not before the most expensive line of dialogue in the series history i'm a little teapot short and stout here is me handled here is miss balt yeah so it turns out that i'm a little teapot is still under copyright so insomniac had to settle out of court for using it without permission amazing it's all downhill after that because right afterwards rusty pete betrays ratchet attaching captain slag's head to darkwater's beheaded body but pete is still sort of straddling this weird fence where he's not actually a bad guy he's just loyal to his captain so he throws your weapons down to you for some reason and ratchet's already got the map he needs to find the fulcrum star now so slag being back wouldn't be all that bad if not for the robot pirate ghosts apparently right before slag had betrayed dark water years ago the latter saw it coming and put a curse on his own body so that if he was ever disturbed after death his crew would reanimate as pirate ghosts so rather than slag being our big bad it's actually mostly dark water himself just now with slag's head attached to and the two consciousnesses bickering back and forth sometimes i i don't know it just doesn't work for me i'm sorry i just can't take this game all that seriously when one of our main antagonists is rusty [ __ ] pete how do you fall for the comic relief character's traps don't say anything about quirk i appreciate that dark water has this immense interest in lombax and zoning technology but that's only because i recognize that he was the original space pirate that tachyon built specifically to hunt for that tech but unless you scroll through all of the hidden flavor questions you can ask the supercomputer back in tools of destruction you would never put that together because the only other time in the game that they acknowledge why slag and the robot pirates exist and are even here is if you pay careful attention to one of their poorly mixed sea shanties that you probably won't even notice since these games took several more years to make sure that subtitles existed for out-of-cut scene dialogue i have to think it's this messy because of the writer transition and fixman having to piece together what he could get into the game on the fly with his hands tied behind his back i can't imagine it would have been easy but i also can't say that any of this really holds up unless you bend over backward trying to justify it in your head i mean talwin's the biggest tragedy of the entire future saga this game has pretty much the most we get out of her throughout the entire series and she gets trapped near some rubble here a damsel in distress that you don't even have to save technically and then she's kidnapped half an hour later that's another thing quest for booty also brings back the dialogue prompts from tools of destruction and they're just as out of place here as they are throughout all three future saga games i don't know these just always feel like the clearest attempt to follow industry trends and they're just half baked the dialogue we get is almost never interesting in these the basic over-the-shoulder camera angle covers up the uninspired programmatic lip movements and animations the lore is so sloppily set up that the games never even earned the right to have this sort of thing it's all just uh here in quest for booty specifically i will say that they had some fun with it because you can actually respond too for some reason rather than just choose from a set list of questions and you could just make ratchet as smartass you have this quintessentially 2008 video game karmic choice to save talon in the caves or let her find her own way out and she'll either be thankful or pissed depending on your choice it's such a strange thing to include since ratchet is well past the point in his life where he would leave a friend behind like that especially in the game where he's hunting for his missing friend but then considering that tauwin's nowhere to be seen in the next game replaced by characters that fixmen created himself rather than ones that he was for lack of a better word burdened with having to write for i guess technically it's probably canon to leave her there and let her find her own way out look i've given this game more time than it's frankly worth even at two hours it overstays its welcome i'm just gonna run through the rest here the second hour of the game features ratchet and tauwin finding darkwater's secret treasure cove they find the macguffin needed to use the obsidian eye ratchet falls into a second trap because he's an idiot tauwin is capped by slag slash darkwater and the smuggler flies ratchet over to slagwater's fleet for the final battle and this game this 15 stop gap meant to plug the psn's ability to have awesome download games the game that's meant to follow up on the universally panned cliffhanger at the end of tools of destruction it ends on another cliffhanger when they return to the island and activate the obsidian eye ratchet and tauwen see clank trapped in stasis surrounded by the zoni they actually think they're helping him as clank sounds a bit loopy x is the coefficient of a squared minus the unprobability of the hypotenuse at absolute zero the bogot index of the denominator must be equal or lesser to the number of b's in your bonnet and our big reveal isn't why they took him no it's that they took him right into the hands of the returning doctor