The Rise and Fall of Jak and Daxter | Complete Series Retrospective

noidog has consistently been one of the most revered developers in the video game industry people have plenty of nostalgia for the Crash Bandicoot games on PlayStation 1 as the studio had developed the first major PlayStation mascot and advanced the technology of games like never before seen today they're known for the action-packed throws of the Uncharted series that debuted on PS3 and the emotionally gripping stories of The Last of Us games what often goes unmentioned when discussing nd's impact on the industry is their PS2 franchise Jack and Daxter today I'm going to be addressing that by compiling all my Jack and Daxter coverage from 2022 into one easily bingeable video as I told the story of the Jack and Daxter franchise and how it brought naughty dog from the days of Crash Bandicoot Uncharted without further Ado let's begin man it's crazy how much time flies I mean this game is 21 years old this year for context a 21 year old game when Jack and Daxter hit the PS2 was Pac-Man and arcades I don't know it's just funny to me to think about how old games from the early 2000s are now despite once being the Apex of gaming but since I'm on the subject of History how did Jack and Daxter come to be well like I said the game was developed by Naughty Dog who made a name for themselves in the PlayStation 1 with Crash Bandicoot which first released in 1996. if you watched my video on Ratchet and Clank one last year this story should be familiar crash was very successful but this presented a problem and that Naughty Dog developed a good relationship with PlayStation but crash as a character was owned by Universal so the profits on the crash series got split three ways so naughty dog decided that they were going to cut the middleman out and work directly with Sony on the PlayStation 2 with a new franchise which meant saying goodbye to crash which I don't think was a mistake at all they basically exhausted all they really could do with that series by crash 3. a game full of different mini games and power-ups to really squeeze the juice out of that particular lemon the last crash game they did was crash team racing in 1999 and while that was in development members of the team got to work on conceptualizing their new game for Playstation 2. a console that was Leaps and Bounds more powerful than the PS1 giving Naughty Dog the vision for what this game was going to be before they even had characters in a story the one sentence description of the new game was it was going to be an entirely seamless load Time free world in games prior to this especially on Playstation 1. you'd beat a level go to a loading screen and get hit with a menu of some kind and then pick the next stage even when they did have characters and a story one of the biggest talking points with the precursor Legacy was that you could walk on foot from the starting point of the game all the way to the final boss without seeing one loading screen the manual like Ratchet and Clank is a giant pamphlet where one side shows the entire map of the game and how it connects and in game It lines up perfectly the other side of the manual is this cool poster of Jack riding the Zoomer alongside an ad for Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus no real reason to mention that it's just that it's the first game in the Goda Trilogy how could I not mention it immersion was one of the biggest things they wanted to achieve with Jack one and the game not having to stop and load was one of the biggest achievements the team pulled off with this game in the PlayStation magazine article regarding Jack and Daxter the writer even slipped in a dig at Crash Bandicoot the Wrath of Cortex the game that had recently released in the PS2 and was the first crash platformer not developed by Naughty Dog something made apparent with its lacking visuals and poor optimization as the game took upwards of 20 to 30 seconds to load in new stages I'm sure no idea dog felt the same way as this writer though to them seeing their old Series be more stagnant in this area only reaffirmed that they were going in a good direction with Jack that's all talk of what they wanted this game to feel like what kind of game is this well the basic concept is that you play as Jack a mute character who loves Adventure alongside his wisecracking friend Daxter the two of them defy the demands of Samos the sage and travel to Misty Island where they uncover a plot to destroy the world from two mysterious figures in their army of lurkers Jack and Daxter walk up to a pool of dark Eco and once Daxter falls into it he's turned into a half otter half weasel called an otzel and after getting chewed out by Samos they learn that only Gall ackeron the sage of dark Eco has a chance of returning Daxter to his human form but since none of the other sages have turned their teleporter Gates on for a while they have to travel by foot with the help of samos's daughter Kira The Village mechanic Samos is the sage of green eco eco being the source that all life comes from each type of Eco has a different sage green blue red yellow and dark Eco Jack has a mysterious power to channel Eco in a way nobody else can the world is a very mysterious one because of the fact that it was created by the precursors but no one knows who they were and why they're gone but they've Left Behind fascinating technological cities and machines you can see all throughout the game and with all that set up the player is good to go on their Journey but that merely answers what the plot is what kind of game is this when naughty dog was developing crash for the PlayStation 1 they modeled the gameplay after it was already familiar to them games like Donkey Kong Country but in a 3D space this being the format that kept evolving as they made an entire Trilogy out of it by 1998. when crash 1 released on PS1 the N64 received Super Mario 64. the game game that revolutionized how 3D platforming would feel from its analog stick movement to its mission-based item collection gameplay this burst the collect-a-thon genre where you'd search areas for Collectibles that were tied to your progression point being when doing their new PS2 epic naughty dog wanted to move on from the level to level style that crashed had perfected in the 90s and do something more like Mario 64 but not a copy one thing that often repeated in the promotional material for the game was that they wanted to have a mix between the platforming and item collection of Super Mario 64 but mix it with the Epic scale and scope of Nintendo's other N64 classic The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time so that's what you get an Epic Fantasy quest with Jack and a sarcastic sidekick Daxter as you journey across the land with platforming challenges in abundance as you scour the areas in search of precursor orbs a collectible currency and power cells the main thing that Jack and Daxter need to find in order to progress to different areas so in spirit it's the same kind of idea as Super Mario 64 but they stress that immersion in the world is one of their goals like I said this manifested in the gameplay because the objectives in Jack and Daxter are all contextualized in Mario 64 you do tasks and objectives for no real reason besides the game telling you that was your current objective of in Jack you can look at several missions to show how they designed a more thought Out World in the Forbidden Jungle you have one mission that sees Jack redirecting the Eco beam from one lens to another why well that's because the Eco beam is what powers sand over Village and the mayor thinks the Eco beam being down will kill his re-election so he offers Jack and Daxter a power self that can fix it for him Kira has sent seven Scout flies to every area in the game and your reward for collecting them is a power cell but the reason you collect them is because the lurkers captured all the Scout flies in Hidden boxes you lose out on this power cell because a pelican eats it from the ground so you have to chase the Pelican to get it back you lead the lightning moles back to their burrow in the precursor Basin because the local geologist is concerned about them you fire at these lurkers eating these support beams in the spider cave because Gordy a local Miner tells you it's important to keep the cave intact you rescue this Muse on Misty Island because he belongs to the sculptor in sandover village and he needs it for his inspiration and your reward is you guessed it a power cell not every mission is super fun I mean hurting the gak house for the farmer is really dull and is right at the start of the the game and I don't like aiming yellow Eco to hit targets I've just always feel like the aiming is really finicky but I'm just saying that the world is cohesive the end result is always you getting a power cell like any other collect-a-thon but each task achieves something in the world you're playing in the missions also have cause and effect like how you rescue the flood flood from this Ledge in Sentinel Beach and then that allows you to ride the flood flood in the boggy swamp and the snowy mountain to even reach Misty Island you need to help the fishermen in the Forbidden Jungle where he gives you a power cell and permission to use his speedboat his regular boat is broken and this is also contextualized as a part of the game did you see the size of the bike that lurkish shot took out of the Fisherman's Boat we best stay way clear of them naturally there are boundaries in the world but instead of having the player run into an invisible wall if you swim out too far you'll have to hear this sound which means that the lurker shark will eat you if you don't turn back fast enough you get eaten by a shark for swimming too far out of bounds I just think that that's clever I'll be nearly as effective without fun gameplay and Jack and Daxter more than delivers on that Jack is just one of those video game characters who's fundamentally enjoyable to control his move set's pretty simple you run with the analog stick jump with the x button and pressing it again will double jump squares a punch attack Square followed by X is an uppercut circles a Spin Attack triangle goes into first person mode which is contextualized on Jack's character design by the way the first person viewing mode is why Jack wears goggles figured I'd mention that at a standstill L1 allows Jack to crouch and jumping in this state does a high jump and on the Move You Roll and Roll jump in addition to that Jack has the power to channel different types of Eco blue Eco making you move faster and allowing you to operate precursor technology green Eco replenishing your health if you collect 50 small ones or one big one ready go making your attacks far more powerful killing everything in the surrounding area in one hit and yellow Eco allowing Jack to shoot Fireballs from his hand just don't fall in the dark Eco that's an instant game over what I've always loved about Jack's moveset is how seamlessly you can transition between these things we've created kind of a unique system for blending different animations to create Smooths between what would be two totally separate animations in most other games now I'll give you an example of this if you're running along you may be halfway in speed between a walk and a run but what our game will do is it'll take the walk animation it'll take the Run animation and it'll evenly blend between them to create a new frame that represents where your feet would be if you're running at that speed his run can go right into a kick and there's no pop or click and it just is seamlessly smooth for example you can uppercut into the air and then rapidly do a dive attack and from there you can do a spin attack if you need to or just keep diving back up and down it feels great to use the rolls in Attack by just barreling into the enemies and killing them in one hit I also love using the high jump you get When jumping immediately out of the Roll jump it's super satisfying and it makes you feel like a gaming Guru when you pull it off and make it look effort less Jack is just very mobile and that's fun to mess around with like in the first boss against this plant enemy after you kill his minions he shows you his weak spot they are supposed to climb the pedals in order to hit but if you have good timing you just uppercut right into the weak spot and damage him that way side note I love how throughout the Forbidden Jungle you see these Vines attack you from the ground but once you kill this plant boss those Vines from before are all dead just some more World building as I was saying this is a moveset where things feel useful as attacks and as platforming options I just said the role which is meant to pick up your speed can be used as an attack but the spin is another example where its primary function is to hurt enemies but in the air you can use it to get some extra air time and to break your fall from large Heights the combat is just so satisfying in this game because of how smooth it feels to execute these different commands and when you hit an enemy you feel it with the sound design foreign this game just looks and sounds great I just brought up the sounds from attacking enemies but the music also amplifies the atmosphere Josh mancel returned from the Crash Bandicoot games to deliver the score for the precursor Legacy a soundtrack with equal parts tranquil atmosphere or boating atmosphere Whimsy mystery frantic action and climactic action whenever appropriate the visuals are also stunning for 2001 standards as the game renders all these different environments that have a variety of different enemies and high quality textures with no visible loading screens the game also Sports an organic day-to-night transition with two different morning Sky boxes for variety's sake one with more bright yellow lighting and another with a green tint to capture the atmosphere of more subdued mornings the graphics are great for their time but what has not aged a day would be the animation I think at the time of this game's release the animation was simply unrivaled in the gameplay it's Top Notch exaggerating the character's movements with squash and stretch to make the gameplay more satisfying like how Jack's arm extends when punching or how when kicking or uppercutting Daxter will go flying off of Jack's body but his arms will cartoonishly stretch he pulls himself back to you we're looking for impacts that couldn't possibly be achieved through conventional means like motion capture we want to see the character jump and stretched twice as high or if he's punching we want to see that fist to be twice as big as it normally is when running in low water Jack will be slowed down and move like a human would in that situation when you're swimming you can see Daxter shivering from the water when you're rolling you can see Jack's Hair go in the motion of the flip this game is jam-packed with details in its animations the greatest example being the various Power Cell grab animations an iconic element of the series is they have a variety of different poses and moves from Daxter whenever you get one they had several members of the dev team just working on the cinematics alone some Talent even coming from outside the video game industry like Disney and Nickelodeon to help perfect the animation despite the models looking blocky by today's standards I can't help but be really impressed just how much detail there is in the characters moves in every scene like how daxter's laughing at Samos for falling to the warp gate in the red Sage's lab or just the way Daxter moves in most of the scenes serve as a good example the facial expressions also convey a wide range of emotions alongside the movements of the characters this scene prior to the claw boss fight serves as a good example check I think you're ready to handle that monster without oh really heroic of you the only issue I could bring up with the cutscenes is just that they're unskippable when you get into the game this doesn't present a huge issue as there aren't that many cutscenes from start to finish but the game opens on a lengthy scene of Jack and Daxter going to Misty Island and getting chewed out by Samos afterwards the scene of the start of volcanic crater also goes on for a few minutes this had to have been intentional since you could skip the cutscenes in the crash games so my only conclusion is that they thought that being able to skip the cutscenes would break the total immersion they were going for or they just thought that the animation work they did was so great that players had to see them it also could have been both of those things the logic isn't faulty the animation work is fantastic but if you've played the game as many times as I have over the years it does weigh on you a bit when getting back into it knowing that the cutscene with Jack's uncle or the sculptor cannot be skipped when trying to go for 100 completion I note this because I think the precursor Legacy offers a lot in terms of replayability for one thing I love how each mission in the game has a reason to exist like I said before so each Mission has a quest Giver you can contact however you almost never have to talk to Quest givers in order to do missions for example Kira tells Jack and Daxter that they could explore the temple in the Forbidden Jungle in order to activate the blue Eco events but you don't actually have to activate this cutscene in order for the mission to be done if you know what you're doing you can just rescue the muse from Misty Island at the flood flood from the ledge re-root the Eco beams release the blimp from the boggy swamp and destroy the Eco crystals in the spider caves entirely without being told to do so which cuts down in the amount of cut scenes you'd have to watch in a second playthrough I literally did not know that the support beams mission in the spider cave was a quest you got from the miners until this playthrough I just go to them for their four power cells nor did I remember that the poison plants mission in the precursor Basin and the revisit to Misty Island were directives from Samos but I don't have to remember that because the game doesn't require it the only exceptions to this rule both come in the precursor Basin where you need to talk to this Gambler in order to activate the racetrack you need to beat the best time on and to rescue the lightning mold you'd have to talk to the geologist first Jack also encourages replayability through my favorite subject stage routing when you start the game you have the choice between going to the Forbidden Jungle or Sentinel Beach the game encourages you to visit Sentinel Beach first it being the simplest and easiest level in the entire game but the catch is that to get on top of the tower with the cannon you need the blue Eco vent to be open which can only be done in the Forbidden Jungle so to cut down on backtracking I actually play Forbidden Jungle first then Sentinel Beach a similar moment happens later in the game when you can go to either Snowy Mountain or the spider cave but to go to Snowy Mountain you have to ride this Gondola which you can only ride on after letting Kira and Samos into the lab which is easy enough but they need to collect two more power cells so therefore you'd naturally go to spider cave first but getting all the precursor orbs in the final room of the spider cave requires the yellow Eco vent to be open which can be done at Snowy Mountain which is where I go first between these two Gordy and Willard in this cave sell you four power cells which covers the two power cells required to get on the Gondola the only backtrack you have to do in the game is the mountain pass the transition stage between Rock Village and Volcanic Crater one of the power cells here is locked behind a rock wall that requires yellow Eco to bust but this is before you have access to Snowy Mountain to open the Eco vent so once you do it you hop back on the Zoomer and go backwards until you reach this point to open the path and get the power cell but this is pretty minor at the end of the day on my first run for the video in fact I almost forgot to do it that would have been embarrassing to reach the end of the final level and see I only had 100 power cells instead of 101 but on the note of the Collectibles tally that's another very addicting element of this game pausing the game shows you how you're doing with the various Collectibles with each collectible having its own tally whenever I think I'm done with the stage I hit the pause screen and see all the power cells lit up and that just activates the reward center you know that feeling of completion and getting closer and closer to your goals I also love how each level has a set amount of precursor orbs and when you collect them all you get this notification that you have done so which also activates the same reward system I just mentioned when doing 100 run one of the most satisfying moments is in the final level where you walk towards the last power cell with the final few orbs on the way there knowing you're about to reach that perfect 2000 out of 2000 on the precursor orb tally right before grabbing the 101st Power Cell this game is just an Epic Quest like the developers set out to make every time I revisit the precursor Legacy I'm just taken aback by how addicting the gameplay Loop is how fun the controls are how massive the scale is and how you fully explore all these different areas like a forest a Forgotten Temple a dark and Mysterious Island a swamp an ancient underwater city a mountain a cave and many more in just a few hours time it's epic something you feel for the final time has reach the final level gal and Maya's Citadel throughout the game you can see that the lurkers are up to something big but it's impossible for the players to know what it is all you can do is stop them in their tracks like on Misty Island Samos gives Jack and Daxter credit for stopping the lurkers from opening a silo of dark Eco that no doubt would have been used for a nefarious purpose similarly in the boggy swamp the lurkers are using a giant ship with a balloon on top to lift a precursor robot out of the swamp which you stop them from doing Samos again says this is a huge Victory although he doesn't know what they'd want a precursor robot for it all comes together when you reach volcanic crater and learn that the sages are gone because they've been captured by the villains we saw in the opening cut scene this is gol Akron Iran the sage of dark Eco and his sister Maya needless to say they don't plan on turning Daxter back into a human the two have been so corrupted by dark Eco that they now plan on harnessing enough of it to reshape the world completely to achieve this they plan to open the silos the most vast source of dark Eco in the world but they need the power of a precursor robot to do that when you reach this level you find out that Samos has been captured by them as well so it's up to Jack and Daxter to get through Gaul and Maya Citadel to rescue each of the sages so they can help you get to the final Boss Arena gone Maya Citadel is a pretty interesting level because of the fact that the aesthetic is like the precursor levels we've played previously in the game but on top of that is a layer of chaotic junk modded onto the area like circuit boards and wires I just think it makes for an interesting visual mix despite stopping them from getting the robot in the swamp they do still have one working that they've modded with their various scraps and intend to use that one to open the silos setting the stage for the final boss this is the culmination of my point that this is an epic adventure when you get to the top of the elevator that takes you to the silos you can see in the distance all the places you've been to get to this point Point like the snowy mountain and even seeing geyser Rock and miss the island out in the distance just like the artwork promised and the devs claimed repeatedly in the pre-release you did travel seamlessly from one side of this game world to the other and now you just have to destroy this robot making use of yellow and blue Eco power you've been using throughout the game and to cap it off the sages combine their respective Eco powers to combat the now open dark Eco silos and this creates a type of Eco only rumored to exist before light Eco which Jack uses to lay the final blow on the robot stealing gal and Maya inside the dark Eco silos saving the day ending the game as well [Music] thank you well it looks like I may have been too hard on you boys you do have what it takes to be heroes another thing that hits me whenever I replay this game is that a criticism I often see people Levy against Jack and Daxter is that it's mechanically fine-tuned near Perfection but the game doesn't have much personality and you know what I really think that's just not true the reason people say it is because this game is one with a silent protagonist and a more Simple Story compared to say Ratchet and Clank which released the year after this which had a more developing story throughout the game and a more contentious relationship between its two lead characters and Sly Cooper also dropped in 2002 and I shouldn't even bring that game up I mean how does any game compare to the goaded trilogy and come out unscathed my point is that I see where the criticism comes from but I personally think it's overstated and is also not true the writing and characters of Jack 1 are more memorable than people give a credit for when just looking at the story I think it's an entertaining plot that's well told you don't know who the mysterious villains are at the beginning but they're clearly up to some something throughout the whole game on your quest to find Gaul to help Daxter get back to normal but him being the villain connects the dots in your mind setting up for the climax where Daxter albeit reluctantly decides to not use light Eco to turn himself back to normal because using it to stop the robot is more important it's not much but I think what they did is good and also when getting into the memorability argument it's really subjective simply because my counter argument is that I remember it quite well the driving force the cutscenes is Daxter and the way he interacts with the various characters is Unforgettable if you ask me like yeah lightning molds we can maybe for two power cells I thought that's one of your vital organs walking off tough guy the NPCs that bounce off of daxter's energy are also memorable to me like when the warrior says so full of Valor armor shining in the sun I climbed the hill to take him on but he pounded me like one tenderizes a yako steak have you tried attacking him with your melodrama cause it's killing me most of the cutscenes are Daxter roasting the NPCs you meet but my