The Jak and Daxter series is something that I hold very close to my heart. This franchise along with the Kingdom Hearts games kept my PS2 pretty busy while I was a kid. And like Kingdom Hearts, the Jak games all went through pretty drastic changes as the years went on. Games in the early 2000’s were wild, game development was a hotbed of experimentation and most long-standing franchises went through one massive change or another. But where Kingdom Hearts introduced convoluted lore and various gameplay additions, the Jak series introduced testosterone.
Let’s get this out of the way up front: the Jak games are very painfully early-2000’s. These games weren’t afraid to say the a-word. And they didn’t even care if your mother was in the room while they said it. Copies of Jak II were probably spinning in the same rooms where kids would make DragonBall Z AMVs. The series wasn’t always like this though. The first game in the series is pretty standard preteen fantasy fare with a more lighthearted tone. And while that game is practically perfect in what it sets out to do, it’s not the game that I’ve spent the most time with across the years. That accolade belongs to its pot-smoking older brother, Jak II. I feel like Jak II and 3 deserve to be talked about. So I plan on doing it. Here we go. And don’t ask about the whole roman-versus-arabic naming scheme. I don’t know. And after really combing through this series, I don’t think Naughty Dog did either.
This Ain’t Your Daddy’s PS2 Platformer
Just to bring those of you up to speed, Jak II comes after Jak and Daxter. It takes place pretty much directly afterwards, with some machinery accidentally sending Jak and friends into the far-flung future. After arriving in an industrial police state known as Haven City, Jak and Daxter are split up. Jak ends up meeting the butt of a guard’s rifle and being dragged off to be tortured and experimented on for two years. And Daxter goes off to get a job. Eventually, they reconvene and break free together to raise hell through the city. They end up linking up with all sorts, from underground freedom fighters to illegal gun runners, all in an effort to take down the ruler of the city, Baron Praxis. And Baron Praxis is voiced by Mr. Krabs. Destroy him.
Jak II is a chasm away from the tone of the first game. While Jak and Daxter had some cheeky jokes and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gags, it was still kid stuff. It certainly didn’t want to explore the ethics of ruling a people by way of a borderline fascist, propaganda-spouting regime. But to be fair to the first game, neither does Jak II. The name of the game in Jak II is angst and there is so much of it, just, like, so much. But that frustration isn’t really directed towards anything in particular. Jak II isn’t really interested in thinking about the bigger-issue problems. It’s more a character-driven story about driving angry and shooting angry. And while this is entertaining, you have to know what you’re signing up for: lots of nonsensical melodrama and inconsistent character moments to hit those young adult novel beats. Angst at authority and action being taken just to “get back at them?” We got those. Angst at your potential romantic partner because they expressed interest in another man’s ability? Done and done. Angst at pretty much everyone for just opening their mouth in your vicinity? Yeah, it happens a few times. And horny? Oh, brother. Oh, let me tell you: we’ve got horny.
Jak II is one of the horniest games I’ve ever played. But not horny in a general way. Horny in a “mid-2000’s SuperBowl ad” kind of way. It should be said now that the developers were heavily influenced by Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto at this point, a series known for their counterculture persona and raunchy comedy. And just like an adolescent taking after their big brother, Jak II tried adopting these elements into its personality in a pretty clumsy way. Whereas Jak is the straight man in the narrative, Daxter is how the developers were able to really let loose with their most grimy thoughts. When he’s not posturing and antagonizing everyone around him, you’ll find Daxter trying to fit his entire head down the low-cut shirts of every female character. And since Daxter is pulling double duty as both the irreverent loudmouth comic relief and the mouthpiece for writers who wanted to call out the hypocrisy of the real-world analog of Haven City, the tone can give you a little bit of whiplash. If you don’t take the story very seriously or you’re one of those nerds who only care about exposition and explosions, you probably won’t be bothered by any of this. But trying to buy into the premise is going to be frustrating if you’re looking for a consistent through-line.