nefarious all right so this reveal would be pretty awesome i will say if not for two things we paid 15 dollars for this cutscene pretty much none of the rest of the game matters there's no challenge mode here so most players will never play this game again so this was a 15 cutscene but more importantly they immediately take away any threatening aura that nefarious could have by having him trip and fall down the stairs i can hear some of you saying that he's always been a funny kind of clumsy character yes but the thing that made him such a beloved villain in up your arsenal wasn't just haha funny it was that he was menacing he had plans that when put into action actually succeeded in some way he was arguably an equal to ratchet and clank one step ahead of them often maybe just a step below overall thanks to the duo's friendship and ability to work together as a stronger team than they are alone which makes sense since the whole theme of this franchise is that these two friends prove to be greater than the sum of their parts and the mostly loner nefarious suffers for his mistrust and manipulation of others so for ratchet to have to go up against nefarious alone in the next game means that he could very well fall short and that is incredibly compelling to end a game on but instead of really letting this tease reach its full potential they needed to pop the viewer i don't know if anything i actually like this ending less than tools cliffhanger especially since in the context of development that first cliffhanger may very well have been rewritten or reconfigured in order to sell units of this game to string players along for a year while insomniac put kraken time together for 2009. i don't know that for sure that's just a supposition but the timeline according to my understanding would line up look this game has some fun to it i do like some of the platforming and puzzle elements i like the wrench tether there's a there's a lot that you can accept here and i'm generally pretty accepting of the more experimental ratchet games overall but in the greater context of the future sagas production i can't help but feel a bit sour imagine a world where quest for booty never exists where insomniac doesn't promise to make it up to sony for the missing co-op in tools by the time that tools had finished production it seems like nefarious was already locked in to be the big bad for future 2. if quest for booty never exists we very likely end up with a nefarious reveal at the end of tours of destruction that he's the one somehow controlling the zony a reveal that would be at the very least much more hype than clank floating away followed by [ __ ] disco music if this game never happens it doesn't cut into kraken times production perhaps we get a more complete second game in the saga dare i say maybe the second game in a longer saga instead of ending there with more questions than answers after all according to writer tj fixman if 10 000 lines of dialogue that he wrote made it into crack in time another 10 000 more were cut i don't want to be too harsh to a game that perhaps insomniac ended up feeling obligated or dare i say maybe pressured to make but it's a game that actively detracts from both of the games that sandwich it actually no screw that i'm gonna be harsh quest for booty is the video game equivalent of a meeting that should have been an email it's the phantom menace of the ratchet and clank franchise a plot so insignificant that it's summarized in just a sentence or two in the intro to the next installment it's thanks to tools of destruction's embryonic days and that over-ambitious promise of co-op in multiplayer that we ended up with a game like quest for booty that seems to have thrown a wrench into the initially conceptualized plot arc for the future saga or rather the conceptualized on-the-fly plot arc for the future saga seemingly completely rewritten once fixman took over writing duties but strapped down the characters and levels that were already developed but were certainly not his vision it's thanks to tod's frankly bone-headed cliffhanger that quest for booty acts as narrative fluff a game that if you didn't know about its development backstory you would have to assume only exists to address the cliffhanger only for it to end on kind of another cliffhanger itself as a result a crack in time had a shortened pre-production period and a rushed production cycle we've heard as little as nine months for the entire game because insomniac hoped that developing quest for booty wouldn't adversely affect the next full game and would somehow actually save time overall it didn't such a thing has never happened with a game series before as far as i can recall unless mark cerny's worked his ear wizard powers to adjust the flow of time and make some hyperbolic time chamber or something maybe you'll be sending us a video of your ears and this rush in turn seemingly led to several characters and plot points just being dropped entirely or explained away in flavor dialogue we'll get to all of that in more detail when i talk about a crack in time but that game which many consider to be the most complete ratchet and clank story the game that was marketed as likely the end of the franchise thanks to diminishing sales sales that very possibly slowed down in part thanks to the tools of destruction cliffhanger pissing people off this story that caps off the future