favorite cutscenes are with Daxter trade and insults with Samos who's my favorite character in this series especially in this game where he's one of the few characters who just doesn't take anything from Daxter the two of you went mucking around and the only place that I told you not to go Misty Island that's right and then and Dexter you finally took a much needed bath but in a bathtub filled with dark Eco whack old man are you gonna keep yapping are you gonna help me out of this mess I'm Gonna Keep you open because in my professional opinion the change is an improvement but he also genuinely comes to respect the Duo's efforts as the game goes on despite laughing at the idea of them being Heroes at the start of the game the dialogue is burned into my brain for almost every cut scene so I can't agree that this game lacks personality I think it's exploding with it just not as much as Ratchet and Clank people tend to Hype hypothesize that the lacking personality was one of the biggest things Jack and Daxter had going against it upon release but I don't think that tells the whole story looking back at the development of Jack and Daxter it's like this game was lab engineered to be as popular as possible when Naughty Dog designed the character of Crash she clearly took inspiration from the Looney Tunes very Western in style however crash's design was changed in Japan to make him suitable for the market Naughty Dog didn't want that to happen to Jack so his design wasn't just their product son of America Sony of Europe and Sony of Japan were all involved in giving feedback to the designs of Jack and Daxter therefore designing characters that would be universally appealing all over the world they got what they wanted since test audiences in Japan felt Jack had Western influences just going off of his build but in the west audiences felt he had anime influences with his hair in his ears a mix of different art styles that made Jack feel at home in every region was the goal they even said in the PlayStation magazine that if Jack doesn't reach the same audience as crash it wouldn't be for a lack of trying and that's the thing Jack and Daxter came out to raving reviews and sold very well however it did not sell as well as crash and the Jack sequels would suffer the effects of diminishing returns compared to the crash sequels as I said people have cited Jack's character and the game's story is why this is but I don't his character is appealing in all regions the game's story is Charming no what happened was something naughty dog could not have possibly prepared for 2001 was a big year for the PS2 with Jack and Daxter being the console's obligatory family game but 2001 was a year that showed you really don't need a family game as the face of your console Jack 1 is a perfectly executed game based upon the ideals of most 90s Platformers but the market had changed we can go more in depth on this when covering Jack 2 next week but let me put it like this in the holiday season of 2001 the PS2 got iconic games like yes Jack and Daxter but also Final Fantasy 10 Silent Hill 2 and Devil May Cry the first and the most based action franchise of all time as well as that gear game people seem to like and most importantly Grand Theft Auto 3. this game more or less changed the video game industry overnight from a design standpoint this game had taken the open world feel from the first two GTA games on PS1 but evolved it into being full 3d adding an extra layer of immersion I'm not going to say this game invented the sandbox genre genre but needless to say if you play any game today or really any game in the last 20 years that involved you running around a large open world with tasks and objectives marked on a mini map or with waypoints that game was influenced by Grand Theft Auto 3 in some way but more importantly GTA 3 changed the video game industry in a cultural sense this game generated a large source of controversy back when it was released in 2001. playing as an escaped convict doing various amounts of criminal activity just sparked a discussion about what was acceptable in video games this debate ranged from video game websites rating it the most offensive game of 2001 to full-on news stations discussing the violent and sexual material depicted within the game now the game was rated M meaning players 17 and up could play it but the discussion was more about if explicitly playing as the bad guy doing bad things like carjacking and beating innocent people up with a baseball bat and outrunning the law alongside other things I won't mention to keep this video Advertiser friendly was someone that even should be in a mainstream video game obviously video games had controversies before GTA 3 I mean the ESRB rating system was created in the 90s as a result of increasingly violent games even if those had more limited graphics compared to what GTA 3 and now games of today had in them but this one was different despite all the controversy caused by Grand Theft Auto 3 it clearly didn't make a change because the PS2 alone got two more GTA games and then the series continued onto GTA 4 and GTA 5 which they then ported endlessly for the next nine years but why well GTA 3 was the highest selling game of 2001. first controversy sells this much is a fact the game getting so much media attention only put more Spotlight onto it and made more people curious to try it but more importantly GTA 3 came out in the early 2000s which I think is fundamentally the largest demographic shift the gaming industry has ever seen and then I'd argue we'll ever see now really strap in because it may seem that there's nothing to do with Jack but bear with me I'm going somewhere with this just by looking at the context of the early 2000s in gaming you'll see why this demographic shift happened and how it was more or less inevitable in the 80s and into the 90s video games were largely considered a children's thing it still is today however seeing a video game console in a home that does not contain children is pretty normal this is just a mainstream thing for people of all ages and demographics nowadays more mature games existed in the 90s like Boomer Shooters Mortal Kombat and a plethora of rated mps1 games but like I said I think it's fair to say that back in the 80s and 90s games were more or less considered a children's hobby that's the the audience they were appealing to after all but the generation that grew up on the first Nintendo largely didn't stop playing games into their older years if you were 5 years old when Super Mario Brothers came out in 1985 then by the release of the PlayStation 2 in 2000 you'd be 20 years old maybe during the PS1 ERA this demographic thought games like Mario and crash were cool but also got enjoyment of the mature games that were making the rounds as well but by the release of GTA 3 in 2001 this age group was well into their 20s these were full adults still playing the newest video games with their own money a new large portion of the audience so as a result in the early 2000s the mature games just became the biggest and most popular ones C GTA 3 mgs2 Halo 1 and the list goes on games like Metal Gear Solid 2 demonstrated that game players were willing and interested in more complex plot lines and I should note I always throw digs the Metal Gear series but old fans of mine should know that I'm only 75 kidding when I say I don't like MGS like I used to games like Devil May Cry show that the main character have a little more personality without being straight up annoying and games like Halo Combat Evolved on Microsoft's Xbox really went to show that the face of a console didn't have to be a colorful mascot platformer but then you might be wondering what's the problem here can't both audiences coexist well they could and they definitely did but GTA 3 type games being the most popular game for adults affected all audiences that's how we Circle back to Jack and Daxter Jack and Daxter was a success it broke new ground on animation and World design got great reviews and sold well but it did not reach the audience of Crash simply because the time of its release was the time the industry was changed forever and that's that but when looking at what naughty dog did they made a great game regardless of all that context I think this game was a true Masterpiece because of its rewarding gameplay and satisfying feel it's a game I can always come back to and know I'll have a good time with and that's got to be worth something the game will always be well made and fun regardless of whether or not the top of the charts like its contemporaries may have which still like I said it's not even like it didn't succeed it's a landmark game in the early PS2 days I'm just saying that in terms of popularity it was just the right game at the wrong time on an episode of Dev plays where Tim Shaffer played video games alongside one of the lead designers on that particular game Jason Rubin explained this change in the audience better than I ever could so I'll let him say it we were we had already started working on Jack 2 and I remember doing a focus group with and two eight-year-olds were in this focus group and I was like so what do you think and they acted like 16 year olds like eight year olds well no the graphics are good and we really like the gameplay we like what you're doing and the expansion of the universe really this would be a fantastic game for our little brothers and you're like you're eight what are you playing Grand Theft Auto yeah and it just changed everything focus groups so yeah Naughty Dog seeing that the kinds of games they had made were just falling out of style wasn't sure if continuing Jack and Daxter was really something worth doing so they came to an agreement with Sony that there was still a lot more you could do with Jack and Daxter that hadn't been done so they radically transformed the identity of Jack and Daxter into something much different this is where the divisive elements of The Game come in some feel like the Jack sequels are a transparent attempt to desperately grab the mainstream audience shining a light on how the precursor Legacy was basically doing the same thing just with a different audience I don't see it that way because like I said at the beginning Jack 2 is one of my favorite games and today we're going to be exploring all the things that jak2 does to evolve this series and the gaming industry in positive ways and then also gush over why I enjoy it as much as I do so strap in this might be a slightly longer video than usual but I think it's worth it because we're talking about Jack too [Music] thank you for every age there is a time of trial the Rocks faced such a fire before they were the strength beneath our feet the plants Brave fast winds before their Roots could give us life as a sage of considerable years I have known only one such great ordeal yet the hero it created was a champion all time I had to let that full sequence play out I've always felt the opening monologue from Samos really got me in gear for an epic story much more than the opening monologue from Jack 1. Jack 2 places much more emphasis on story than the previous game the first game had a little over half an hour's worth of cinematics but Jack 2 has over 90 minutes of cut scenes telling a much more in-depth story than the first game Jason Rubin said this when promoting Jack 1 that the gamers want more for the same exact price but they want more so it was time for Naughty Dog as a studio to take the plot more seriously so what are we dealing with here well if you got a hundred power cells in Jack one then you'd see Jack Daxter Kira and Samos react to opening this giant door that flashed white if you look at fully completing games as a method of obtaining a cool reward this is pretty lame but in my case I like to complete that game because I find it rewarding intrinsically but this ending did serve to set up a sequel and here we are the group has taken what was inside of the door and somehow lugged it all the way back to samos's Hut what they found was a giant precursor ring and a rift Rider to travel through it in order to activate it Jack has to use his special powers to make it work which caused the rift gate to open as monsters tear through alongside their leader the group manages to escape by going through the rift but Jack and Daxter get separated from Kira and Samos Landing in a place completely different from what they're used to a whole city walled off from the rest of the world called haven City patrolled by the crimson guard who seemingly knew Jack was going to be here and captured him as Daxter makes a getaway two years later we see that Jack has been held as a prisoner of Baron Praxis the dictator ruling Haven City Praxis and his right-hand man Arrow have been performing torturous dark Eco experiments on Jack as a part of their dark warrior program this allows Jack to tap into the dark Eco in his body to transform into a destructive monster called dark Jack this also taking away Jack's previous Eco Powers the point of the experiment is to give them an edge in their war against the metal heads that threaten to destroy the city the same monsters that came through the rift at the beginning after two years of this Praxis rules the dark warrior program as a failure and says to kill Jack later since they aren't getting the results they want but Daxter miraculously comes to the rescue is we get this moment here that changes the dynamic of the series and sets the stage for Jack too I kill Praxis yeah Jack can now fully speak this is a tricky one for the team because like I said in the last video Jack was a mute character he never spoke one word of dialogue throughout the entire game and that's because they just thought a character with his own personality would distract from the immersion of the game the other games at the time had characters with their own personalities that weren't annoying or just terribly voice acted so it was time for a change Jack now speaks in most of the cutscenes they tried to make it as smooth of a transition as possible in an earlier version of the story that you can read from the Jack 2 design Bible the original intention was to just have Jack start talking from the very beginning of the game even though it takes place right after the first game's ending that would have been jarring to the audience so I'm glad they changed it to where at the start of Jack too Jack is exactly who he was in the first game but two years of dark Eco experiments later Jack is pissed and ready for action as Daxter remarks a few times in the early scenes that it's weird for Jack to now talk but that's just to say to the audience yeah Jack talks now you gotta just go along with it I think the change was for the better Jack one had funny moments as a result of Daxter being the one who could talk I Jack two ghoul back and forth throughout the game and I find that much more entertaining where would you be without me adax well Jack I probably wouldn't be two feet tall fuzzy and running around in a sewer without a pair of pants God I miss pants special shout out to Mike Irwin who brought the character of Jack to life I can't put it any better than naughty dog did in the behind the scenes video you look at the art of Jack in this game and you hear the voice Mike does and it's like yeah that's Jack so who or what do we have to shake down knockout or blow up all in all I think the game made the transition between Jack's Old personality and his new one as gracefully as they could but then they just move on once it's established back to the story Jack and Daxter escape praxis's prison meet an old man named core outside with protecting a child who is apparently important Cora tells Jack and Daxter that there's a rebellion being waged against Baron Praxis called The Underground that he helps out and that they should join the underground is led by someone called The Shadow but when they join they only deal with torn until they prove themselves worthy of meeting the shadow so that's the big picture for the First Act of the game Jack and Daxter proving themselves to the underground meeting various people who live in Haven City navigating characters with different motivations and tasks that they want you to do as you work your way up the ranks the underground hoping to meet the Shadow and get revenge on Baron Praxis for what he's done to Jack setting up the journey now with all this talk of what's changed regarding Jack 2 coming off the first game that naturally leads one to wonder how different the actual game is the answer is when playing as Jack nothing is different Jack's entire moveset from the precursor Legacy is still in Jack too his punch spin uppercut dive roll roll jump all that everything that made Jack fun to play in the first game is still present in Jack 2 and they gave every action a really satisfying sound effect too something I noticed when doing all of Jack's moves in Rapid succession not a big deal I'm just saying genuinely the only change that I can think of is When jumping out of a dive Jack will do this spin in the air instead of just jumping back into the air like it did in Jack one which is a quality improvement in terms of making every animation seamless but yeah despite the game trying to age the series up a bit the game is still built off the back of things that made Jack one's animation work like squash and stretch in your attacks and daxter's responses to your movements and those things still work just as well in Jack 2. Jack 1 made advancing the technology in games to another level one of its core elements and Jack 2 keeps that going Jack one had an option for a crop 16x9 display something other 2001 PS2 titles weren't doing so that game is ahead of the curve on that but Jack 2 adds to the graphical options by including a toggle for progressive scan or a 480p resolution games running at 480p was a little more common on Nintendo's GameCube and Microsoft's Xbox but on the PlayStation 2 a vast majority of games running at 480i which sees the image on screen flickering due to the way displays draw every frame in 480i for technical reasons I don't care to explain point is running at 480p produces a cleaner and more defined look that also puts Jack 2 on the small list of games of the PlayStation 2 that did have 480p support the most impressive technical achievement in Jack 2 is the way the cutscenes are presented though this was the first game where noidog utilized cutscene models in the gameplay the models are pretty much the same quality as what you saw in Jack 1. but Jack 1 used those gameplay character models in its cut scenes where you could see how the models are dated today since you have to look at them up close Jack 2 uses lower poly models for gameplay but then made more detailed models for the cutscenes where you'd be admiring the details of the characters much more a character model from the precursor Legacy had about 3 000 polygons but these cutscene models in Jack 2 will have close to 15 000 giving the characters more detail like in daxter's fur Jack's Hair their clothes in the various characters they just look fantastic and then in motion it's even better Jack 2 even with its significantly higher cutscene counts still put great effort into the animation with fast movement lots of detail and movements on the screen at once from the various characters and expressive facial animation with all these improvements over the first game I figured I'd also mention that when playing on PS2 there are some technical issues compared to the first one Jack one ran at a perfect 60 frames per second when a lot of actions going on in Jack 2 the frame rate will dip to a degree where you would notice even if it's not game breaking I also found pop in very noticeable during my playthrough where I'd get close to enemies and just see details appear on their models the closer I got I also saw cases of visible culling of geometry which I don't think he ever did in Jack one or even naughty dog's crash games on PS1 much more distracting would be how frequent screen tearing is in this game it's hard to spot when things are going really fast however you might notice in cut scenes especially that things might seem jittery and that's because of screen tearing if you take any cutscene to look at it frame by frame you'll notice what I'm saying a line will just appear on the screen especially when changing angles from one shot to another but this also does happen in gameplay in addition to that I think the game's way of having no load screens is a little less impressive than Jack one when playing it since in that game you could walk from samosa his Hut to go on Maya Citadel without having to wait in Jack 2 you don't stop and see a screen that says now loading but the game definitely has loading zones like these passageways between areas have these big gears on them the door opens when the game is done loading Jack one used cutscenes for loading like the ride to Misty Island from sandover Village I just think that overall Jack one disguised loading better than Jack 2 where you'll see a cut scene of you flying away and then cut to Black for a few seconds before reaching the next area as I'm sure you all know by now I prefer playing my PS2 games on an actual PS2 but after years of having played this game on the 2012 HD collection and then going back to the PS2 Release you see that the loading in these rooms is much faster on PS3 than on PS2 as you'd expect but then when playing on an original disc it just makes the loading more apparent to me speaking of the HD Collection though that is how most people will experience this game these days and all these issues from frame jobs to screen tearing are not present there it's only like that on PS2 while it sounds like I'm being negative towards Jack 2's visual presentation I'm not I'm just making sure that in the interest of balance that I point out the ways the game pushed the graphics forward but also how it had new obstacles to Performance as a result I said these were technical inferiorities to Jack one but that just depends on your point of view technically Jack one had a perfect frame rate and didn't see nearly as much pop in or screen tearing but that's not because Jack 2 is inferior technologically to Jack one that's because Jack 2 was pushing the limits of the PlayStation 2 Hardware much more than the last game more enemies on screen more NPCs a larger world so yeah maintaining these things without loading screens and doing that while targeting 60fps and including these high poly cutscene character models is going to be a lot tougher on the hardware than Jack one which didn't do any of that but then when you level the playing field between the two on something like the PS3 HD Collection it's pretty obvious that Jack 2 is much more technologically advanced than its predecessor and what I'm realizing is that we haven't even gotten into the meat of the game yet and this video is already two-thirds the lengths of the Jack 1 video what can I say being a big YouTuber sure does make you nitpicky so having said that once you're in the world of Jack 2 what do you do well Haven city is where you're stuck for the entire game and the city is divided into a couple of areas but these are all blocked with security passes so at first you only have access to the slums or the underground bases located you go here and get objectives from torn you leave the base and then see the minimap displayed in the lower right as you follow these icons leading you to important destinations this much works just like Grand Theft Auto 3 and it's pretty intuitive by the end of the game you'll know the map to Haven City pretty well however it's great that you have a map at all times that displays these icons and you just follow them as it takes you on the path to your next objective but this is just how you get from place to place the actual destinations make up the core content of Jack 2. outside the security walls lie dangerous areas like dead town where the metal head armies overwhelmed the crimson guard to the point of a retreat the pumping station which is also overrun by metal heads the sewers the drill platform the Dig and some others each time you visit these locations you have a mission to do but then you keep coming back to these areas throughout the game game which might sound repetitive but you always uncover something new in the process I'll take the pumping station as an example the first time you go here you take a right from this platform because it's the only path available to you on your quest to turn the valve on that brings the water back to the slums but the next time you go here is where you have to protect Sig while he hunts for giant metal heads Sig uses his Ultra powerful Peacemaker gun to blow open this tank that allows you to go where you couldn't before then the next time you go here you find a pathway you hadn't taken before to meet Ashlyn The Baron's daughter who secretly working with the underground while she's under attack from the metal heads all the locations you visit are like this where it may be the same area but what you do is completely different each time and what you see might also be different it's like how your first mission at the Dig is this jet board challenge where you grind on Rails to destroy this giant machine but then the next time you visit here is a long Mission with exploration combat and platforming to reach a seal piece you need to progress playing this game again has only reminded me of the fact that I do believe this is an authentic sequel to the first game from a gameplay perspective I already mentioned the fact that Jackson higher move set from the precursor Legacy is here and accounted for in Jack two so from that alone players of the first game should have an easy time getting into Jack too but then when actually playing it you see the game puts just as much of a focus on tight platforming in its levels as the first game areas like praxis's Palace the Dig and Mars tomb show this off best where you got time your swinging jumps right and land on moving platforms so it's just as satisfying as it was in the first game to roll jump off of Ledges and high jump off the platform you land on to make it to the next one and when you're fast enough to get all the moving platform segments done in one cycle without waiting you feel pretty rad if anything I think it might actually be more fun in Jack 2 than the first game because the platforming segments throughout this game are actually more difficult on average than what you'd find in the first game and more complex too as you have more movement options like the escape from praxis's Palace at the end of the game you gotta make these perilous jumps over a bottomless pit while blasting the enemies from afar and then at this moment you gotta shoot the glass out of the window