Jak and Daxter 1 - A Tech Demo That Shouldn't Have Been

[Dracos]

As most should know by now, I'm a pretty big fan of the Ratchet and Clank series.  I think, for better or worse, they did most of their shit right.  It was enjoyable, exciting, and had a delightfully addicting upgrade quality to it.

It also always advertised this other group that did the major tech of the engine for them.  Angry Dog productions or some such.  These guys made Jak and Daxter.  I figured, hey if they rate such praise from these folks, that's good enough for me.

So I ploped down the cash for the entire series in one go.  Big mistake.  Don't get me wrong, the tech for the Ratchet and Clank series definitely came from here.  It is unmistakable and the folks responsible for making such an effectively flowing environment deserve complete thumbs up.

The 3d art is reasonably nice, even if decisively uninspired and dull in character design.  The music wasn't too onerous to listen to, even if it didn't make me want to leave it on particularly.

The first and foremost problem with the game was Daxter.  Yes, one of the two main characters.  Daxter is precisely the most unlikable sidekick I have the misfortune of remembering.  He starts the game by getting accidentally knocked into a pool of dark mutagen (or whatever they call it) and transformed into this little furry pipsquek rodent that sits on Jak's back the rest of the game making annoying quips.  Part of your quest is to restore him to how he used to be.  In return, he continually berates the main character, being such an ass that they honestly could've kept me playing ten hours longer by allowing me to punch him over and over again.  He's squeakly high pitched and a pain to listen to.  His worst trait though is he'll tend to make these exceedingly annoying one liners at you when you die, essentially blaming you for everything.  As the game is not precisely so easy that you'll never die (3 hits or a pit ends it), this gets really old, really quickly and shouldn't have ever been in the game in the first place.  In light of the fact that your major quest at the beginning is to fix him back up, hearing his taunts simply make the whole thing disheartening.  He's not someone who I was left with any desire to want to save after a few minutes of him.

Jak is silent.  This, as is later found out in other games, is an odd blessing.  That said, it leaves you pretty strongly in the 'do whatever other people say, even if it is utterly retarded without a quip'.  Such as, oh, having no response to Daxter being an ass.  This is more just another complaint about dexter because I do think its important.  If sidekicks that taunt at you while you're helping them is annoying, don't pick this game up because you'll be dealing with that throughout the entire game.

The second real problem I found was the game design itself.  It felt like a tech demo all the way through (or the about 80 percent I finished before putting it down).  There was little coherency to the whole regard, and much of a sense of things coming into the gameplay as they finished being built, rather than as a natural extension of the design.  "Yo, todd, we finished this neat vehicle.  Let's have a vehicle area."  Alongside that, for all this game is advertised to be story based, I have never played such a bald fetchquest game ever in my life.  Pokemon was less fetchquesty than this.  Everything I did in the game corresponded to the big gigantic fetch quest.  Every mission, every side jaunt, every single part of the world.  "Collect this, Collect that, Collect these other things".  Every last character would go on and on about it.  The game even gives you this gigantic list of every object in the entire game and percentage collected stuff.  While that actually is a good design, the fact that there's nothing else on top of it to do is mind boggling.  It never lifts above the level of the collection.  There's never an instance where you just do something because it is neat or do something because if you don't, evil monsters will raid the down of collection oriented task givers.  It's always "Do this, get x collection item".  Every damn time.  What 'story' existed largely was simply to facilitate this in the most basic manner imaginable.  "Oh this is broken, go gather 42 of these thingamabobs."  "You want a thingamabob?  Collect me nine of thosethingees"  "You want a thosethingees?  Go race around this valley through the hoops."

I found this frankly outrageous.  More disturbing since these characters were apparently designed to be globally appealing and by that lacked much character at all to relate to.

The game is about 20 hours through, maybe 10.  I forget but it is pretty darn short.  Shorter if you just grab the minimal necessary and run to the next part.  This helps emphasis how little meat there is to it.  If you removed the collection need, what you have is an action game you could run through in about an hour, defeating the small handful of boss fights(which drop collectables) and rushing on to the next area.  It might even have been fun if they did that, but then they'd have no excuse to have their million collectables.

So, really in the end, all I can do is recommend never touching this game.  It really has no soul to it.  No life.  There's weak theatric flavor to it that does little to make the bad medicine of constant fetch quests go down.  It's almost as if someone looked at one of the GBA castlevania designed and went "You know, this would be more fun if the focus was just getting all the treasure and we removed that whole simon and dracula and all that angle.  After all, who really to proceed without gathering a thousand things?"

Dracos