saga spends more time introducing new species rather than truly following up on what tools had established and it has so much left on the cutting room floor itself that they not only wrote an entirely new epilogue game just to clean up the dropped plot points it's got so many frayed plot threads that they still haven't addressed all of it 12 years later and even that epilogue game had its plot shifted around early on because just like with deadlocked addressing the fate of the lombax's or the lombak's question was to be fair rightfully deemed too important for an end of console game especially in this case one being sent out to die a few days before the playstation 4's launch alongside wonderbook that's how little sony cared about that game it launched next to wonderbook had one print run and now goes for 70 plus dollars online because they only printed a handful of copies now the point was always to leave some threads open for the future of course that's why fixman was tasked with writing a series bible and setting up future plot threads and i can absolutely empathize with the guy who was thrown into the fire on his first project writing a game tasked with writing a game that was already mostly done and only getting to actually explore some of his own ideas three games into a two-game saga there are very few folks on the planet who could pull that off swimmingly and outside of all of us here right now the minority of players that love to analyze and overanalyze the stuff that we like he did an excellent job of distracting most players from the fact that every single ratchet project he touched was part of a string of rush jobs or attempts to cover their tracks because of other rush jobs speaking of covering tracks a crack in time was never going to be the last ratchet game that has always been misleading marketing at best and a lie at worst no we're not done yet with tools of destruction's impact that's because 2011's co-op adventure all for one was conceptualized allegedly as far back as june 2008 you know right as sony was pissed off about the lack of co-op and tools and wanted insomniac to make it up to them and that game started development in january 2009 it was developed concurrently alongside a crack in time across the country by some of the insomniac team that was moved to the studio's new north carolina location and it's thanks to that game that it took another decade for us to get a full-sized ratchet and clank game afterwards that's the game that began what many might call ratchet and clank's blunder years an era with three titles that took on a new controversial perhaps more budget-looking art style right around the time when these games started being sold at budget prices thanks to you know the lower budget from lower sales projections which in turn and this is entirely my own speculation here i want to be clear was in my opinion very likely part of the reason that insomniac branched out for the first time ever passed the playstation after both ratchet and resistance seemed to be a bit marginalized or outright shelved because of waning consumer and internal support i mean they partnered with ea to make a bland co-op military shooter that should tell you how bad things were at the start of the 2010s for insomniac even the ps4 game made to tie into the ratchet and clank movie that i recall some insomniacs were pitching as far back as 2007 right when tools of destruction came out incidentally was developed in only about 10 months on a tight enough budget that sacrifices had to be made on some cutscene animations levels had to be cut and the plot had to be adjusted a few times around the movie's script being changed by the director seemingly multiple times only for the film to be delayed twice and the game to sit essentially finished for 6 to 12 whole months months that could have been factored in earlier on in production to make a far more complete game that's the game that would later splinter the core fan base and lead to some players arguing online incessantly that insomniac didn't know how to make good games anymore thanks to issues that the development team knew about well before we ever had a chance to even sniff the game issues that they couldn't exactly fix given that the game's entire existence was tied to the whims of a low-budget c-list film studio that was only chosen to get canadian film industry tax breaks and it took until 2021 14 years and 96 games after tools of destruction for us to get even a semblance of a morsel of a hint of a continuation of those frayed plot threads left for us thanks predominantly to one single over promise during pre-production the departure of one writer who apparently wasn't a good fit and the frantic work of the new writer to put something remotely cogent together with his back against the wall i don't want to come off as bitter here again as i've already said i actually really do like tools for what it is as a game solely on its own merits and by itself critically speaking one can only judge art alone for what it is not what it could have been but as i've said before with this retrospective series you can love something and still strive for it to be better some of you may not care about all of this behind the scenes stuff you do you i totally get it but for those of you that do when you put tools of destruction into this crucial development context you've got a question if it was all