to grind along the ledge with your jet board it's really fun and exciting it's easy to think Jack 2 is a radical departure from the first game and in many ways it obviously is but in the core DNA of what the first game was trying to achieve is still in Jack 2. by that I mean on the surface this game is not a colorful collect-a-thon obviously but what was Jack one trying to do well it wanted to take elements that games from the late 90s had utilized like the platforming of Super Mario 64 the grand scale and story and mythology of Ocarina of Time or Final Fantasy and paying attention to the details like Banjo-Kazooie and combining those elements into something that had all of those things at once that felt fresh just the same while impressing you with its jaw-dropping visuals and Technology Jack 2 just realized that the elements they were taking weren't what the industry was most impressed by anymore so they still took their platforming focused gameplay and thought how do we adapt this into what's popular so you have a game that tries to take the open World mission-based gameplay from Grand Theft Auto and combining that with some creative gun play and incorporate elements from Tony Hawk into the game for that extra youth appeal and giving it a post-apocalyptic Blade Runner cyberpunk Vibe has been the backdrop of their more serious story while still playing exactly like Jack 1. it's an interesting mix but definitely feels like a sequel to Jack one just not the one you'd expect now that doesn't mean the implementation of these things is above criticism because mixing popular elements from other games is a staple of the series driving in Jack 2 is one of the main areas the game gets flacked for a lot of folks find it boring now I've kind of flip-flopped on this issue over the years in my earlier playthroughs back in the day I found driving between missions to be the part where you get to relax from The Challenge of the missions that issue we'll talk about later don't you worry but then when I got better at the game I tended to think that the long commute between areas just took up too much time in my playthrough now I think there's still truth to that you start in the slums but then you gain access to this industrial district a long sequence of passageways that leads to the port at the bottom of the map you then gain access to the left side of the map where the gardens and the bazaar are located and at the very top of the map is the stadium that leads to the main town which is the most developed area and sees praxis's Palace at the very center which Stands Tall Above the Rest of the City the map in this game is pretty large so when you're in the port at the bottom and your next objective is located at the stadium that's a pretty long drive same for being in the gardens and having to go all the way back to the slums and talk to torn or whoever it's just a long commute from area to area since there aren't a lot of shortcuts or easy ways to do it however I find the act of driving in Jack to fun like GTA you get around by stealing people's cars but technology has evolved in the Jack world to where the Zoomers you rode in Jack 1 are now capable of full flight and have different classes the basic Zoomer is the fastest and the one you'd best grab if you want to move quickly however these are pretty vulnerable and blow up easily therefore if your mission is to destroy something on the move you're best grabbing a heavy vehicle which turns worse and moves slower but the Boost in defense is worth it for these missions sometimes you'll find a crimson guard bike just sitting around unoccupied and these are the best moments because then you feel all the benefits of grabbing that sweet ride a fast hover bike with a cannon on the front just without instantly setting the whole city on alert when piloting these vehicles you have to switch between the low Zone and the hover Zone I just think it's fun going really fast and weaving in and out of traffic but going high and going low especially when on the run from the guards so my overall stance is at some moments driving can get old if it goes on for a few minutes but for most of the game I find it enjoyable even more fun than that is the new jet board Jack and Daxter get their hands on a hoverboard that you first test out in this skating rink where you have to do combo tricks to get high points thing feels great to use to the point where in this playthrough when my drive was short enough I'd even just take the jet board to where I was going because then I'd go mad with the tricks and the grind rails getting from place to place if you do a perfect 360 spin you get an instant speed boost and the controller vibrates when you land which is great feedback R1 allows you to do basic tricks like spins but on L1 you can do these crazy combo tricks that Grant you more points for comboing them together without touching the ground and just looks really sick as a jack 2 vet using the jet board to get through basic segments gets more enjoyable with each run especially this late game mission in the strip mine that makes you use the jet board to grind on Rails getting through here without dying and while maintaining the speed from the board is some good fun but of course if we're talking about Jack's extra gear there's one elephant in the room seek we are Capitan he had his friend [Music] that baby can do try the gun goals outside show me some skew with that hardware and I'll Hive for a job actually after the fifth Mission Jack and Daxter meet crew and his right hand man Sig crew sends the three of them and hunt down some metal heads but to make sure Jack has the Firepower to watch ziggs back you're granted the morph gun I absolutely love everything about the morph gun in Jack 2 you have access to four weapons first is the red scatter gun shortly after you get the yellow Blaster then a bit later you get the blue Vulcan barrel and towards the end of the game you get the dark Peacemaker these are four modes that the morph gun switches between four modes the player switches between with the four d-pad buttons the morph gun switching between these four settings is one of my favorite animations to look at in the game most of the time you won't even see it as the camera is behind Jack when you do look at it it's cool the gun doesn't just click or pop between settings you can actually see the barrel change shape when switching between the modes as Jack holds each one differently and fires each one differently it's such a neat way to bring guns into the Jack and Daxter series you don't play is Jack firing some realistic assault rifle like it's Shadow the Hedgehog from 2005. this is a Sci-Fi weapon that you want to see up close since it's so original you also want to see the various animations they gave Jack and Daxter when using it I do say Daxter because they allow the player to fire guns while driving by having Daxter grab the morph gun from Jack's back while he's the one driving the vehicle they also made each mode of the morph gun tie back to mechanics from the first game I mentioned earlier that as a result of praxis's dark Eco experiments on Jack he no longer has the ability to use Eco powers or interact with precursor artifacts like he did in Jack 1. but these guns are all made using the various Eco types as ammunition in Jack 1 red Eco major attacks more powerful and allows you to easily wipe out small groups of close by enemies the scatter gun is a weaponized form of red Eco that you use to blow enemies back from close range yellow Eco allowed Jack to shoot Fireballs out of his hand and so the Blaster is their basic gun that used to shoot enemies both close and from afar blue Eco made Jack run faster so naturally the Vulcan Barrel shoots rapidly across the screen and The Peacemaker uses dark Eco to unload electric destruction all over the screen these are very basic video game gun archetypes like the shotgun the rifle the Gatling gun and the grenade launcher but they take these familiar ideas and just give them a Jack and Daxter twist jak2's Gunplay is very unconventional but I love it when you get the hang of it there's nothing that plays quite like it for example you can't strafe around enemies in Jack 2 but I don't feel like I ever needed it because they designed weapons that were meant to be used alongside Jack's existing move set if you need distance you roll jump away from the enemies and start shooting them and the generous auto aim will do the rest each weapon just feels really useful throughout the game like if you see a crowd of small enemies come rushing your way you know to bust out the scatter gun and tear them to pieces if you're in combat with the bigger enemies you spin kick or punch them first and then fire the Blaster to do three shots right on them something could get taught when you first unlock the weapon when enemies are firing at you from afar the Vulcan Barrel will stop them dead in their tracks as you unload your ammo upon them and then when surrounded by enemies or a tough boss in the late game you use The Peacemaker to level the playing field not that there's only one use for weapons as the Blaster is great with distance it just doesn't have the stun power of the Vulcan Barrel the scatter gun can put some room between you and the bigger enemies as its range is pretty big but the rate of fire is slower than the Blaster and less Precision than the spin kick Blaster maneuver but all the weapons are viable in most combat situations but each weapon does shine in its own areas and for the millionth time I just love the sound effects that's not to say every method of combat in Jack 2 is a hit one of the main thing advertised in this game is Jack's new transformation dark Jack that has been Unleashed thanks to the experiments defeated enemies will drop dark Eco that fills up this gauge around your health bar when it's full we can press a button to become dark Jack but this barely gets used throughout the game your melee attacks are more powerful in this mode eagle flying all over the screen to the point where you can barely control yourself when activated you're also stuck with it until the bar is depleted meaning that if you do use it you want it to be worth the full bar of dark Eco and most situations aren't like that it can't use any weapons either this is absolutely something you only use when you're desperate and surrounded by enemies otherwise it's just not that useful it kind of creates a weird disconnect between the gameplay and the story since cutscenes say Jack is his vicious Dark Side from this transformation but I never use it so yeah you do get upgrades for dark Jack via Metal Head skull gems that you give to the precursor Oracle these are fun to use like the dark bomb that clears enemies or the electric dark blast that clears boss health bar cars but again it doesn't make the form any more useful compared to your other options late in the game you might get the invincibility mode which speaks for itself and then finally there's the Dark giant where you can grow double your size and run rampant throughout the city like you're the Hulk or something but I've never obtained this during the campaign so it's not very useful to me I've actually never fully completed this game as a whole I mean I beat in the campaign plenty of times trust me but I mean that you can collect precursor orbs like the first game and Daxter explains these are worth a lot now because they're rarer than they were in Jack 1. I just never bothered collecting them all because I don't see the point collecting all the precursor orbs grants you need extras like being able to re-watch cutscenes replay missions and view great concept art but if I ever want to play Jack 2 I'm just going to play the whole game not individual missions or cut scenes and the Arts on Google at this point for 200 precursor orbs you unlock hero mode a harder version of the campaign maybe that's worth a live stream one day we shall see I've never played it before and I don't really have the time now I mean have you seen how long this video has been thus far collecting precursor orbs in this game involves searching through the tiniest nooks and crannies of every area some of which are only accessible once in the campaign and are otherwise just doing busy work like going through Rings or reaching a destination Before Time Runs Out needless to say I'm just fine doing the campaign although I should note hero mode is unlocked with 200 orbs and there are 286 in the game so you can miss a few which is nice but I'm now wildly off subject from what I was talking about a few moments ago which was the game's combat I was saying that it was pretty balanced and fun I wasn't sure if I should just start out by saying that I thought it was balanced well because that's not the common consensus one of the main abilities Jack has with his guns is shooting them while spinning in the air so many players have adopted this strategy of grabbing the blaster or jumping spinning and firing sending shots all over the screen in the hopes they kill the enemies believing this to be the dominant strategy of Jack 2. I used to play like this myself but in more recent years I stopped doing that as much only doing that when I had no Health left and he did a quick Hail Mary before I got killed in the hopes I'd survived but this is a bad strategy to rely on for most of the combat situations in the game this video by powersell Zeke explains it pretty well I'll link it below when I first watched this video the things I had been noticing about the game's combat were definitely validated but I'll quickly sum it up the jump spin shoot Strat leaves up to chance as to whether or not your shots will hit the enemies as they just fly all over the screen in random directions this drains your ammo like it's nobody's business when the Blaster has much more accuracy just being used normally and when enemies are firing at you from afar it's much easier to grab the Vulcan barrel and shoot them locking them in place before they die in the metal head Nest at the end of the game I was attacked by a group of small enemies and some big metal heads that fired lasers what I did was bust out the scatter gun and kill the little guys with it and then used the Vulcan Barrel to stop the laser guys from firing while I weld on them if I just did the jump spin shoot you can clearly see that I'm hitting the enemies technically but you see how much ammo is being wasted on shots that are not hitting anything draining resources in the hope that I hit my foes with some of these stray shots it can work but you'll likely take damage and probably die because that's what happens to a lot of players when playing the game like this when the true dominant strategy is using all your moves together like punches and spin kicks and unarmed enemies the scatter gun on fast moving tiny enemies the Blaster spin kick move on armed enemies the Vulcan Barrel enemies from far away and The Peacemaker on bullet sponges are boss fights so yeah I really have no issue saying that this game is a pretty balanced combat system when using all your tools together the jump spin shoot strategy is a large contributor on why many players feel this game is very challenging believe me if you think jak2 is a challenging game I'm not calling you out this isn't even a new position the PlayStation Magazine review got flacked from readers back in 2003 because of the fact that the author criticized Jack 2 for its difficulty balancing a full magazine article was written on the top 10 hardest missions in Jack 2. YouTubers have been discussing the difficulty of this game in their videos for well over a decade now I just said that the jump spin shoot strategy is part of why but really there are many factors in why this game is considered so difficult that have nothing to do with the player's capability or method of approach in fact I used to think this game was insanely difficult I was right there with you guys spending 30 minutes on get the steel piece from the slums of the final boss of the various race track missions the game is tough as Nails on the first playthrough side tangent I know but I just want to throw it out there that when I was a kid I never made real progress in Jack two or three I just bumbled around causing trouble in the city whenever I read recount this fact in a video I then follow it up with then later I tried to beat the game for the first time when I was older in 2011 but it really Dawns on me now that there's a much bigger gap between 2011 and now than Jack 2's release in 2003 and my finally beating it in 2011. there are people older than me who have felt this much more but I'm just saying I feel old and that's a new experience for someone in their 20s anyway back to the game discussion when fighting enemies in Jack 2 a problem you're bound to run into is a newcomer is the fact that Jack has no iframes when getting hit so if you get cornered by a group of enemies you'll take all that damage with no breathing room this was true in Jack 1 but I never mentioned it because the lurkers were never the threat that the metal heads are in Jack 2. these guys are faster have more attacks are more aggressive and have more projectiles and more of them are on the screen so now iframes or trip up players more in Jack 2 than the precursor Legacy the other major issue which act 2's difficulty balancing is the checkpoints there are several missions that just have no checkpoints at all the escape from the palace at the end of the game is an example but there are so many missions you could use as an example like backing up Sig in the cavern or escorting these three morons to the heart of mar gem if you die it's all the way back to the beginning of the mission I don't think Jack 2 asks a lot of its players in the moment-to-moment gameplay but when the consequences of failure made a boatload of progress is lost just feels really punishing but then the game is very inconsistent with this too some missions do have generous checkpoints throughout the game but others simply have none it just throws the balance of the game out of whack you can't tell if the designers were trying to make a punishing game or were just slap Dash with their checkpoint placements the lack of iframes and the checkpoints was the biggest thing that tripped me up back in 2011 and I guess I also just thought it was funny to play off the rage because my favorite YouTubers did it and therefore I must copy their personality to the letter oh o to be 11 again anyway these two issues are things I will admit to if you don't like the game on those grounds or have issues with driving for minutes on end and all that I get it nobody has to like the game as much as I do or I just look past those things to enjoy what I enjoy about the game in fact in the main platforming missions I kind of like the harsh checkpoints it gives the game a real intense Vibe when you get to the end of a mission but you can't get sloppy because a poorly timed jump could mean redoing the whole level it adds some suspense to the experience which I'd imagine was something they wanted given the more serious story and intimidating setting because of the way the combat is designed it makes the metal heads a more consistent threat from start to finish I just talked about how they come in all shapes and sizes throughout the game and this gives them variety as enemies but then they're also interesting villains from an art design and story perspective when researching the first game I saw them note in the artwork that they intentionally designed all the human characters or the long ears so that players would associate them instantly as someone on your side and on the flip side they designed all the lurker enemies from the basic grunt to the big guy and even the lurker shark to all share a massive underbite making you instantly recognize that they're the enemy these are the kinds of details you'd never think of while playing the game but has a subconscious effect on you while playing Jack 2 takes that philosophy and uses it to its Advantage first they designed the metal heads in a similar fashion every metal head has solid yellow eyes and a giant shining skull Jam that you collect upon defeating them but they also wanted these guys to appear more menacing Naughty Dog noted that no player would ever find the lurkers to be a threat in Jack 1. you just see them and punch them but in Jack 2 it was all designed to be more challenging like I've said in terms of the story The Simple good guys and bad guys art design from Jack 1 is used to show how things have changed in the world for example one of your regular threats in this game is the crimson guard but these are all normal humans led by completely normal humans but the lurkers are now a permanent underclass that you help escape slavery coming to befriend a lurker named Bruder who even has evolved to walk on two feet but then again we're over 40 minutes into the video now and if you haven't played the game you don't even know what's going on and what I mean when I say the art design and characters show how the world has changed so allow me to fix that Jack and Daxter find out four missions in that Baron Praxis is secretly giving barrels of Eco to metal heads whom he claims he's fighting against Torin tells Jack and Daxter to go meet crew an arms dealer in the city to hopefully get on his good side and then learn why the baron is doing this the answer is that the metal heads need Eco to live and since Praxis knows he can't beat the metal heads he cut a deal with them promising that he'd give them Eco in secret and in exchange they'll attack the city just enough to Warrant praxis's continued rule Praxis is an illegitimate leader the guy who once fought off the metal heads was called Mar he created Haven City and the shield wall that surrounds it to keep the metal heads from getting in the true heir to Mars Throne is a kid whose whereabouts are currently unknown as long as metalheads attack the city Praxis can continue his unjust rule over Haven City it turns out that this kid the underground's taken care of is Mars air and they intend to put him back on the throne after they take down Baron Praxis Jak and daxter's missions do a lot of good in the underground's cause Rising through the ranks of the group to the point where the the shadow decides it's time to meet them after a mission in dead town where they stop the metal heads from destroying the sacred site a place the metal heads seemed to be drawn to but for the duo it's a shocking discovery that the sacred site is samos's Hut from the precursor Legacy and that dead town is what's left of sandover village where they grew up revealing that the rift ring the characters traveled through took them hundreds of years into the future but things get scarier when it turns out the shadow is a younger version of Samos the player might have been able to guess that they were in the future before this point when you see that a 15 years younger version of Samos is leading the underground now you really want to know how the story is going to play out as J and D meet up with Kira who works as a mechanic and still don't know what happened to the old Samos they knew setting up a lot of intrigue for the second act of the story now while all this serious stuff is going on around Jack and Daxter I still think Jack 2 is a funny game barring the humor that was obviously included to appeal to 13 year old boys I think that Jack 2 in terms of comedic value is actually funnier than Jack one and like Jack one the humor value comes from Daxter in the first game the humor was largely Daxter being snarky and rude to the various people you met during the game but it's no doubt that the funniest scenes in the precursor Legacy were the ones that made Daxter the butt of the joke which is why Samos was my favorite character in the game as he'd roast Daxter every chance he got but now a lot more characters are doing that and it's just very entertaining fair enough even when other characters aren't involved Daxter is consistently taking punishment in these cut scenes like he's got some Universal bad luck follow me even when he tries turning the tables on Jack he still gets the short end of the stick s but I don't just enjoy the slapstick comedy of Daxter I think Jack 2 has great character interactions between the cast I can say that because Jack too has a core cast of characters Jack one's gameplay Focus structure meant that all the people you saw in the world were just one-offs that gave you a power cell here you regularly interact with and take missions from the same people and so they give each one a personality and a different motivation for being in the story they also designed missions that affected the world you were playing in continuing off with a precursor Legacy contextualizing everything you do but back to the characters I just love the cast in this game like Sig he's a total Powerhouse that works for crew but he's growing more uncomfortable with the kinds of jobs he has to do each day so he starts off all tough but he starts to like Jack and Daxter the more the game goes on or torn who used to be the lead of the crimson guard but quit due to the cruelty displayed by Praxis one of my favorite new characters is Vin who's a total nervous wreck who's always fretting over the threat of the metal heads and the scenes with him and Daxter are some of my favorites in the game now at least plasmite bombs should do the trick drop one into each well and the blast will do the rest plasmate huh cool how does it work I believe this is yours hey not my problem anymore no really I insist you're the hero no that's the hero oops sorry my bad I also love the cutscenes with Onan now wise old woman in the bizarre who guides you when it comes to Old precursor Legends but she can only be understood through her interpreter pecker who's another one of my favorite characters in the game with his Shameless snark why is Mars tomb so important disabled precursor stone is rumored to sleep within the tomb stupid I added this stupid part helps that every character is really well cast and equally well directed throughout the scenes in the 90s games having acting at all was a bar most companies were happy to meet but naughty dog was always a step above that as early as crash 2 getting in The Talented Clancy Brown to play Dr Neo cortex but fast forward six years and you have Jack 2 where they got a lot of voice Talent from the animation and voice over world to bring their characters to life in their first truly cinematic game such as Susan Eisenberg as Ashland Phil Lamar as Sig or Clancy Brown once again as Baron Praxis I highlighted them specifically because they were on Justice League which aired on Cartoon Network at the time so that gets special mention but everyone here was talented and passionate about