really worth it was ratchet and clank futures ambitious promise of a story that would be too big for just one game worth it when so much of the story never really got finished in any of the games as much as any of us may love a crack in time who among us wouldn't throw a game like quest for booty out of existence even for a chance at getting the finished version of kraken time that the pirate game robbed from us without insomniac scrambling to make it up to sony for realizing that tools co-op wasn't feasible who's to say that this series doesn't end up as overexposed as it did during those blunder years which in turn could have led to a less fractured fan base that debates or dare i say seeds over the more recent games even today i know so many fans criticize the perceived lack of edge the ps3 games onward have had but maybe it's just that after years of pushing years of grinding dare i say years of crunching to get these games out albeit crunching less and less with each game as the studio admittedly continued to improve its project management with each subsequent title after that grind after the usual industry turnover maybe there just wasn't much edge left in the studio it was all sanded down now all of it naturally has to be more complicated than just these one or two butterfly flaps this one over promise that spiraled over the course of years across franchises with an intercompany partnership that later ended with sony willingly spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy insomniac outright anyway there are thousands of factors at play that none of us are ever likely to know no matter how much research we can do i'm not one to dwell on what-ifs for long even if they're interesting questions to ponder but a lot of this it's not a what if at a certain point the cracks aren't just showing they are prominent and while i may have a soft spot for so much of what the future saga did for giving me the deeper lore and story beats that i wanted back when i grew up playing the earlier ps2 games looking back in retrospect years after those story beats were hastily if ever wrapped up sometimes i can't see the finished picture in a vacuum the way that i used to all i see all i see are those cracks thank you so much for sharing your time with me and joining me on this journey through most of the future saga if you're not already subscribed and i know for a fact based on my other videos that about 85 of you watching right now are not subscribed please make sure to do so even if half of you hit that dumb subscribe button right now youtube would probably have to send me a silver play button like next week and that'd be pretty cool truly subscribing hitting the like button commenting and sharing really does help the channel grow and reach new viewers just like you and it allows me to make better videos more consistently as you can tell hundreds of hours goes into each of these ratchet and clank projects alone so your support means the world i'll be getting to crack in time soon enough i know a lot of you are going to be waiting for that one but i have another big project that i want to tackle first so i appreciate your patience hopefully i've shined some new light on these games and taught you something about their development or about the behind the scenes process that went into making them maybe i've helped you find a new appreciation for them or i've given you more justification for why the future saga never sat right with you with these games it could go either way and i'd truly really love to hear your personal thoughts in the comments i do try to read most of them and also i have to give a massive thanks to those of you that have gone above and beyond with your support on patreon and elsewhere i'm incredibly grateful including and i'm going to try and do this in one breath here gold storm 07 a non 42 drastilite philly d360 the foe3 vincent bahari calico plus cooking mama dervinator l pineapple the crazy even harry james boss jess the milkman terminally nerdy tabriz siddique wolf chaos on and buckles chucklow as well as everybody else on screen you folks are incredible your support truly does help these retrospectives come out more frequently and at a higher quality and hopefully never a longer length than this good god i would never get these done on my own without your support and if you'd like to see your name on this ever growing list if you'd like access to videos and updates early if you'd like to help me select topics to cover or if you want access to the exclusive golden bolt discord server and more you can do so for as little as a dollar a month over at patreon.com the golden bolt whether you're binging some of my older videos or waiting for the next one i'm sure i'll see you soon so until then stay safe and stay golden

Channel: The Golden Bolt

Views: 206,648

Keywords: the golden bolt, ratchet and clank, ratchet and clank future, ratchet and clank future retrospective, ratchet and clank future tools of destruction, ratchet and clank future tools of destruction retrospective, tools of destruction retrospective, r&c tools of destruction, r&c future, ratchet & clank future retrospective, the cost of ambition, ratchet and clank future quest for booty, ratchet and clank future saga retrospective, ratchet & clank future saga

Id: k-TX-UBkskM

Length: 121min 57sec (7317 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 28 2021