the project and in awe over what no idea was achieving with this game although on the subject of Baron Praxis I find him to be a pretty interesting character we see several sides of him throughout the game first is the guy we want revenge against for what he did to Jack then as the ruthless dictator ruling the city you see this side out of him through these propaganda spewing speakers placed throughout the city where he speaks to the people about how he's protecting them from the metal heads and these other lies it's fun to stop and listen to these when you actively follow the story you know he's trading Eco with the metal heads but here he is getting on the mic talking about how he's bravely putting a stop to their continued assault on the city I am still in control anyone who contradicts this fact [Music] will be outlawed underground militia [Music] no middle but things get complex when you learn that he's not trading Eco with the metal heads to help them he wants to destroy them he just doesn't have the power to do it when talking to Arrow he says this he's toying with us let me leave an assault on the nest before it's too late I can take him patience Commander no one has ever penetrated the metal head Nest you know that I've seen what comes of such foolish plans then when you reach the nest you see it's covered in destroyed tanks and all that meaning he did lead a direct attack on the nest and got beat really badly and now he's been searching for a more powerful way to destroy them ever since including the dark warrior program they tried on Jack but that doesn't make him sympathetic he's a terrible person doing evil things selling lies to his adoring fans while also having nothing but contempt for them however it just so happens that your goal is align with his in trying to stop the metal heads which is a core part of the second act the race for the precursor Stone the metal heads of the ancient enemy of the precursors and the metal head leader feeds on the precursor Life Energy that can be released from the precursor Stones Mar used Haven City and the shield wall to safeguard the last precursor Stone from the metal heads but now nobody knows where the stone is Jack and Daxter find it in the center of the city underneath the giant Mars statue funny how no one thought to look there this is Mars tomb as you get there with young Samos core and the kid who opens the door to the tomb as he's Mars Heir but since he's too young to face the trials inside jack rushes in beginning one of my favorite levels Mars 2 and we have to navigate through tough platforming as well as tests of memory and reflexes but then in a Twist Praxis swipes the precursor Stone from under you and tosses all your allies in jail this is a cool moment for the story because we see different character motivations colliding and causing conflict it turns out that Praxis knew they were about to make a move on the stone because tauren told him Praxis threatened to kill Ashlyn his own daughter who torn has affection for something the story set up as a sore subject earlier on why didn't you tell me Ashlyn was praxis's daughter what's your connection with her that's none of your business so he put that before the cause of the underground he is quickly forgiven as you must lead a daring rescue mission inside the Fortress you escaped from at the beginning of the game but getting out was much easier than getting back in as the guards have new armor that allows them to take more damage and you have to carefully use the jet board to grind through these laser cannons and electricity waves it's an intense Mission I always look forward to when playing the game once you rescue your teammates you also find the older Samos trapped in the prison as well as the two versions of Samos bicker back and forth like it's nobody's business we need to find the kid Pronto what are you talking about old growth the kid already opened the tomb our top priority should be to disrupt The Baron's forces oh look who thinks they've sprouted if you were half as wise as I am you'd know that the proper course of action is to find the kid it then becomes an element of the story that Jack Daxter and the old Samos helped the young Samos grow to get the sagely power as you know he's supposed to have after having played the first game and then Kira reveals to the old Samos alongside Jack and Daxter that she's rebuilt the rift Rider they went through at the beginning but is missing the heart of margem and a device called the time map which are in Cruise hands but he's currently working with Praxis to use the precursor Stone to build a bomb capable of destroying the metal heads that will also destroy the entire world in the process so the third Act is a quest to stop the Stone from being used to create that bomb with nobody knowing that all their efforts are in service of the true villains machinations core what's going on I'm sure you know no deep down in your darkest nightmares we've met before remember everything's going exactly as at the 11th hour it's revealed that core was the Metalhead leader all along disguised as a human to get into the city join the underground and help them undermine Praxis right before the reveal the city goes on high alert as metal heads are attacking a lot of things went into this happening so I shall explain as the reveal of Cora's true identity allows players to recontextualize the story Praxis thought he was playing the long game deal with the metal heads give them Eco and strike when they least expect it but core was playing an even longer game he would take The Baron's Eco and apply the pressure by saying he's at his wits end with the slow Eco deliveries meanwhile he'd receive Intel on Praxis by being a member of the underground like this part here and we overheard a secret meeting with the leader of the metal heads you saw the metal head leader no he was on some communicator but we heard him talking with Baron Praxis the baron is bribing the metal heads with Eco it will never be enough but the Barons gonna double cross him is that so and like I said by being a part of the underground he can further undermine Praxis positioning himself to be there when major events happen like reaching Mars tomb while in the city he learned how to shut down the shield wall but needed the perfect moment to strike enter crew crew worked alongside the baron to develop the bomb that would destroy the metal heads with the precursor Stone but he made a side deal with core to provide the metal head armies away into the city that would go unnoticed which happened at the end of the game as Sig claims he was sent into the underport by crew to open an old Gateway and once he did metalheads began their attack in the attack on the city The Situation's given more Stakes because then one of my favorite characters in the game gets killed off by an army of metalheads at the power station with the shield wall down in the metal heads in the city it's only a matter of time until core finds the precursor Stone and after being beaten by metalcore Praxis reveals to Jack that the stone was placed inside of a backup bomb before dying he also mentions that he made Jack the way he is now with the intent for Jack to defeat the metalheads showing how even in his final moments Praxis is thinking that if Jack uses the stone to defeat core Praxis wins technically an ego to the very last but that sets up the final mission where Jack and Daxter have to raid the metal head Nest creatures are Stone Gun Nest Light It Up Padre that ought to wake him up let's go take care of business what you mean go in there uh I'm right behind you maybe it's just experience at this point but I feel like the final level isn't really that spectacular Gaul and Maya's Citadel was the ultimate test of all the platforming skills you had gained up to that point in Jack one but here is just some enemies blocking your path that you tear through before reaching core who has the kid as a hostage the final part of his plan is to get the Stone from Jack and Daxter and then have the kid open it because the kid is Jack's younger self Jack was born in the future with all these precursor Eco Powers but was sent to the past in the hopes he'd gained the skills to face core when he was older but with Jack having been experimented on with dark Eco he can't access the precursor life force inside the stone like his younger self can so now it's just an intense final boss between Jack and core where it's set up so that you start the battle is darkjack but the second I transformed into him I was immediately turned back to normal I feel like that happens every time I get to this boss fight but even without dark Jack I'd say metalcore is pretty easy to defeat you just gotta roll jump out of the way of his attacks and attack after he's done and once you do the day is saved the rift ring is open and Kira's Rift Rider is ready but old Samos claims they need to use it to send youngjack and young Samos back to the past so that young Jack can grow up in a safer world this turning the series into a Time Loop where the Young Jack will always be rescued from core by his older self and then sent back in time with a younger Samos where Jack grows up the events of Jack 1 happen and that causes this Jack to be sent into the future where he experiences the events of Jack 2 and then the cycle begins all over again although the game quickly shows how confusing time travel can get I sure hope I built this replica right I don't know if it's perfect Kara this is the very machine we found or we'll find later what I just built this after seeing the first one I need it's based on what I remember from honey the more you think about it the more it takes the head but on that note the weirdest thing about this whole twist is something pretty minute Jack had this Uncle character in Jack one to the point where there was a quote from the uncle in the manual of Jack one not Samos because they obviously hadn't thought this far ahead that's just one of those things you have to sweep under the rug to enjoy the overall story forget that guy ever existed basically and that's basically it for the story of Jack too with all the major villains of the game Dead the heroes celebrate remember those whose lives are lost and look towards the future where they rebuild Haven City check my boy [Music] and after having written 11 000 words on Jack 2 I'm thinking that my point in all this might have been lost in the sauce long ago so now that we're in the conclusion I'll address the title of the video do I think Jack 2 is a perfect game no I guess not I can list several flaws with it I've not mentioned thus far in the video like how I think it's weird how the story tells us that Jack is a symbol of Hope for the people of the city but then it's a core gameplay mechanic to steal from bump into and attack the citizens I try not to hurt anyone when I play this game since that's just not my style but to get around you have to steal vehicles on the regular kind of a weird mismatch between the story and the gameplay I never look forward to these missions with this clunky mech suit that come at the end of the game I think these rail shooting segments are all boring and I think things start getting padded when you have to rescue lurkers for a second time at the end of the game but none of that really matters to me Jack 2 is not perfect by any means but for me it comes together like no other game it's such a satisfying mix of different elements that all work in isolation and putting them together in a fun way it's unorthodox for sure sure you probably won't like it if you're an adult playing it for the first time but when it clicks it really clicks it's without question one of my favorite games to ever be made I specifically called it a misunderstood Masterpiece because well I obviously think that it's writing in World design and gameplay are masterful but then I just see this game written off as a dated product of its time so often made by a studio desperate to be one of the big kids but too afraid to just let go of their cartoony Roots When I just don't see that in Jack 2 I see it careful all in effort to make a Next Generation game that like its predecessor and the crash games before it sought to raise the bar on storytelling voice acting and animation and games with Cutting Edge World design it's something I appreciate about naughty dog as a studio from 1996 all the way to today and Jack 2 is no different and that's basically all I got to say on this one I really did just say everything I ever could about this game in the last like hour so I'm glad I got the chance to give this game a full review that I can be proud of to say the least since I'm someone who loves Jack one and Jack two you might expect my thoughts on Jack three to be more of the same since it seems you either loved the whole series or just certain parts of it however Jack 3 is not the same to me despite having played Jack 3 several times in the year 20 years since its release back in 2004 my playthroughs of it as an adult have only made me look at this one as more of a disappointment compared to the first two now let me make myself clear I don't hate Jack 3 I don't think it sucks or anything it's just that I thought Jax one and two came together in a really satisfying way different ways between the two of them but satisfying in both cases to where I enjoy replaying both of those games whenever I feel a revisit is in order Jack 3 is one all replay because well I just replayed one and two might as well play three then I walk away thinking yeah it's all right I guess but it's a total mess when looking at it as a package and that is again coming from someone who thought Jax 1 and 2 were both excellent games in their own right there isn't even that much history to go over in regards to the development of Jack 3 or at least in ways that are relevant to the discussion at hand the history behind Jack 1 and 2 got me interested in exploring it because of how those stories of the evolving gaming culture impacted this series harder than any other something so obvious because it changed so much from its first entry to its second so I spent a long time in those videos exploring why Jack one was so well crafted only we met with a less enthusiastic audience response than other games of the time leading to Jack 2 being the way it was for Jack 3 they knew they were sticking with the story characters in gameplay structure of Jack 2 and wanted to add on to the existing moveset for Jack to make it feel like a full Sequel and also improve upon the elements they got criticism from after releasing Jack 2 and that's what they did shipped the game just one year after Jack 2 compared to the two years of concentrated development that both Jack won and Jack 2 had gotten suffice it to say I think this video will thankfully be much shorter than my video on Jack 2 last week just focusing on Jack 3 as a a whole what I think it gets right where I think it misses the mark and giving my theory as to why that is so let's not waste any more time and get into Jack 3. The Story begins in the desert as Jack has been banished to the Wasteland for life as Daxter and pecker protest this is an outrage I am outraged beyond words although I do have something to say I always gotta chuckle out of that Daxter and pecker decide to join Jack in his Exile from Haven city as the game Cuts between their March through the desert and flashbacks that show how we got to this point despite killing core at the end of Jack 2 some of the metalheads survived and are continuing their assault in the city but the New Freedom League led by Jack and Company have to fight on two fronts as the metal heads have taken over one side of the city but on the other crimson guard death Bots are being mass-produced so they're fighting a losing battle Jack's name is being dragged through the mud as he's accused of being an accessory to letting the metal heads into the city which technically is true as Jack's missions for crew throughout Jack 2 while a means to an end to help the underground get Intel were also the things that ultimately allowed crew to get the Metalhead into the city to wreak havoc so buy a vote from the grand Council led by a guy named count vieger Jack is banished but he's found by a group of wastelanders living in a sanctuary city called spargas ruled by Damas pecker being his new advisor while Jack and Daxter have to prove themselves to the people of spargas through combat and various desert Expeditions setting up the First Act of Jack 3 where all the problems begin the pacing in Jack 3 is really messy you start the game off in a tutorial with basic platforming and combat but then you have to ride a leaper lizard to catch six rats play a mini game where you have to press the buttons that correspond with the ones in the screen do tutorials on how to drive race in the car collect artifacts with that car do a leaper lizard race with a local monks battle desert metal heads in a vehicle battle in the arena again more content with leaper lizards and then after an hour of gameplay the player finally gets access to a mission with raw unfiltered Jack and Daxter platforming which was the thing you came to play when in Jack 2 the first mission yeah it was a tutorial but it felt like it was part of the experience as you escaped captivity then your first several missions are all core gameplay the first mission in Jack 2 that I'd argue had nothing to do with core gameplay was when Jack and Daxter were first sent to the drill platform to destroy the metal headaches which didn't come up until an hour and 45 minutes into your playthrough even then that mission still had combat and platforming like I said the platforming action that I think defines J and D isn't playable until an hour into the game now you could say that driving and such are the core gameplay mechanics of Jack 3 but in that case I just think it's a downgrade from Jax 1 and 2. while they did have mini games and driving they were verifiably side portions of the game Jack 3 blurs the line much more driving missions don't bother me but then when it's back to back with leaper lizards and such yeah the First Act of the game is really boring once you actually get into the main platform and content of Jack 3 I think it's enjoyable but then after two good levels you then do more of this stuff like searching for survivors in the desert driving this one large vehicle through a nearby Metal Head nest and the worst of all shooting down targets with a Turret the First Act just sets the stage poorly for Jack 3 because you're met with a host of mini games that obscure the focus of the game and that's not to say it's all terrible like I said I think the driving missions as soon as you get access to a ride with guns that is are fun the metal head Hunt mission has these cool camera angles for when you get hit where the car goes flying it's cool to see how in-depth the physics are for these desert Vehicles because this is back when developers talked about designing elements like that from scratch it really gives us an opportunity to showcase the rigid body physics system that we developed it's a very complicated uh simulation of physics we have different gear ratios differentials centers of gravity horsepowers and torques so it really is a realistic simulation on this dune buggy I always enjoyed using the Dune Hopper vehicle which can jump really high into the air combined with the Boost turbos you get and you'll see some serious height and distance I think all these vehicles are appealing from a design perspective too I never really thought about this before playing Jack 3 for this video but I'm pretty sure this game is the first time we ever see a vehicle move on Wheels in the Jack series we saw the the larkers use balloons in Jack 1. while the Zoomer the player used could hover a bit and had a propeller in front of it but Jack 2 was much more futuristic with his flying cars and racing pods it goes to show that the wastelanders are making do with scraps having less futuristic technology than Jack won while still being cool nonetheless it's all pretty neat but again in the first hour of the game you only play as Jack to fight in the arena twice otherwise it's a sea of things that were considered side content in the last two games First Impressions do matter and one of the reasons why I don't go back to Jack 3 often is because I just remember the fact that the game's first two hours have a lot of side content tossed onto your lap when the First Act should be the time to get me excited to keep playing more of the game I do get that most of these are mechanics the player will use later in the game so it's better to have a soft introduction earlier in the game before the big test but I just think it could have been spaced out better because the first two hours really felt bogged down by all the mini games and tutorialization it also isn't great because the story wants to return to Haven City to feel Grand after having spent a lot of time getting to know the people of spargas City in the desert the main thing the game was advertised around however by the time you begin the quest to re-enter the city two hours into the game I haven't done much in the way of fun gameplay so my attitude is instead of thinking I'm just like yeah take me back you don't feel like you've been here long at all because I'm still getting into the game by the time you return to Haven City but at least things get a lot better once you do starting with this long mission in the minds to get back into the city a boss fight against a fully functioning precursor robot not like the modded one from Jack one's final boss and then once you get top side the content gets a lot more interesting making this as good a time as any to mention the fact that there are plenty of things I really like about Jack 3. those things being both major and minor so let's look at them in terms of quality of life features I appreciate the fact that menus all scroll much faster in Jack 3 than they did in Jack 2. this just improves the pace of the game if you plan on changing a setting or visiting the secrets menu from gameplay graphically Jack 3 is working off the same standard as Jack 2 widescreen progressive scan no load screen cutscene models all the stuff you've come to expect from the Jack series is here and accounted for in Jack 3. although the game still suffers from the same performance issues it affected Jack 2 with screen tearing and frame drops the latter of which might actually be worse than Jack 3 because of how much more actions on the screen but I won't give the game too much crap because for PS2 standards Jack 3 is loaded with content I mean you have two massive Hub Worlds the sprawling wastelands and the ruins of Haven City you don't see all of the city like you did in Jack 2 but most of it is here pulling off all that with the dev time this game had while keeping the bar of the visuals as high as they did as a feat in and of itself now when talking about the actual gameplay Jack 3 improves upon elements from Jack 2 in numerous ways first of which being the Streamline travel the fact that players would spend a long time in Jack 2 just going from place to place is one of the biggest criticisms naughty dog took to heart when Designing Jack 3. so instead the game places missions very close to one another so you don't have to spend several minutes going from place to place for example when in the port in the second act all the missions are right here in this area or they're in Haven Forest which is like 90 seconds away from the port base in addition to that Jack 2 also had you complete a mission but then drive back to the quest Giver so you can get another one this still happens a few times in Jack 3 but a lot of the time you'll finish a mission and then a character will get on the communicator and say the next mission is this go go do it like how Samos will tell you to go to Haven Forest for a mission and then when that is done tauren will say jinx is waiting for you outside for the next mission this keeps the pace of the game going and contributes to why Jack 3 is shorter than Jack 2 by about an hour I imagine designing the game like this also save Naughty Dog time on the amount of cutscenes that have to animate since half the missions in the game don't have a cutscene that triggers them you just go do them Jack 3 adds things that are quality additions the jet board was great in Jack 2 giving you a satisfying bit of extra speed with some visual flare thrown on top it's pretty much exactly the same in Jack 3 but you'd want to use it more in this game because of the fact that now you get this charged jump and a ground-based attack so you don't fear whipping it out in the middle of a platforming combat Mission dark Jack was almost useless in Jack 2 because of the fact he had to drain the full bar of dark Eco in order to tap into dark Jack it just made dark Jack something you wouldn't want to use unless the situation seriously demanded it like you were low on Health in an enemy rush or a boss fight where other weapons still do the job just fine Jack 3 is a 100 Improvement in this aspect because the transformation now works more like the Devil Trigger and Devil May Cry the circular part of the gauge must be filled before you can be dark Jack but once you've transformed you can transform back in an instant with the Press of a button so since the stakes don't have to be as high for you to use darkjack his old moves like the bomb or the electricity spin are more useful and I also got used out of the new moves like where you toss beams across the screen to balance out dark Jack this game also allows you to tap in a light Eco to become light Jack the Yang the dark Jack's Yin dark Jack allows you to tear through enemies of vicious attacks and so light Jack is built around defense and Mobility as you learn various moves throughout the game like the light Jack Shield the time stop the self-heal and these light Wings you use to reach places you couldn't otherwise I actually don't use light Jack much throughout my playthrough of this game and that's not because there's anything wrong with the form itself in a vacuum these are all fine abilities but well I guess I'll just save the rest of that thought for later and just stick to the things I like about Jack 3. the game massively improves upon the completion aspect Jack 2 had over 200 precursor orbs but they didn't really contribute anything meaningful to the game in Jack 3 there are 600 of the things and while you still do use them for concept art a level select and behind the scenes material like Jack 2 they serve a much bigger role in the core gameplay loop as you find them all throughout the areas and can go to the secrets menu and spend them on things like new vehicles to drive in the desert with with their own stats and weapons Nifty enhancements like dark Jacks attacks homing and on enemies the jet board going really fast in the desert and best of all upgrades to the functionality of your weapons like ammo efficiency and rate of fire increases and so on with rewards tied to your gameplay I feel more incentive to spend more time looking for precursor orbs during the campaign whether that be through the challenges that Jack 2 had which you now spend metal heads Gold Gems on or just by doing jet board exploration in the hub worlds that reward you with a surplus of orbs lastly there's the soundtrack I haven't really mentioned it up to this point but I find the music and the Jack games be pretty underrated I highlighted the various moods that Josh Mansell put off in Jack 1 but this also carried over in Jack 2 even with its completely different direction Jack 2 also had Dynamic music where hacks would be altered if you were walking fighting shooting driving or jet boarding that's not in Jack 3 but I figured I'd mention it since I forgot to do so in the Jack 2 video the music in Jack 2 and 3 was done by Josh Mansell in the gameplay but they also got a fellow named Larry Hopkins to score the cutscenes to add a more cinematic quality to the music compared to games like Jack one where the cutscenes just keep playing level music in the background and I'd say it was a successful effort but as for Jack 3 the in-game music I find is memorable and Atmospheric so I often listen to it when doing other projects on my computer like thumbnails for videos and such I've actually used Jack 3 music in several videos in the past because I find its Vibe so easy to work into videos about other topics I just use Subterranean the theme of the forest and sewers in my Resident Evil 2 video from a few months back to you as an example but there are plenty of examples of tracks I really like listening to from Jack 3. foreign [Music] I mentioned earlier that the platforming action and the second act of Jack 3 was an improvement over the start of the game and it is and I'd like to use that as a thing I enjoy about Jack 3 but that's where we get back into the problems in terms of raw platforming Jack 3 has a lot of fun moments the first visit to the precursor temple in the desert sees you climbing up the tower by jumping between crumbling platforms and Swinging between poles with Jack's entire move set still being in Jack 3 it's still fun to roll jump off Ledges and land and high jump or uppercut off Ledges and transition into a spin Jack just feels great to play as and that has remained true throughout the entire Trilogy I can speak to numerous levels that are fun to play and like the sewers the forest the war Factory the mines and all the levels with platforming as a central element are satisfying to play from the mechanics alone however what I enjoyed a lot about Jack was the seamless platforming and combat mix but I can't say I fully enjoy the main levels and missions of Jack 3 because this game is one of the most broken combat systems I've ever experienced Jack 2 had only four weapons nothing compared to the roster you'd see from its sister series Ratchet and Clank however less is more in this case I thought Jack's Four Guns in Jack 2 were really well balanced around each other for reasons I stated in my video on that game in Jack 3 the scatter gun the Blaster the Vulcan Fury and The Peacemaker are all still in this game and work the same as they did in two so in theory the balance should still be intact but things get screwed up the moment Jack 3 introduces additional modes upon the four weapons you have each of the four weapons will receive two new modes before the game is over giving the game a total of 12 guns I get it they wanted to go big or go home but if you're going to have all these weapons you have to design enemies around that fact you have to design the weapons to work in tandem but they didn't the first upgrade to the Blaster alone breaks the game you get the beam reflector early on which causes the Blaster shots to Ricochet off of walls this makes it so that in combat you barely have to try with this thing equipped you just jump spin and shoot the beam reflexor and watch the sparks fly in the arena you can see that I'm barely doing anything and yet the enemy turtle is drastically going going down this even dampens platforming levels in the mines you're supposed to shoot these targets to give the dynamite a path to reach the door while under a time limit but with the beam reflects or the shots may just travel so far all over the screen that it will hit all the targets after a few tries and in the mission way before it was actually supposed to end this track gets people killed in Jack 2 but in Jack 3 it truly allows the combat to almost play itself one weapon this op is bad enough but then you get the gyro burster which upon being fired will send the mini UFO into the air that spreads Blaster shots all over the screen to the laser-like Precision and hitting the enemies when using the gyro burster and the beam reflects her together no combat scenario stands a chance against you another utterly broken weapon is the plasmite RPG the third level for the scatter gun this one tosses a grenade in front of you that decimates any enemy it comes into contact with including the shields of the ultra powerful dark makers you fight at the end of the game you get the plasmite RPG before the first level of The Peacemaker but it makes The Peacemaker completely obsolete because it doesn't need to be charged up and tear through enemies just the same with an almost identical amount of shots but with much more frequent ammo drops because red ammo is never in short supply compared to dark ammo the same issue applies to the blaster's upgraded weapons yellow ammo is so common that abusing the beam reflexor is very easy to do but even if you run out of ammo for the scatter gun or the Blaster it's no problem just grab the arc wielder which spews electricity all over the screen or the needle laser which homes in on every enemy out of that too well you still have the Peacemaker and its upgrades the mass inverter which reverses gravity making every enemy in its range utterly helpless or the Supernova which is just a screen nuke and if that wasn't enough for you you still have dark Jack and light Jack at your disposal the perfect example of how Jack 3 is just not well balanced can be seen in the stadium ruins level I ran in with the plasmite RPG and the gyro burster and blew every enemy away before they knew what hit them then I tried it again with the Vulcan Fury weapons and did the same thing then I tried it with light Jack who I remind can make himself completely impervious to damage while also having the power to heal and slow down time then turning into dark Jack unleashing his screen nuke Powers Jack 3 is just not a challenging game that's because the player is showered in a sea of ultra powerful killing machines as I said the enemies are not designed with this in mind because they don't feel like a threat this can be satisfying like the war Factory level where you just tear through all the enemies in this one man raid and then the part at the end where you find this vehicle to tears through the doors was a nice cherry on top of a good level but I don't want to feel this powerful throughout the entire game even in the third act when the dark makers reach the Earth the player can't be stopped the plasmite RPG will tear away their Shields dark Jack will destroy them in no time and so will all your other options I get that they got a lot of heat for Jack 2 being as difficult as it was but this is a comedic overreaction I don't even mind that Jack 3 has way more checkpoints than Jack 2. in fact if they left it at that it would have been a quality improvement in the difficulty balancing since losing all your progress and admission for the tiniest slip up was too far but really it's just the stale calm combat that does Jack 3 in for me you have so many weapons of mass destruction in Your Arsenal that combat is not fun to play anymore I never die from a combat situation in Jack 3 because the enemies stand no chance against me and even when it gets dicey I can heal all my health with light Jack even with all my experience an enemy rush and Jack 2 still manages to be tense to me because you have to play your cards right to succeed in that game but not Jack 3. this is definitely one of the most unbalanced combat systems skewed in the player's favor I have ever seen it just makes it difficult to enjoy what's worth enjoying in the game when its systems are not carefully considered I enjoyed the second act the most because it was the part where the game focus on combat and platforming for several missions straight even if the combat isn't good in Jack 3 it's still one of the better parts of the game but then in the final hours of gameplay the game just goes off the rails with the mini games like raiding the metal head Nest a second time with Sig in this giant tank followed by a mission where you shoot the cannon in that tank while Sig drives aiming at metal heads for No Lie five minutes straight of just holding down the shoot button there's no overheating mechanic or anything you just point and shoot at the targets that move very slowly when there are only like two or three things you need to shoot on screen at once it goes on for an eternity one of the main attractions for the end game is the raid and the kg War Factory that hangs in the sky and to get there you need to grab something from the Power Station where Daxter must enter a computer and play this Pac-Man type game it's not full on Pac-Man but it's clearly evoking that imagery and you know some kind of homage to an older era of game could be interesting in a game that knows what it's trying to do like say the Quark 2D platforming levels of Ratchet and Clank 3 but when Jack 3 is forcing the players through this Entourage of completely random game modes and mechanics have nothing to do with Jack and Daxter this just becomes part of the White Noise defending spargas from the dark makers isn't an all-out assault from the enemies of course not it's a rail shooting minigame that goes on for several minutes Jack linking up with the dark maker ship for the first time sees you taking control of the mech suit from Jack 2 that I already didn't like as you with no checkpoints must reach the end of this Hall I spent almost 10 minutes on that because I died towards the end after that you have to raid errol's ground base and to do that you must do another rail shooting minigame protecting torn and his bombs that last for six minutes where you just point and hold down the shoot button this really wears me down it's just so boring especially after all these other missions and while I'm on this one Sig just appears in this Mission out of nowhere Ashland tells Jack and Daxter they need to defend torn and Jinx and then in the mission Sig is just there too with no explanation as he had nothing to do with the plot in Haven City before this point and really doesn't after this Mission either all he does in this mission is hand you the Supernova gun which Jinx could have easily done or just not have Jinx and have a Sig instead things like this are the only things catching my mind because otherwise the gameplay is just this for six minutes things don't just happen in the Jack and Daxter games for no reason it's been a staple of the series since the first game so yeah that's another thing against Jack 3. of course I'm not saying you play all these mini games back to back but we already went over the fact that Jack three's combat greatly brings down the main gameplay especially this late in the game where you have most of the weapons so by the end I'm just really bored with the game and it doesn't help that the last nail in the coffin that cements Jack 3 is the worst game in the trilogy is the fact the story is a mess for starters the plot is very unfocused at the beginning of the video I said you arrived in sparga this and you're getting to meet these new faces and then you're tossed back into Haven City to continue the conflict so therefore new characters like Cleaver just don't leave much of an impression he doesn't get any screen time besides being the reason you have to go on pointless missions he doesn't get the screen time to be anything else but dividing up the screen time is a game-wide issue by the end of Jack 2 the core cast of characters is pretty large and now we add a few extra ones to the roster every character in Jack 2 played a role in the overall story and it came together in a satisfying way in Jack 3 you can't just not have Kira for example be in the game without people wondering why she wasn't in the game but because of that you have the flip side problem of Kira just being there doing and saying almost nothing from start to finish Onan is another example of a character who served a purpose in Jack 2 who's just there in Jack 3. hell I'd even say Sig doesn't add anything to the story either we learned that he was a spy in Jack 2 trying to find damas's son but got caught up in working for crew but as a character his role in the story is often confusing like I said he just shows up in one of the last mission with no prior context whatsoever so first you have the fact that there are too many characters with not enough to do in the plot just dropping in and out of the story as they please but then we just don't get enough development for the actual important stuff I like Damas he's kind of a hard case at first but warms up to Jack as the game goes on I just think it's a little force that they make sure to mention that Jack doesn't know his dad something that never came up before this point despite it being a clearly sore subject and then later it's mentioned that Damas lost his son in Haven City I'm thinking the bond between Jack and demos would have been better if he was allowed more screen time but that's the cost of the game going so quickly between spargas and Haven City one of the biggest issues I have with this plot is that there's no clear villain for the first three hours or so of the game Count Vigor banishes Jack to the Wasteland but this guy is no main villain he doesn't have an army or powers or anything so it doesn't feel like a threat especially since he's getting mocked in so many cutscenes stop vegan Vega it's Vega you idiot but then it's revealed that arrow is the main antagonist of Jack 3 and this always felt like such an [ __ ] Arrow was a rival to Jack and Jack too something I barely went into last time but he died at the end of the game by driving himself into a barrels of dark Eco in an attempt to kill Jack but now he got revived as a cyborg and as a super hammy Metal Gear boss who's controlling the metal heads and the kg robots is communicating with the dark makers and is leading the charge in their attack on Earth I say it as a question because I really have no idea what's going on in the plot half the time it just confuses me more than anything else especially since arrow and veger have nothing to do with each other Vega was the one who attacked the palace at the beginning of the game to gain access to Something in the catacombs to stop the dark makers himself but arrow is the one instigating the war it's not like Jack 2 where it caught between two warring factions you have to fight against it's just figure as a guy who needs to be stopped and arrows up to something completely different but luckily Vigor stopped pretty easily and one of the weirdest scenes in the game Ashland just dissolves the council that got Jack Van finished count Vigor I hereby dissolve the city council and strip you of your title command and all privileges now get out of my sight but at the beginning of the game she said that couldn't be done I guess she just hadn't thought of firing the council yet the writing of this game just feels like it's being made up on the spot when the previous game just felt so tightly written to build up to the grandest moments to close this book I think one of the worst elements of the plot is how inconsistent the tone is in Jack 3. I said last time that I found Jack one and two to both be funny games in terms of witty dialogue and physical humor but Jack 3 made a much more concerted effort to have this Ratchet and Clank styled humor and I think it's just not that funny there are some good lines and moments in Jack 3 but largely it's all going in one ear and out the other when I replay this game then serious moments don't get much time in the sun either like when Jack refuses to return to Haven City with Ashland he then just does that the mission immediately after this okay he got his mind changed with Ashland's last words to him maybe but it just feels rushed no greater example of tonal Whiplash in Jack 3 than the two most important cutscenes in the game demos comes to Jack's rescue when the duo is cornered by some dark maker machines and would get the final mission with him after a whole game of building their relationship up but after the task is accomplished the car gets hit by a bomb that flips it over and mortally wounds damus as he asks Jack to find his son Marth the youngest Heir in the house of mar as Demas himself was once the leader of Haven City but was betrayed and banished by Praxis leading to Jack 2's status quo Jack immediately realizes that he is demus's Son and getting separated from Demus is how Jack's younger self came to be in the care of the underground in Jack too but before Jack can say anything Damas dies and count Vega who just appears out of nowhere reveals that he knew it all along and wanted to tap into Jack's special powers for himself before Jack got found by the Shadow and mocking that damus never knew Jack was his son getting Jack and Daxter fired up for a confrontation with veger but of course we first have to play a mini game and then we go from this dramatic death scene to the reveal that the precursors are actually otsels the species Daxter is a scene played for Laughs which I really don't care about either way it's not like finding out who the precursors were mattered to me in the previous games but they chose to make this reveal as comedic as possible with full-on fourth wall breaking gags and again ratchet styled humor about how they should have gone with a backup hero it's just not that funny to me it's nice they tried to tie the whole trilogy together by explaining that since they made Eco it contains their Essence which is why Daxter turned into one of them in Jack one but the real problem is that this comedic apex of the story is right next to the dramatic apex of the plot the writing in this game is just all over the place setting up for a climax that just doesn't land the way it's supposed to I for starters don't care about the dark makers their former precursors who got corrupted by darkiko and now destroyed planets will Earth be next no way Jax Arsenal is far too loaded for that to happen they can't touch me so I'm not afraid of them and then an arrow as the final boss this character who still even by the finale just feels like such attacked on afterthought that you're still wondering why they even decided to bring him back of all characters to be the climactic final enemy of the Jack Trilogy doesn't help the first part of the final boss is really annoying as you need to shoot these Targets on this terraformer's legs but whenever you get down to the last one it always takes forever to shoot it then the second phase is laughably broken in your favor like all the other combat scenarios in the game but hey at least this shot of Jack and Daxter walking through the sand is pretty cool thank you [Music] and I almost forgot about that this game rewrote the fact that KIRO was Jack's love interest in favor of Ashland who was presumed to be torns before so yeah that was a weird thing they did in Jack 3 that came out of nowhere and goes nowhere as well but then we get the ending where Daxter finally gets that pair of pants he's been waiting for and the precursors invite jack on a tour of the universe where it's then implied that Jack was the real Mar his own ancestor and created Haven City and all that and then went back in time to this very moment but I choose not to think that's the case because making Jack the real Mar just makes him a little too important for my liking but that's just me wait Jack is Mark zimar I just assume that he changed his mind and pulled a Batman exit and appears here just in time for the ending shot I couldn't leave you Dax with all our adventures ahead you wouldn't last a second without me ah what a team we are yeah well the next adventure I call the shots oh yeah life is good Jack three is an interesting game to me after all the complaining I just did I might as well rip the Band-Aid off and say I don't hate Jack 3. it's like I said at the beginning it's not some unplayable mess not that this is where the bar should be I'm just saying it didn't kill the series or some melodramatic line like that it's a finished polished product with all the same elements I enjoy from the previous games I just think Jack 3 in so many ways not live up to its potential the game just doesn't feel inspired to me it obviously had its Inspirations like Mad Max or this Rockstar game called Smugglers Run on PS2 however my point is that Jack 1 and 2 had a history to them that I thought was worth exploring the things that inspired those games the culture of the video game industry that affected those two titles to me Jack 3 just feels like Jack 2 but with more stuff in it made with the intent to address the issues people had with that game it's not a terrible goal I understand it's just that in execution it makes Jack 3 feel kind of bland being pulled in too many different directions it wants to be the Epic finale of the Jack Trilogy and it also wants to be this funny game game and also wants to have all these crazy weapons and Powers but with the game not doing the work to make the enemies scale with your weapons it makes the combat a breeze and with writing this all over the place it fails almost everything it sets out to do tossed in a bunch of mini games and that's Jack three I don't think it sucks I just think it really isn't that great either I can play this any old day of the week if I felt so inclined it's just one of those games where I can play it it's just that I'd prefer not to like Embark will be the [ __ ] scrivener over here it's a c tier game to me which as I defined in a previous video is a game that is okay at the end of the day just not when you'd be clamoring to revisit a lot of folks in the audience really love Jack three and that's fine I get it it's just that I think the game could have been a lot better if different choices were made in regards to its focus and difficulty design I mentioned at the beginning that there wasn't much to tell about the history and context of Jack 3 but I merely meant that as not much that would matter for my opinion on the game at the start of the video Jack 3 launched in the fall of 2004 and that game was the last one Naughty Dog developed while the co-founders Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin worked at the studio Jack 3's development cycle being their opportunity to smoothly transition between that old leadership and the one we know today while developing Jack 3 the studio already knew that for PlayStation 3 they were going to fully Embrace what the industry is most interested in game starring real humans using real weapons that ended up being Uncharted Drake's Fortune which was released in 2007 something I can go way more in depth on when I do an Uncharted retrospective in the near future however I bring it up now because as a buffer between games naughty dog did one last game on PlayStation 2. an epilogue to the Jack series Jack X combat racing the first game the studio had released completely without its Founders in 2005 but Jack X was going to be a smaller title reusing assets from previous games and just building a racing title with those assets and if there's one thing Jack had consistently had throughout the trilogy it was Vehicles if there's one thing I can do it's race so it was a natural fit and not something the studio was unfamiliar with having capped off their crash run on PS1 with crash team racing in 1999. despite all that and my immense Nostalgia for the Jack series I never played this game as a kid I played all the sly ratchet and every other Jack game when I was a kid but this one consistently evaded me I always thought of it as a I'll get it eventually kind of game but never did always had my eyes caught on some other game the one time I could have gotten and actually my uncle was like the this is rated T I'm not buying this good on him for that level of due diligence when buying a game for a six-year-old or whatever the hell I was at the time but hey I did walk out of that store with tie three on Game Boy Advance though maybe that series is worth a retrospective someday it's been years since I played any of those anyway I never got around to playing Jack X combat racing until 2012 which of course was a hot minute ago now compared to how old the game was in 2012 but I already talked about feeling old in the Jack 2 video so I'll just get to the point do I like Jack ax even though I didn't play it back when it was hot off the presses well the title of the video says all I think this game is fantastic and dare I say is way better than Jack 3. that's in a genre I don't even play that much of games where the multiplayer component is the most important one are games I tend to lose interest in quickly so fighting games and racing games while being things I have experience with it's not particularly vast because without a strong single player campaign I just don't feel the incentive to keep coming back and playing more of the game just look at crash team racing which I mentioned a few moments ago my review of that game a few years ago was the first time I played it and it was also the last time I don't think these games are bad I just know they aren't for me so if one of those games does manage to get its hooks in me that's how I know I've got a real winner on my hands one of the quickest ways you can get me into a game is if that game has a sick sense of style crash team racing took all the elements of and lessons learned from the crash Trilogy into a racing game that suited that brand that could stand toe-to-toe with Mario Kart or Diddy Kong Racing Jack X did the same thing looking at the best parts of the Jack series's personality and coming up with a racing game to suit that this game isn't trying to be the ps2's Mario Kart Double Dash it's full on f-zero meets Twisted Metal combined with the Jack World iconography creating this deadly racing game where as the title shows you don't just race it's full-on fight to the death combat racing so to go along with that hardcore racing identity the game has this metal music to suit any track it plays as you blast your way through the opposition and just barely outrun their attacks yourself I said I love the soundtracks in the Jack trilogy but this music is easily the best one in the series one I listened to frequently when doing projects on my computer and I'm in need of some background noise just a soundtrack that I think is a genuinely good listen if you're someone who's into that intense mid-2000s kind of stuff [Music] [Music] so what's going on in this Jack X game well in short Jack and friends have been invited by crew's daughter rain to hear his last will cruel being a crime Lord that Jack and Daxter left for dead in Jack 2. a hologram of crew boldly proclaims that the party gathered here today will race for him in the crash City grand championship and to make sure they do it the drink they all toasted over was poison and the only way to get the antidote is by racing but of course it's not that simple the competition is run by the Miso crime syndicate so our heroes have to face their own inevitable Doom also competing against dangerous criminals who also want them dead for upsetting the order of the criminal underworld in crass City the story serves its purpose for getting the characters racing and I do mean almost all of them in the story mode you only play as Jack with Daxter flailing about on top of your vehicle but in the multiplayer you get to play as a whole host of characters from the Jax series all give a new attire fit for racing such as Ashlyn torn Sig Kira Cleaver and new characters from Jackass like the sports commentator GT Blitz or Jacks do racing rifles like ur86 or Razer by visiting the secrets menu you can unlock other characters as well if your memory card is a save file on it for Jack one two and three you get to play as Jack from those games and if your card is a save file for Ratchet deadlocked on it then you get to play as ratchet from that game with new audio recorded from his voice actor for this game at the time of Jack X's development there was also a Daxter spin-off game in the works for the PlayStation Portable so Jack X built in a bunch of characters from that game to be playable in this game by connecting your PSP with all these characters unlocked I'd say this is a pretty stacked roster full of fan favorites although it was a big missed opportunity to not have Samos as a playable character I mean he's the funniest character in the series and it would have been a riot to unlock him and blow Jack and Tor into bits with rockets and all that but that's just one glaring on Mission from Jack X's roster otherwise I think it's great that we get to take all these characters we know out in the track in this one it's a nice epilogue naughty dog's time with the series one of the biggest things the team wanted to achieve with Jack X was giving the player an assortment of ways to customize their vehicles throughout the story you unlock more and more race cars to work with and also new hoods new side panels front and rear fenders wheels and Trunks that you can mix and match wherever you see fit these don't have any strategic Advantage it's just giving the cars different designs and styles that allows players to make vehicles to their preference you could even ride with no plating whatsoever what does impact the play experience is the game allowing you to spend your currency from completed missions and upgrading your car of Choice's stats such as its armor its boost gauge the acceleration and the top speed allowing the rides you like the best to reach their full potential I'm a sucker for games that allow the players to customize cosmetics and so I just get a lot of reward out of mixing and matching the different parts but especially got rewarded out of the paint job feature each ride can be given a body color and a stripe color I tried cladding my vehicle in Jay's reviews colors but that looked completely hideous without the white and black to contrast with the blue and green so instead I defaulted to my usual favorites black and green black and blue black and red but then mixed it up silver and orange silver and red using black as a stripe instead of a body color and so on I was genuinely swapping paint jobs almost every race I did and with a color wheel this extensive can you blame me it Sparks my imagination when actually pulling up to the track it's immediately obvious just how much more fun the cars are to control in this game compared to Jack 3. in that game the physics on each vehicle was definitely interesting to see as your car would interact with the bumpy terrain of the Wasteland but it's not handling that's particularly satisfying when trying to race so Jack X improved that by making the turns feel smoother and the tracks straighter in design and for ones that aren't I thought the skid turns were really responsive although I always seem to struggle with these tube tunnels in the sewers this goes for each of your vehicles the first three cups of the game all have their own vehicles with each of them being a certain type you have all-around vehicles that have a standard armor and speed bulkier vehicles that are best used in the combat Maps smaller cars that are the fastest but the weakest in terms of health and hybrid cars that aren't as efficient in either of the previous two advantages as the specialized vehicles but is good with both in regards to combat other things worth noting about the mechanics I love how they made sure to tie each weapon variety to a type of Eco and how they were used in Jack 1. this is also something I liked about the morph gun in Jack 2 and 3. it just helps making the whole series feel like it's a part of the same world Eco is still what everything is built from Green Eco is how you repair damage to your car on the track your health bar being displayed in the bottom left this is the most rare pickup of the bunch and so when you see one you instantly want to grab it so you can tank more damage from incoming attacks blue Eco is where your boost gauge comes from as you refill with pickups on the track but the game also encourages you to jump off of ramps for maximum air time and to perform tight skid turns because the longer you hold those they'll refill your boost gauge keeping you in the front of the pile by defeating enemies you collect dark Eco and that gauge is filled all your attacks will become stronger your boost gauge will be filled up to the Max and so on but on the note of the attacks you use yellow Eco weapons to attack your foes in front of you whether that be bombs missiles bullets or a peacemaker shot and red Eco weapons being used for defense like a mine they leave behind or a shield that you raise around your vehicle other than the weapons are all pretty cool in Jack acts I just don't think they're balanced the best which is the only mechanical problem I can really bring up the offensive of weapons are super powerful capable of blowing up a vehicle within a few shots however you don't get that many defensive weapons in response for example you'll get two missile shots which fire two missiles each when it locks onto you you can deploy a defensive weapon like a mine to deflect the attack but only get one mind so you'll have to just tank the damage on the second set of missiles that player has if you have a full health bar you won't die from this but I do feel like it's cheap there's nothing I can do to avoid damage in this instance maybe it would be unbalanced if you had two minds to block all the missiles but maybe skill of players could just skid turn at the right angle the Dodge missiles and I'd be fine with it but as it stands I think the way the game is balanced makes red eco's use hard to determine the characters encourage you to use Eco the second you get it which makes sense for example leaving behind a drone that blasts the drivers who pass by it will further damage the enemies behind you making it harder for them to catch up and more difficult to use weapons on you but since I could be attacked at any moment I try to hoard my red Eco weapons for as long as possible to make sure I can use it to deflect incoming attacks but the issue only gets worse when the players in the back get access to The Peacemaker which locks in on the player in first place and kills them instantly you're only hope in avoiding this is having a shield raised The Peacemaker will be deflected by The Shield which is from my experience the rarest defensive drop in the game I just don't like mechanics like The Peacemaker where I'll be leading the pack for most of the race but at the end it can be stolen from me by a weapon I literally cannot Dodge I just don't think that's fair although I think this issue is pretty minor it's just something that irks me every now and again while racing as opposed to a serious problem lots of racing games have items that players in the back use to wreck players in the front but I'm just saying that's my preference to not have it that way if I were designing the game but then that just brings up the conversation about how accessible a game is if less skilled players will just get utterly wrecked by people who have played it for longer it's a whole thing so from a certain point of view it makes sense to design it like that Jack X is a title with a lot of variety the standard racing is what you'll do most with a certain number of laps around the track shorter tracks have up to five laps like the race is in Jack 2 and longer tracks will have two laps making it so that each track gets a roughly equal amount of play time but then there are whole host of other modes that take place in these tracks such as Death Races where the player has to blast a certain number of drone cars under a time limit in order to get the gold medal freeze rallies where you need to reach the goal under a strict time limit and so you need to strategically hit these time-stopping items to stop the clock for however long that time lasts ranging from two seconds to the rare 10 second time stop there are power cell races where you'd grab a power cell needed to boost continuously until the power cell is charged to 100 where it will then attack another racer once the power cell is fully charged up you'll get a defensive item to block any power cell coming towards you I actually think this is my favorite mode in the game as it's really satisfying to see a power cell coming for you and just barely get to 100 in time and block that attack and it feels equally crushing to almost get a power cell charged up but then get hit right before it happens by the end the racer with the highest amount of power cells charged up wins the only standard race mode that I don't like would be Rush Hour players must face off against an onslaught of cars coming your way and you must slam into them for points green ones are worth one point blue ones are worth two and red ones do damage to your vehicle it's simple and concept but whenever I play it I can never get a flow going because I'm just bouncing all over the place trying to get my bearings it's better done with the bigger rides but that doesn't really fix the core issue here to mix it up every now and again you get a break from the core racing and go to these big combat Maps here you do standard death matches where you try to get the most kills in the time limit but they also give variety to these Maps too some missions testing which racer can hunt the most Raptors in the time limit who can get the most artifacts and my favorite capture the power cell Racers are divided into two teams and a power cell will spawn in the area and your goal is to grab that power cell and bring it back to your base before getting blown up by the other team giving them the chance to NAB the power cell and bring it back to their base as you then need to destroy them before they can make it it's a really fun mode and feels pretty competitive even when playing against CPUs so this game is all these different tracks and modes and all that so I think it's worth mentioning that because the game is centered around segmented racing levels this game features loading screens they're over fairly quickly and were pretty much inevitable unless naughty dog wanted to make an open world racing game but since this year series had prided itself and not putting the words loading on the screen I figured I'd mention that since it's something that took me by surprise on starting up Jack X for this video another thing Jack X does differently from previous scams on a technical level will be how they handled the cut scenes Jax one through three all had the cut scenes play out in engine but Jack X's cutscenes were pre-rendered when playing the game with the native resolution it's harder to spot but if you try cleaning them up the artifacts are pretty easy to see I never knew why they did this prior to making the video but luckily the game itself informs us as to why like Jack 3 you can unlock animators commentary on each of the cutscenes and in the scene where Jack and Company toasted Cruz will it is explained now uh this scene is also interesting because this is really the first scene where we took advantage of the fact that we were essentially a screenshot capturing all of the scenes instead of playing them back in real time and this enabled us to do a hologram effect that pretty much would have been impossible to do or at least not look nearly as cool in real time on the PlayStation too so essentially this is a scene is composited much like a film special effect would be composited what we had to do was create two separate scenes one scene that had all of the characters except crew in it and then another scene they had just crew in it against a purple black background and what we were able to do is extract crew from the purple background and then superimpose him over the uh scene that you see here so yeah in order to pull off the effects they did like Cruz hologram or I'm imagining the GT show overlay it was necessary to pre-render the scenes and superimpose elements like that little tidbits like that are why I wish every game had behind the scenes material I also appreciate them including a video of the actors reading the lines for the first scene it really allows you to appreciate how Intuit voice actors get as they move their arms and make facial expressions while reading the lines you never see because you only hear their voices it just reminds me of how I'm doing the same thing right now and you just can't see it but anyway in gameplay Jack X still maintains a high bar of presentation I mean look at these environments for racing game standards this does lighting effects and backdrops like like this were a rarity on Playstation 2. but this game pulled it off at these high speeds I love going in the first person mode with the select button as you can then see how wide the tracks are as you blaze by with the ground view I dare not imagine what would be like playing this in VR even this late in the generation Jack axles have a technical improvement from the previous games all the PS2 Jack games allow you to display them in 16x9 but Jack X was the first one to have a true authentic widescreen display I mean that if you pick 4x3 in the previous games you'll see the image how it would appear on a CRT but if you pick 16x9 in the event you're displaying in the early 2000s supported that the first three Jack games as well as many other games with a 16x9 display mode at the time would simply crop the image in the top and bottom to fill the screen horizontally personally I don't mind I can't think of a game where this ever damaged my playing experience but it's worth noting as some don't prefer to lose out on total visibility just to fill the screen I'm just used to seeing the Jack Trilogy like this so it's weird to play in 4x3 but Jack X does what you would hope to see in a widescreen setting and actually shows more of the image on the left and right of the screen than it would have in 4x3 this is what remasters like the Ratchet and Clank HD Collection or the sly HD Collection I've done with those games the Jack HD Collection just stuck with the cropped mode as the default if you were curious one of the best things about the newly released fan made Jack one PC Port is that it has true widescreen another reason why it's the best version to exist looking forward to seeing how Jack 2 and 3 come together in the end I say that because the team behind it have confirmed they're doing the full trilogy but Jack X is still up in the air I hope it does happen because Jack X never got remastered like the trilogy did in 2012. maybe the time and budget wasn't there to have a fourth game attached but seeing as Ratchet deadlocked got a PS3 Port separately from the ratchet Trilogy it was just a bummer back in the PS3 days to see Jack X get left in the dust however the Jack series's history with ports and re-releases is quite Messy as is these segments in my videos about ports tend to go on pretty long so I'll try to keep this discussion pretty brief as I do think it's warranted to give my thoughts in the various versions of the Jack games now that we're at the last Naughty Dog game boy I don't want to be here all day so here we go the most complete way to experience these games today is on PS2 warts and all these versions showcase the games as they were originally made and intended to be seen however some notes I should bring up Jack X is original no Black Label release had a memory card glitch that could wipe your whole save file or Worse corrupt your memory card entirely this was fixed for the greatest hits release on PS2 if you play Jack X on a backwards compatible PS3 for some reason the game would does not load past the tutorial but if you skip the tutorial you can continue the game if I remember correctly the PS3 Jack collection is largely fine in fact before the PC version I'd say this was the best way to play the precursor Legacy running at 720p and having no issues I could speak on Jack 2 is largely the same removing the issues with performance drops and Screen tearing but the elephant in the room is this cutscene that reveals core as the villain was completely ruined since his face looks like it was covered in ink Jack 3 also has the same Pros as Jack 2 HD however the vehicles are much more annoying to deal with than they were on PS2 since they skid turn with very little input from the controller so yeah Jack 3 is way better on PS2 the Jack Trilogy was then released on Vita a year later and this has got to be one of the worst poor jobs I've ever seen broken music slippery controls on vehicles a frame rate locked to 20 FPS that frequently drops below that in Jack 2 and 3 textures and effects and look anything like they're supposed to and you have an abysmal handheld Port of great games if you're one of the few who have fully completed the trilogy on Vita you have my props I think it's barely playable Sonic Genesis tier bad you have to imagine that this is the byproduct of extremely rushed development in the Publisher's end and very difficult code to work with on the developer end you gotta feel bad for the people who have to Port these Jack games as the PS2 games are all made of the custom coding language that the people behind the ports have had to detangle so the HD Collection being as good as it is is a feat just look at what the people who worked on the games had to say in this behind the scenes on the HD Collection daddy dog will probably tell you they told us at the beginning that this is an Impossible Project and it wasn't long before we agreed with them we had like completely custom tools and completely custom way of using all the hardware made stuff back and forth between all the different processors and like did weird stuff on the the old PlayStation One processor you weren't supposed to and it was just a very complicated design yeah I wouldn't we didn't think when we were making the game of the people that would come through and improve the game so one would assume that it being announced that all four Jack games were coming to PS4 via their PS2 emulation service would mean that we were getting the original Jack games without all the BS and you'd be very wrong of the console versions the Jack games on PS4 and PS5 are the games at their absolute worst these games have always been notoriously difficult to emulate as well as these PS4 ports show that off best with broken effects frequent frame drops and graphical glitches thankfully this version did see numerous patches post launch I mean when it came out on PS4 the Boost trails and the cars and Jack X barely touched the vehicles stuff like that Jack X has been patched to the point where it's largely playable especially compared to the trilogy but overall I think the PS4 versions are a dumpster fire as several videos on YouTube have gone into I mean this version screws up the controls to the point where moving the analog stick in a circle feels awkward and stiff unlike the other versions because at launch Jack could only move in eight directions on PS4 and I believe that's now been updated to 16. so great and that's that like I said I tried to keep that little bit brief now let us resume discussing Jack X as originally released so you have all these modes and Missions at your fingertips how does it work in the campaign well in the story mode you have four cups by beating each Mission you get a maximum of three points depending on your performance you need 50 points to unlock the Grand Prix of each cup and by beating one you move on to the next repeat the process a few more times and you'd be in the game and this is why it's good that the game has a variety of race modes and combat Maps since the game is pretty long maybe too long there are four cups and the one that I beat the easiest was the third one in 90 minutes the other three all took me over two hours Jack X is a full length Jack and Daxter game I enjoy playing the game for most of its run time however I'd be lying if I didn't say that by the third and fourth cups I was thinking okay how many more races does it take to get to 50 medals because after a certain point you've seen pretty much everything the game has to offer and it's just a matter of playing more of it until it's over the game took me forever to beat the first time I mentioned at the top of the video that I first got my hands on this game in 2012 the fall to be specific and then I didn't actually beat it until the summer of 2015. that's my entire Middle School career of on and off trying to beat Jack X combat racing because the game is lengthy but also pretty difficult if you don't have a grasp on how to use defensive items you'll get wrecked and get bronze medals further lengthening the play time and the four grand prix each have high stakes to win these you need to play three races back to back if you restart you go back to the first one you get points for each one you win 10 if you get in first place eight and second and so on if you have the highest amount of points by the end of Race 3 then you win on my first time doing the final Grand Prix in 2015 I was getting so mad because I would just barely lose out in these long tour tracks but I'm not criticizing the game here I'm just noting that took me and Eon to beat this game back in the day to the point where when I reviewed Jack X for the first time back in 2016 and I actually didn't play the whole game I watched all the cutscenes and played like one cup or like a half a cup and just decided to review that thinking it would take me weeks to beat the game yeah if you ever wondered why I try to re-review games that I did in ninth grade exhibit a but it's just funny because I replayed the first four Jack games back in 2019 and took me a weekend to beat Jack X and I was like damn who knew and then for this video I once again beat the game in a 48 hour period who knew it could be so simple even though racing can start to wear on You by the 6th or seventh hour of play time you still have plenty of motivation to see the game through to the finish line and that's because of the game's story I didn't hide the fact that I thought Jack 3's plot was a mess last week and I think Jack X is a wholesale Improvement this is especially worthy of Praise since this is a racing game the team mentioned in the commentary track that they needed to come up with story beats that would be resolved in the racetrack and beats that the audience actually cares about you know CTR had a reason why you were racing but not one that the audience would be invested in it's just a cartoon setup nothing more nothing less but Jack X took the biggest thing from Jack 2 using story as a reward for gameplay and then they pulled that off in a racing game which is a job well done where Jack 3 went wrong was its unfocused main plot its overly large cast of characters and its villains Jack X is much simpler the plot is Just Jack and Friends need to race to get that antidote so that's the most important thing everyone's on board with that basic goal but this leaves room for more complexity between characters such as it being the elephant in the room that Jack is the one who left crew for dead and Reign doesn't know this which comes to light at the end of the game from GT Blitz causing her to trust Jack less or how Kira who's been a support character from day one wants to finally get in the mix herself but Samos is against it with which gets resolved by her finally joining the races in the last cup the game still has a pretty large amount of characters in the plot like how Sig shows up to support the team Cleaver joins demuck in your mud and you face other rival characters like Razer and ur86 but centering the plot around the grand championship makes the plot easier to follow than Jack 3. Sig is here to race and he's going to offer his underworld knowledge as best he can the whole plot sees you gradually unravel the conspiracy of miso The Crime Boss rigging the tournament in his favor as you upset the balance of power by winning more races The Mystery of the story also concerns the event's commentator GT Blitz whose father was killed by the meso Syndicate back when he was a racer but Blitz doesn't seem to care he just wants ratings although on the subject of Blitz he's where the story's humor comes from while you could say his bit of being in a flashy showman gets old by the end of the first cup it gets really funny when pecker gets added as his co-commentator and the Tudors trade insults in highly comedic fashion once you win the Grand Prix get the antidote as Reign explains that crew was trying to defeat mizo for years but can never ID the guy and that's because mizo doesn't exist GT was meso all along having set up his own father's death as revenge for the man caring so much about racing and then running this crime syndicate ever since maintaining cover by being the lead commentator but the winner of this race determined who would run organized crime in crass City and a desperate move to stay on top mizo steals the antidote as Jack chases after him it's a pretty simple final boss we have to shoot mizo's car until he has no Health left although I have to mention something really funny that I've never seen before the mission ends as soon as miso runs out of Health but his AI forgot to jump off this ramp so mizo just fell into the abyss not even 25 percent of the way through the battle on Just One automatically that was funny but of course Jack gets the antidote and gets the last word in on miso in a really satisfying way you have a habit of leaving people to die don't you you get used to it bringing us to the ending where everyone is cured and the day is saved but in one final twist it turns out that rain was never poisoned and was never innocent either she's now in control of organized crime in the city and couldn't have done it without the help of Jack and Friends although she did actually grow to like them even though she knows they're definitely not friends now but the heroes just say hey well at least we're good important thing is we won and we're alive and we brought down that scumbag measle and we rocked the racing circuit right jack finally allowing Jack and Kira the moment they've been denied game after game will you kiss her already sheesh oh yeah that's what I call a photo finish and that's Jack X honestly I don't have too much to say about this one in conclusion I mean I've said it all already the game is a satisfying combat racer with a slick aesthetic and Vibe and a cool story what more could you want as an epilogue naughty dog's time with the Jack and Daxter series I think you can't go wrong with Jack X although I'm probably not going to play this game again anytime soon it's a bit wearying by the very end but it's a great game overall similar to crash before it I think naughty dog was wise to close the series and move on to something new the Jack series was always experimental trying new things every time to see what worked it was good of them to stick with it for a generation and give it a proper conclusion but I think moving on to more stable Evergreen franchises was a wise move now that through Jack and Daxter they learned what they wanted to make that doesn't take away from my love of Jack I'm just saying that creatively I see why they went the direction they did and I'll just enjoy the ride of Jack and Daxter for what it was although the Jack series didn't end here in 2005 it was announced at Sony's Playstation Portable was going to receive an exclusive Jack title simply titled Daxter which was set for release in early 2006. the developed by ready at dawn Studios Daxter being their first game as they then went on to develop the God of War PSP games the collection of those games and the Order 1886 on Playstation 4. today they do Oculus Rift games but now we're just going to focus on Daxter their first release one that I do have a decent bit of nostalgia for in a previous video concerning PSP games I mentioned that I was absolutely Resolute on getting a PSP back in 2007 due to the release of Sonic Rivals 2 in the system that year when I got it I also managed to NAB Sonic Rivals 1 and to sweeten the deal my console was a bundle that included a copy of Daxter a game I didn't even know existed until it was in my possession only it didn't come with a case it was with a weird sleeve thing I still have that disc to this day and I might even still have that Family Guy episode I came bundled with although I don't know where it is I'd have to look for it I remember loading that one thinking I was getting a video game and ended up watching Family Guy for 22 minutes still the only prolonged exposure to the series I've had to this day but as for Daxter here I was playing a jack game I didn't even know existed that that I didn't even ask for and back then I actually liked the Sonic Rivals games it's needless to say this was quite the score for me back in 2007 although I definitely was not the only person playing Daxter the PSP while not nearly as popular as its rival the Nintendo DS still sold 80 million units and so the player base was quite large Baxter being one of its best-selling games pushing more in sales than Jack 3 and Jack X even which definitely came as a surprise to me since I regard this one as a PSP side game when it actually sold better than noi dog's last two PS2 entries despite that people don't really talk about this one that much today its lack of re-releases certainly didn't help that but in terms of the fan base you see people talking about the Jack Trilogy and Jack X maybe giving a little mention to the Lost Frontier killing the franchise but this one is definitely underrepresented in the discourse I myself barely play or think about this one as well I never beat it as a kid for a reason I can explain later I got it on the Vita store in 2014 when I first got that system that's when I finally beat it playing it again for the review I did six years ago and now I'm back to play it once more despite never having touched it once in those six years so is this game any good is it worth busting out a PSP or Vita to play well that's what we'll find out today when going into a Daxter game you might wonder what would it even be about well they picked a really good answer to that question Daxter begins in Haven city with a struggling insect exterminator business run by osmo one day he sees a giant light of something plummets to the ground this being the moment the Jack and Daxter arrive in Haven City at the start of Jack 2. you know the story Daxter escapes while Jack gets captured by the crimson guard and two years later Daxter rescues Jack beginning the events of Jack 2. the Daxter game fills in the blank of these two years as Dax is telling tall tales in a bar for two years straight until osmo catches up with him to give him a job at the Critter Ritter shop which puts Daxter on the path to rescue Jack as seen in Jack 2. an excellent setup for a Daxter solo game filling in the blank on something we wouldn't have asked many questions about before but now we have concrete info on what happened to doctor led to his rescuing Jack from the get-go there are many things with Daxter I was really impressed by for a relatively early release on PSP it showed off what the system could do in several ways for starters a variety of aesthetically pleasing areas and stable performance it's not 60fps but for a PSP game the performance Target is stable sometimes I saw it dip but not to the point where that would be a noteworthy takeaway from the experience in the forest area I noticed some pop in as well but again for handheld gaming in 2006 it really showed how much more powerful the PSP was given the fact that the prior error of gaming handhelds was the Game Boy Advance which couldn't even dream of doing anything like the kind of visuals you'd see in Daxter fully 3D gameplay in areas multiple cutscenes with high quality animation and its entire script being voice acted that was a pretty high bar for 2006 PSP standards the console wanted its games to feel like less powerful PS2 games and of its early release stuff I think Daxter demonstrated that pretty damn well seeing the player explore tiny bits of the massive Haven City from Jack 2 the industrial district and the support to be specific the PSP housing these environments really showing what the console was capable of I also noticed that Daxter has more fur in this game than usual well in the entirely pre-rendered cutscenes but still it's new I feel like daxter's cutscene model and Jack's 2 through X is more aesthetically pleasing with the simpler fur texture but I found out that the reason they gave him more fur and scenes was so that doctor's character would have a little bit more to his design now that he's the focused character which makes sense in gameplay he still looks exactly how he did in the PS2 games we're just talking about cutscenes and while we're talking about how the game is presented I figured now would be a great time to address the fact that I think the soundtrack in this game is another really high quality one despite Daxter being a silly character by Nature the music for his game goes for more atmospheric and dangerous Vibe as you explore the depths of Haven City like the brewery the transit system or the fish Cannery in more recent videos I've dropped the habit of letting music play out but in the case of these Jack games I feel like it's worth it because so far the series is five for five when it comes to music I can Vibe with while playing foreign [Music] games like Daxter you never really know what kind of video you're gonna get out of it I'm someone who likes covering all the games my favorite franchises especially if those franchises are more Niche they don't have a million games but the part that is the mystery with games like this is will it be a spin-off that you feel there's a lot to say about like Secret Agent Clank because of how awful it was or will it be more by the Numbers Daxter is definitely in the second category of those two Daxter is a good game but when looking at its mechanics it pretty much stops there what I first noticed was that the game has paced pretty well despite taking place in the world of Jack 2 the mission structure is much more like Jack 3. you don't repeatedly have to go back to the Critter Ritter shop for New Missions you just go to the hotel and then get told to make it to the construction site the flow is kept up by taking you from mission to Mission and the areas are very close to one another so you never feel like you're commuting from place to place as the game just keeps the action going almost non-stop perk of it being a handheld game since players are playing on the bus or on the train you don't want to have traveling to gameplay being a significant chunk of time just get to the point you also don't tend to revisit areas much in Daxter compared to Jack 2 and 3 where you would do a mission in the sewers and then come back later in the game to do something else there you do return to the construction site once but largely Daxter is a game where you do one Grand Mission at the brewery and then that's that levels in this game are very focused on platforming I kind of forgot about that when getting back into this game for the video because it definitely took me by surprise to see levels like the transit station seeing you get on top of a train and Dodge these lasers coming from various directions and hopping from one train to another or multiple levels having you time your spray hover ability to get past Gap if you want a game with consistent platforming action you can't go wrong with Daxter since its whole run time has it in abundance Daxter also plays well too he was playable in Jack 2 and 3 during specific set pieces but was just a jack clone in terms of handling but here they gave him a more unique moveset as he fights of this electric fly swatter that you use for a basic combo and if you hit an enemy with the last hit on said combo we were repeated on the nearest enemy the game encouraged you to go combo mad with that to unlock more moves you have to first gather up precursor orbs in the stages collecting certain numbers of them on locksty's dream sequence qte movie reference games you play say that 10 times fast there's not much to these but I think it's fun as a brief distraction from the main gameplay especially when they ramp up and the amount of buttons you have to press at once I also think the various ways Daxter is designed to fit into various movies was Charming besides that precursor orbs also unlock Secrets like concept art and behind the scenes and in gameplay you can find secret items that allow you to wear different masks like Jack human Daxter or Samos or even having ones for Ratchet and Clank and of course Sly Cooper instantly making the game better since you can play it with sly's face the game always reminded me of Sly when I was a kid as you'd have to attack with a close range weapon crawling through vents and stuff now that's come full circle anyway besides the electric swatter you also attack enemies with your spray gun the upgrades to your gun also felt really well paced you get the gun in the second mission and then the game spends the rest of the mission teaching you how to use it and then you unlock the hover ability and use it throughout the next few areas then you get access to the flame mod with two areas open in the port that both tutorialize different abilities with the flame mod the first showing its combat prowess as it lights metal heads on fire and the other showing how it can help with platforming by melting ice you repeat the process with the ultrasonic attachment that destroys crowds of enemies both from a distance and from above and then you use all the skills combined in the final areas at the end of the day I think the game is mechanically sound Baxter's jump and double jump feels a bit slippery but other than that I really can't tell you anything the game does wrong from a mechanical standpoint it's just very Bland as a game they created a decent combat ad system they structured the game in a well-paced way in terms of progression and unlockables but the game just never really left much of an impression on me throughout I did have some issues with the game like how it's occasionally difficult to know where you're going in a more open-ended Mission like the lumber mill since there's no map in the actual stages so when I have one target left in the middle I can't be sure what ground I have and have not covered so I run around aimlessly in the hopes of finding it only to realize that the one spot I did Cover had two Targets instead of one like all the rest that would have been good to know and a map with the one in Jack two and three would have saved me there I never got far in this game as a kid because I could never find the last Eco crystal in the strip mine and that's also a result of just not knowing where I'm going at any given time I also felt like these button mashing minigames Mid Mission came out of nowhere a lot of the time it felt really shoehorned in with little Fanfare and the vehicle segments all felt really slow lacking the tension they had in previous games so yeah it's not like the game is perfect and didn't leave a huge impression it's much more than I thought the game was mechanically solid and well structured has replay value with unlockable Easter eggs and skins and was a very serviceable game for its four hour run time but it's never doing anything so incredible that makes it a must play not that every game has to completely knock your your socks off it's just that this is kind of the thing with handheld spin-offs like this when your goal is to make an authentic Jack game on PSP in 2006 well mission accomplished but once the shine is worn off and that fact is no longer impressive on its own since handheld gaming has evolved to our console quality games of the expectation the game is just left to being good in its own merits and Daxter definitely is good on its own merits but doesn't really do much else to impress you making it pretty bland on the replay what I did find interesting about Daxter is how they use the games placed in the timeline to expand upon the series's lore in the first half of the game daxters just hunt in bugs but we all know that these new bugs of the metal heads just beginning their attack on Haven City in Jack 2 you start by facing the smaller dog-like metal heads and by the end are facing off against huge monsters and you see even bigger ones in Jack 3 so it's fitting that when going backwards in the timeline the enemies you fight before Jack 2 are even smaller but are also to scale with Daxter as a character so its timeline placement suits the game mechanics well in the back half of the game the story gets more focused as as Daxter remembers that he needs to rescue his best friend Jack when a prison ship flies by with Jack in it it's a little weird to make it a gag that Daxter forgot about Jack taking his Carefree attitude a little too far but once he's set on rescuing Jack that becomes the most important thing for the rest of the game and once Daxter sets his sights on that the player gets more insight in the lore like how Arrow makes a cameo being back to who he was in Jack 2. but what's new was that we see him in a meeting with count Vega from Jack 3. veger is insisting that Praxis and arrow use light Eco on Jack and the other test subjects because he like he did in Jack 3 believes that dark Eco is an Abomination also mentioning that he's got his sight set in the secret of the precursors expanding the universe by showing Digger's Ambitions were there in Jack too we just didn't see him in that game in this scene we also learned that the dark warrior program has killed every test subject that isn't jacked because his Eco powers are keeping him alive another interesting tidbit is that Errol mentions that Onan claims Jack is special due to his Eco powers from this you couldn't fur that Onan was the one who told Praxis and arrow that Jack was going to be where he was the start of Jack 2 so they could capture him we've been waiting for you but why though Onan was on your side in Jack too well I think that what they were going for was that in Jack 2 Onan had some larger perspective on the way things were going to play out she says it is good to see you again jack but we've never met before before after it is all the same so by adding this detail I think Onan made it so that Jack would undergo the dark Eco experiment specifically because it would take away his precursor interactivity thus making it so Jack's older self could not open the precursor Stone allowing metal core to feed in the Life Force inside and then Jack could use these dark powers to battle against metalcore and win out saving Jack's younger self and starting the time loop I discussed in the Jack 2 video this idea of mine has evidence backing it in Jack 2 but Daxter seals the deal also while I'm on the discussion of Errol the scene that tries being comedic with him here makes the guy more entertaining in one scene than he was in the entirety of Jack three someone call about a bug infestation what I haven't heard about any infestation who called you uh your boy yeah you know Captain's ice as I'm in Rupert tick check boss nice try that call didn't happen Captain rupertness is on leave this month he couldn't have been the one Speaking of core he's also in this game directing Kaden a Metalhead to disguise himself and going to the city and shut down every insect exterminator shop but osmo refuses to back down causing core to go impatient with Kaden especially as it becomes clear to Corey that Daxter is going to rescue Jack but here's something that doesn't make sense to me maybe you all in the comments can help make some sense of it core explains that the metal heads have just found their way to breach the shield wall in Haven City explaining why it's only the tiniest of bugs you face and at this point he still would have his deal with Baron Praxis so he's just barely attacking the city on the outskirts is agreed upon what confuses me is this part at the end this Jack I could still beat them both outside in the skies which should be cool as core doesn't think Kaden will succeed in killing Daxter so he plans on something else disguise himself as an old man so we can meet Jack and Daxter outside once they've escaped and use them to his advantage in his quest to undermine Praxis and get the precursor Stone which directly ties the end of Daxter in the beginning of Jack 2. however this scene makes it seem like core only just thought of the old man disguise like 30 minutes before seeing Jack and Daxter but he was already a member of the Underground when you meet him in Jack 2. since he refers you to torn to meet the shadow that and he also had the kid with him who we know was found by the shadow first and given Decor to look after while the shadow planned the missions for the underground unless core had already been in the city gaining the trust of the underground before this point with this very disguise only he just now thinks to use it on Jack but then I just think it's a bit of an inconsistency that he just thinks up this disguise one you can wrap your mind around but one that goes unexplained in the game but the Jack games in general have some plot inconsistencies that don't get addressed at any point in the series such as Jack's Uncle from Jack one or how in Jack 2. I feel like the idea was that haven city was the last Refuge of humanity from the Metalhead Menace and that the Wasteland was where the metal head Nest was at but then Jack 3 shows an entire desert civilization in the Wasteland that I can accept but then Jack X has crass city right nearby Haven on the map with Decades of its own history of combat racing that you get mixed in with the backstory of Jack X said that the city and the sport were getting back on their feet after the darkmaker attack in Jack 3 but then how are they doing before when the metal heads were attacking in Jack 2 right next door unless the metal heads were only attacking Haven because they wanted the precursor stone that sat in Mars tomb I don't know I'm just saying these kinds of questions go unanswered but having said that I love Jack and Daxter lore hence why I would even bother talking about it to this extent in the first place and I'm glad Daxter contributes to it because everything else in the story goes in one ear and out the other mainly the new characters 10 Karen Simon and osmo they aren't bad characters but they just fulfill roles in the checklist like the wise older guy who isn't Samos or the attractive woman daxter's gonna hit on who is an Ashland or Tess very one note characters as you spend more time focusing on how the old characters relate to this new story the new characters just don't really add much or even get satisfactory resolutions like Daxter taking on a tiny dot as a sidekicker gets killed by Kaden that was kind of random and how Simon's last note is giving you the outfit they found for Jack explaining why Daxter just has that at the start of Jack too I brought you some new threats put them on otherwise doesn't do anything as a character in the game besides being a surfer bro osmo's shop blows up before the final level but we don't really see what he does after that in the ending the final shot shows Simon and osmo at Jack and Company at the naughty otso celebrating the defeat of metal core after the end of Jack 2 making it so we could infer that he got the business back up and running but the story knows you don't really care about that as fans in the end be more hyped about how it connected directly to Jack to his opening instead of seeing fleshed out resolutions to to the new plot which I think is a good way to describe the whole experience in a way I gave this game a lot more criticism the first time around six years ago but now there really wasn't anything about Daxter I seriously didn't like and there are things it does that I did quite like it's a well-made game but it's just not memorable and is overall a one and done type game of all the Jack and Ratchet games released on PSP this was definitely the best one probably because it was made by ready at dawn the other three were done by a different singular Studio but still Daxter impresses me visually and with how it feels like an authentic Jack game in terms of art design story and gameplay but it's just not doing anything to set itself apart as a game you'd want to revisit I've explained the various tiers through which I see games in a previous video I don't think rating games is necessary in every video although if you want this system to be mentioned in each game I review I suppose I could I bring it up now because I kept thinking if I were to put Daxter on a tier list where would it be well it's certainly quality enough to be a b tier game which is the all-around good game tier but I kept thinking about other games I rate a b and thought Daxter wasn't as good as those so it's the most positive form of a c tier game it's not doing anything wrong and is in fact doing a lot right but those things don't make it an experience any staying power so it gets a c because it's a decent game just nothing special compared to Jack 3 which is in C tier because of the flaws that actively dragged the experience down although I would probably rather Replay that game anyway it's hard to quantify what I'm trying to say here but I hope you get it it sounds like a harsh rating but really I don't have anything against this game I should say in the grand scheme of things but it's just kind of there like I said when going in a handheld spin-off games like this for review there often isn't much to say if the game is overall good besides it's neat for the time it does some interesting stuff for only the hardcore fans should seek it out having said that I think that just about covers Daxter meaning that there's only one Jack revisit left this being a spin-off people do talk about much more Jack and Daxter the Lost Frontier which released all the way back in 2009 in the PlayStation Portable and Playstation 2. a game that you may be surprised to hear was originally being developed by Naughty Dog the story it goes that after working on Jack X it was time for the team to fully get in gear for the new franchise on PS3 a full action adventure title starring a real-life human which ended up being Uncharted Drake's Fortune but it turns out that noidog was also looking to develop for the PlayStation Portable I mean it's a new Sony device we're a Sony team we haven't tackled handheld games yet might as well give it a shot and so they began developing the next Jack game for the PSP but the problems arose with this approach because the PS3 was an infamously tough system to develop for in addition to that you had the natural challenges that arose at the start of the 7th gen with games going full HD well HD at the time 720p is nothing to write home about now but you know what I mean developing Uncharted was such a demanding task for ND that their PSP team working on a jack game had to be shelved to get all hands on deck to make sure they properly understood the PS3 Hardware to use it to Max efficiency like the studio had done for the PS1 and the PS2 and then shipped the product when all was said and done not to get too in depth on uncharted's history as this isn't the Uncharted video but I'm bringing it up because it concern parents what became of Jack PSP this is where the studio high impact games comes in this is a team that was formed in the 2000s by people who once had worked at Insomniac Games a naughty dog in the PS2 days their first release was on the PSP in 2007. Ratchet and Clank size Matters something the team was naturally cut out for given their history at Insomniac Size Matters proved to be a massive success on PSP and one year later they released another ratchet PSP spin-off Secret Agent Clank to this day ratchet fans still remember these games fondly I covered them last summer after I did the PS2 games in that series if you were curious but to put it lightly I think both games are absolutely abysmal when going back to them the former being a game that could have been good with some simple changes to how it was balanced but the game we got quickly becomes a frustrating affair with weak weapons and overpowered enemies the latter game is just one of the worst I've ever played a game that just boggles the mind with its weak writing frustrating and boring levels and an onslaught of mini games and just everything I don't like in a game but the positive reception they got on their ratchet PSP titles would make them Prime candidates to take over where noidog left off on Jack PSP and a naughty dog starting development might mean good things right well not really Jack and Daxter the Lost Frontier is a game that fans were dissatisfied with from day one for many reasons that we'll get into before the next half hour or so is up yeah no hot take this week the Lost Frontier is not a good game and it's easily the worst Jack and Daxter game one I was pretty excited for when it was released I mean it's another Jack game but a proper platforming sequel we hadn't had one in five years at this point it was one of my three most anticipated games of the year but of course one of them was a children's tie-in game one was a lame is all get out Jack game and the other was Batman Arkham Asylum that one's an all-time classic but that is of course a story for another day back on target I want to say I'm not trying to make a hit job on the people who make these games I'm just stating my opinion since I like talking about every game my favorite franchises so when I revisit these PSP spin-offs that I played a lot as a kid some part of me hopes that this playthrough might change things and I can see it in a new light but in the case of these three games it actually ends up coming out worse than it did before so what's not to like about Jack and Daxter the Lost Frontier well the game begins with Jack Daxter and someone who sources say is Kira traveling to the edge of the world because the world is running out of Eco and they're seeking out more of it to save the world without it the planet is seeing Eco storms raging almost constantly they get ambushed by Sky Pirates and the scuffle causes them to crash land at the brink the edge of the world because apparently the precursor has never finished making this planet and so they just had to cut it off at this point while none of what I just said made any sense you get back in the air and Aid the European people on their battle against the sky Pirates making a truce with them for the time being getting us into the Lost Frontier as I said before the first cut scene is over I have several questions but I'll just stick to the gameplay for now the early game had me doubting my memories of this game because when looking at the game's structure and pacing I should be singing its Praises I mean you get a full platforming tutorial level and intro to how sky combat Works a shooting tutorial with more platform forming another plane Mission and then a big level with platforming new powers combat in the works I thought Jack 3's opening act was really poorly paced since it bombarded players with minigame after mini game after mini game not giving you a proper platforming Mission until an hour into the game The Lost Frontier is actually much more consistent at first dog fighting Mission followed by a massive platforming stage structure that could totally work but I obviously don't think it works that's because Jack's movement is very stiff Jack felt great to control in the PS2 Trilogy because of how seamlessly you could go from his standard running to Rolling and jumping out of a roll his uppercut and dive being extensions of your move set as well that Synergy between Jack's actions is just not in the Lost Frontier so now movement just feels slow the game just doesn't have the physics of previous games making the platforming Far More by the books as you jump from one to the next his attacks can't be seamlessly integrated into your movement so instead you wait several seconds to rebound from the ground pound for example it looks and technically plays like Jack it just doesn't feel like Jack making all the regular gameplay a chore no greater example than combat this also feels pretty limp as your basic punches and Spins technically do damage but the enemies barely react to it and since you're pretty committed to almost every attack you do enemies ganging up on you is pretty common even the uppercut which should allow you to get some room from enemies doesn't do nearly as good a job as it did in previous games because again the enemies don't really react to it with guns it's the same problem the scatter gun does not put distance between you and your enemies like it did in Jack 2 and Jack 3 and the Vulcan Fury does not stun enemies making it still quite easy to be torn to shreds when enemies get too close the most effective weapon is the Blaster as the spin kick combo is more useful than ever as you can get enemies locked in a loop until they die The Peacemaker isn't in this game instead you get a basic grenade launcher called the lobber which isn't as cool to be sure but I think it's effective for what it is now in terms of combat I really don't know why it was as limp feeling as it was in this game similar to The Ratchet and Clank games that are made by high impact games making weapons do good damage making your attacks pack a punch and having proper balance isn't really a hardware issue it's a design issue now the Lost Frontier doesn't have the damage problem those ratchet games did but why does the scatter gun not put distance between you and the enemies why does the uppercut not launch enemies into the air especially the small ones these are tinier things that really add up now in regards to how Jack plays that much I can give some leniency on quite frankly I don't think the PSP was capable of doing Jack's gameplay a lot of Justice now I'm sure if naughty dog had developed it it would be based on the code from the PS2 games so would have felt a little better in combat but I'm referring to the controls if you play a lot of PSP games based on PS2 franchises you'll quickly see how held back the games were by the PSP not having a second analog stick in a 3D action game you have to be able to control the camera so PSP games all had to come up with their own idea as to how they would go about it some games like Metal Gear Solid portable Ops use the d-pad as a camera and other games use l r to turn the camera left and right the Lost Frontier being one of those games but in Jack 2 shooting was on R1 with the camera naturally being on the second stick the PSP didn't have L2 or R2 nor a second stick so yeah the game has the camera on the shoulder buttons but that means shooting had to be on triangle the only button left in the controller to use it just feels even more Awkward to play as a result of that the ratchet games barely got away with the limited control schemes as you already used Circle to shoot in ratchets one and two on PS2 and with the strafing mechanic being automatic circling around enemies is no problem hitting Eleanor at once in size Matters also allowed you to long jump which was cumbersome but doable here rolling just wouldn't work with the camera on the button layout so it was axed and after finishing that sentence I gotta say it feels really weird to use Ratchet and Clank size Matters and secret agent [ __ ] Clank as a positive example but here we are in this game without those mechanics the gameplay just feels clunky and lame and there wasn't much they could have done about it while trying to be faithful to the mechanics of Jack while also dealing with this console although I am going to mention the most bizarre bug I've seen in a game in a hot minute sometimes when turning the camera the entire game speed would slow down to like 50 or 60 percent speed I'm not joking just watch this would happen frequently and the only way to stop it was by dying has anyone ever seen that before I never have although this was actually my first time playing the Lost Frontier on PSP well the PSP version on the Vita TV but still I mentioned before this game got a PS S2 Port developed in-house at high impact like the size Matters Port I wasn't sure what the Jack fan consensus was and which version of the two was better ratchet fans are very confident in the PS2 version having butchered this classic game but my comments show that some jack fans still do believe that the PSP version of the Lost Frontier is superior as a game now that I've played all three of these games on PS2 and PSP I'm gonna say that I am sick of this absolute hoax on PS2 the Lost Frontier has better control is because the second analog stick is used for the camera which in some segments is extended to be a full 360 Degrees shooting is on R1 the Eco powers are all d-pad combos the resolution has doubled to 480p and that's that the PSP version has better lighting more colorful environments and more stable performance because my God the Lost Frontier on PS2 runs like ass with frequent slowdown and ghosting effects but the better controls is the deciding factor in my opinion better overall performance does make sense if that's someone's reason for preferring the game on PSP but I have no ever seen someone bring it up nor have I ever seen this camera rotation slowdown issue that was exclusive to the PSP version ever get brought up either to this day 14 years after seismatters hit the PS2 and 13 years after Agent Clank and the Lost Frontier did I have no idea where the high impact pokes as I'm gonna call it came from best I can tell the games all reviewed worse on PS2 but that's because if you play them as PSP games it's more impressive right but I'm not even looking at it from that lens the PSP was a powerful system in its day and had many technologically impressive games released on it but it's still possible for the game to be good which is the thing I'm judging it by sure Daxter or Metal Gear Solid portable Ops wouldn't be as fun on a console compared to the actual console games but if a game is fun then it's fun these three are just not that even with the enhancements brought to them on PS2 so to quote Baron Praxis pay no attention to this [Music] food better maybe that wasn't an exact quote but anyway because I think the combat and platforming is fundamentally not fun it makes it so that all the new additions that are nice go in one ear and out the other such as getting Eco power-ups again red Eco allows you to create explosions yellow Eco gives you the ability to propel yourself in the air you can activate a shield and create crystals with green Eco don't know why the Life Energy Eco would do that but still and with blue Eco you can teleport yourself and slow down time some segments even requiring you to use these powers in tandem like teleporting across a pool of dark Eco while also needing the shield raised things like that are a good way of scaling the difficulty and using all your abilities I also like being able to use dark Eco as currency to get upgrades to colored Eco abilities like energy attacks in the yellow category or health upgrades in the green but like I said I fundamentally think this game isn't good so rare moments of design I think are satisfying don't really leave an impact in the grand scheme of things although I should take this moment to issue a correction from the Jack 2 video in it I stated that Jack lost all his Eco powers in The Experiment but that's not true that's the reason he even survives the dark warrior program to begin with the dark Eco just causes him to lose precursor interactivity that's all I just had a misread of this line here from metal core at the end of Jack 2. now that you've been altered with dark Eco the stone will never open for you your younger self however still has the pure gift for years that misread caused me to think this game was breaking Canon by giving jack Eco Powers again but I was wrong so you get off the hook for that one game but still the game is overall more frustrating than anything else like when an enemy is clearly on radar but didn't spawn in so I had to stand around waiting for the time to run out so I could do the segment again or the numerous camera angles that don't give me a good view causing my demise or when I can barely put any distance between me and this mutant mini boss giving it the ability to kill me in 2.75 nanoseconds how about this part where you control Daxter in his shield but he's flailing all all over the place and I can barely steer him once more leading to my Doom several times over but when the Lost Frontier isn't annoying me it's just incredibly boring the two major game elements are the platforming and the dog fighting combat I think having aerial battles was a good idea for a jack game the series had explored almost every other way of competing with vehicles so this was a natural next step I think the planes you unlock all have good handling like you pulled down on the stick to pull up and vice versa as the plane takes a second to actually do it which doesn't sound good but it feels like you're controlling a heavy plane which I like even on PSP the controls work well the d-pad doing evasive maneuvers like turning around and the barrel roll uh actually it's called an aileron shut up commenter no one cares like the cars in Jack X the planes in the Lost Frontier have a decent bit of customization not in terms of appearance but destroyed planes drop scrap metal that you can use to buy new weapons and upgrade the ones you have mixing and matching to make each plane to your liking however here is where the problems begin a little gimmick mode like this can be just fine is a way of breaking up the regular gameplay but similar to the PSP ratchet games they make it overstay its welcome by quite a large chunk of time I'm mainly thinking about this phase towards the end of the game where you have to defend the sky pirate Bays from these turret towers and this goes on for No Lie 20 minutes because you have to destroy all three towers and then control a missile under the core of one of them and if you die you have to do it all over again but then you have to destroy the turrets on the other two again and control another missile and then a third time and a third missile for the last Tower there are checkpoints here but why does it have to go on for so long the mechanics of these planes aren't so great that it warrants playing for a half hour but as if that wasn't bad enough the next thing you do is fly through a Vortex and this goes on for five minutes as well only I died at the end had to do the whole thing again once that was done I was in another dog fight against the europens which took me over 20 minutes yet again an entire hour of this dog fighting which should go without saying is quite Overkill but here's the most Sinister part during the mission with the turrets I was told by the game that if I wanted to change my weapons I could hit restart and was allowed that chance I almost heard the game up on that offer but realized no I'm sure they'd have it go all the way back to the start with three towers standing but if I kept trying with my current Loadout I would eventually win which I did but then this massive battle with the europins began and I was getting destroyed needed a different weapon so I did try it and what do you know checkpoints be damned all progress must be restarted on this mission that's real nice the whole game just feels unfinished and it seems that it was one of the designers at high impact got interviewed by a jack fan via email a few years back and the interview was hosted on the jack Wiki he mentioned that the game had the shortest Dev cycle of the three games they did for Jack and Ratchet which kind of surprised me given the fact that it was only released a year and a half after Secret Agent Clank which came out only one year after size matters but maybe it was easier to do that game since the ratchet gameplay was already programmed and with Jack they had to start from scratch and also maybe they didn't get that full time to work on the Lost Frontier who knows either way it's pretty clear to all parties involved that the Lost Frontier just didn't get the time in the oven needed to really do good in its ideas which is why it feels padded out and clunky more than anything else by the end of the Lost Frontier I'm just left begging for the game to end I don't want to play these levels and I dread the dog fighting that awaits me afterwards case in point the last main levels in the game where I get these terrible camera angles that make it difficult to tell where I'm jumping combat that's wonky and obnoxious against enemies and bosses and then a massive of dog fighting sequence to end the game where you first chased the main villain down for several minutes only to then battle his ship for several minutes watching the same animation of The Shield going down three times to begin an end each phase it's it's so boring I'm just flying forward blasting targets by mashing the shoot Button as I stated you're just begging for the game to end and of course the terrible story isn't helping it turns out that a lot of these conceptual ideas like Sky Pirates the Eco storms and the brink were all there when noidog was developing this game but that doesn't change the fact that I think many of these concepts of the game don't make any sense the precursors didn't finish building the world like what does that mean they literally hang out in the core of the planet why not what were they doing down there if not finishing the planet they made I don't know how you can run out of Eco in the first place when as established Eco is literally what all life in the universe of Jack comes from maybe that could be explained via people using too many resources that drain the world's Eco but with it just being stated that Eco is running out it just makes me wonder how that's even possible it's good that the plot has a small number of characters in it you know don't want the bloated cast of cameos that Jack 3 had but still I think it would have been nice for it to be established in the backstory this was like a mission from Samos or torn or whoever to make it feel like we're still in the Jack world because as it stands it just doesn't with this different setting different characters and a completely different Jack Jack is portrayed by Josh Keaton in this game who's a great actor and does a good job with the material but man Mike Irwin was Jack and seeing him not in the game stings as a long time fan especially since the beta cut scenes from Naughty dog's version of the game leaked on the internet before the game came out and Mike Irwin was in it to do the lines they needed and the cut scene direction is a lot more like the previous games the characters look more on model and the lines are funnier so why Jack was recast remains a mystery to this day same for why KIRO was recast in Jack 3 for that matter anyway the story also introduces this random ass element where Daxter gets touched by dark Eco and turns into a monster called Dark Daxter I'm sure you were wondering why this hadn't been mentioned thus far and it's because genuinely I always forget this is in the game game whenever we get to this intro cut scene for this I size remember you have to play boring mini games where you bash enemies and obstacles solving switch puzzles in an overhead view for like six minutes straight at a time it's pretty bad there's nothing going on here it's the same brain rot as the other game modes but without the good stuff but the thing is even while playing the game I forget this is in the game no joke when the cutscene for the second and third dark Dax level started I was like oh yeah that's something I gotta do great it's that forgettable it doesn't even make sense anyway Daxter is an otso a precursor precursors touched by dark Eco or dark makers as seen in Jack 3. this one was a high impact original besides all that the story is just so boring and lame in this Kira gets captured by the sky pirate Captain Phoenix but they're actually good guys in the air opens a really evil experimenting on people with dark Eco like Praxis did and we get these story beats like a love triangle a shocking betrayal of one of Phoenix's Pirates a gradual truce and friendship with Jack and Phoenix it's just all so one note and predictable in one earn out the other although I noticed something Phoenix never introduced himself in the opening cut scene but when Kira is captured Jack somehow knows his name when nobody told him it I've got Phoenix's ship on scope he's not gonna get away that easy but then when Kira knows his name Jack is shocked Phoenix don't Phoenix what you're on a first name basis now as I was saying it all comes together in this lengthy scene where Phoenix sacrifices himself for the greater good and the day is saved and more Adventures are coming and I don't care I thank goodness the game is over that's all I'm left thinking at this point in the game I revisit games I used to complain about in a curious sense maybe something will be different this time after all the time that's passed but in the case of Jack and Daxter the Lost Frontier it's everything you've heard at this point it's an easy e-tier for me when it's not frustrating it's boring when it's not boring it's just a stale imitation of the Jack Trilogy for PSP standards it's just not that good considering that other imitations of PS2 games fared a lot better than this and honestly I'm not sure how this ranks in the high impact hierarchy if that's what you want to call it this is the one people dislike the most of the three and I must say the game combined the frustration of Size Matters with the boredom of Agent Clank not to say Agent Clank wasn't frustrating but that's not the biggest takeaway with the game that is grounds for me to say it's the worst of the three although this game isn't quite as Soul devouring to play as Agent Clank was sounds weird but you just gotta play that game to know what I'm talking about so there's that I do think I'd replay Size Matters before this though not that that's saying much because I wouldn't want to play that game either I really don't have that much else to add on this one it's not good and I don't think I'll ever play it again seeing as I never even thought about touching it once between my original review from six and a half years ago to now but it is a shame that the Jack series went out with this quite weak note to this day Jack and Daxter have been seen in various crossover games in cameos this was indeed the last game in the series but we currently live in a pop culture landscape heavily influenced by Nostalgia with PS2 games I'll turn in 20 years old now I think it's entirely possible if not likely that Jack and Daxter will make a return now what I want them to do with it is a completely different question Jack is such a unique mixture of different mechanics that I don't know if it would translate as well to the modern day as Ratchet and Clank gameplay does but maybe that's a chance to do something much different with Jack and Daxter honestly I have no idea what they would do with it now but I'd be curious to see it either way personally I'm pretty happy with the Jack series The Way It Is by that I mean every couple years I'll go back to play Jax 1 through X and be happy with the experience as is remembering the games for what they were and having a good time not being sad the series is gone but glad it happened at all to the point where if it never came back I'd be content with the games we got a lot of people on the PlayStation platformer community and I'm talking about people who are so deep and that the only franchises they like are these five they seem to have a serious resentment and hatred towards new games and the new franchises these PS2 platformer companies did after these franchises that sold a lot better I don't hate Uncharted The Last of Us Infamous goes to sushima especially those new Sucker Punch games that barely even played the former and never played the latter and having played The Naughty Dog games I love Uncharted and I think the last of us is one of the best games of all time but my point is I've seen a lot of people resent these franchises for taking away our precious PlayStation Platformers that really were never that popular to begin with especially Sly Cooper I just enjoy those newer games for what they are and I'm really happy to see these companies that made my childhood favorites continue to be successful to this day doing the games they want to do breaking boundaries in the industry they never could have dreamed up on PlayStation 2. so yeah I don't need to see Jack come back if it does happen I'd be happy would love to see the demolition Duo one last time but if it doesn't I'd be content and generally I think people in online discourse need to consume nostalgia in a healthier manner but that's neither here nor there I don't need a soapbox about that today considering I could make a good video on that in the future but having said all that I'm glad that I got to go back one more time and give Jack and Daxter the definitive retrospective it deserved as I think these are some of my best just works which is what I said about my ratchet videos Last Summer that I think are nowhere near as good as these Jack videos so I'd say my work's only improving much more each year and is only going up from here but that pretty much covers it for this video so next up I've got some anniversaries I'd like to celebrate so I hope you'll join me for that in the meantime I'll say what I always do thank you all for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: J's Reviews

Views: 1,425,812

Keywords: jak and daxter, jak and daxter retrospective, jak and daxter ps4, jak and daxter review, jak and daxter collection, jak and daxter the precursor legacy, retrospective, jak and daxter: the precursor legacy, jak and daxter trilogy, daxter, jak and daxter analysis, jak 2 retrospective, jak and daxter (video game series), jak and daxter the lost frontier, daxter retrospective, jak and daxter gameplay, game retrospective, jak 3 retrospective, jak and daxter ps2

Id: c_pBH_1Mkz8

Length: 179min 8sec (10748 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 06 2023