II Jak II Furious
As per my last paragraph, Jak II was heavily influenced by Grand Theft Auto. And that includes the gameplay. While the first Jak and Daxter was a wonderful, tightly-tuned, somewhat simple platformer, Jak II took all that and threw guns and vehicles on top. Continuing on from the “no-loading screen” mantra from the first game, Jak II is also set in an open-world environment with Haven City. But you don’t maneuver through levels to collect a handful of maguffins anymore. In Jak II, you drive to each mission and get quick narrative scenes that propel the story forward. While there were a small handful of vehicle missions in the first game, the second game expands on this concept immensely. There are multiple vehicle bodies, weapons to use while driving, and a new system where you can choose to drive high up with the traffic or hover just above the ground and weave between pedestrians. A sizeable chunk of the game’s missions are centered around vehicles as well. And these suckers are hard, thanks in no small part to the inebriated vehicles themselves, that always seem to turn just a second after you tell them to do so. While the driving in Jak II isn’t bad, it’s best described as loose. Naughty Dog seemingly just took the driving system from the first game and plopped it in here. And while this system worked fine in the pretty low-stakes, wide-turn-friendly levels of the first Jak and Daxter, you can sometimes feel it clashing with the level design of Haven City. This ends up making the vehicle missions some of the hardest the game has to offer. And I don’t care, someone at Naughty Dog must really like Erol to let him hit those corners in the Bazaar without slowing down.
Moving to the weapons, Jak has an arsenal in this game. Before, Jak could punch and sometimes shoot fire from his fists if he drank the right kind of Gatorade. But in Jak II, he has access to a few more tools. Thanks to his years of experimentation, Jak can turn into Dark Jak, which is pretty much a berserker mode where he takes less damage and can attack enemies much faster. It’s upgradeable throughout the game and can really help in a pinch. Jak also has the morph gun, a swiss-army weapon that can turn into four different guns with a simple touch of the d-pad. These guns cover all the bases, from close-quarters to far-range, whether you need something hit with a million bullets or if you just want whatever you don’t like to explode. The game auto-aims for you and, in general, this system works pretty well. You can stay mobile, rolling and jumping out of the way, letting loose with a few shots before you do some more dodging. You can even mix up gunplay with melee combat to combo one into the other. The morph gun is probably the most successful addition to the Jak formula and you can tell that the developers agreed because of where they take the gun in the sequel. But before we get to that, we need to talk about the defining aspect of this game: how stupidly difficult it is. And how that difficulty is exaggerated through frustrating game design.
Surrender And Die
Jak II has a few types of missions. There are the vehicle missions, where you need to race someone, or deliver something across the city, or escape law enforcement, et cetera. And then there are the on-foot missions, where you could be doing anything from storming a heavily guarded stronghold to retrieving an artifact from the slums and fighting your way out. There are also a few that involve your Hoverboard, a sort of futuristic skateboard (radical). And the through-line with all of these missions? They’re hard. Just incredibly hard. In fact, they hate you. They are specters given form through video media, resentful at the gamers who seek to enjoy them, loathsome towards those with hygiene problems and Naruto t-shirts. But that’s only kind of true. Because while almost all of the missions are pretty difficult, there’s a much bigger issue at play here; the lack of checkpoints. Checkpoint who? Jak II doesn’t know her. Missions in Jak II are usually on the longer side. They take a while and you’re expected to keep topped off with health and ammo through the whole thing. Because if you don’t, if you let that bar dip and you end up running out towards the end of the mission, then you have to start it all over from the beginning. Miss a jump at the end of the level? Have fun doing it again. Let Jinx die in the bum-rush at the end of the sewers? Run it back, pretty boy. It’s hardcore. I don’t know if this was just a result of too much play-testing and the developers over-tuning to keep the game challenging, but nevertheless, this difficulty is the legacy that Jak II leaves behind.
So, is Jak II worth playing today? Honestly, yeah, totally. While I think that it stumbles when it comes to things like narrative and I think that the game is too unforgiving for its own good, I can’t help but love everything else the game has to offer. Mission variety is great and the game has a brisk enough pace that you’re not bored doing the same type of mission constantly. Daxter is a bit much but the characters are pretty interesting and there are some cute moments here and there. Ultimately, this game was a pretty huge step forward for Naughty Dog. They didn’t necessarily nail everything and it’s weird to see unsure decisions from them. But seeing uneven decisions from a studio that nowadays can be accused of honing and sterilizing their products too heavily is interesting. So that’s Jak II. Pretty good game. Now it’s time to go forward in time to the sequel. Time to go forward… a year? Only a year to get Jak 3 out? Huh. I wonder if that affected its quality at all.
More Stupid Precursor Crap
Ok, so now Jak 3. The scene is set pretty much directly after Jak II, with a few flashbacks to fill in the gaps. Haven City has gone to shit. Monsters are overrunning one part of the city. Robots are destroying the other part. And Jak is being blamed for it. In order to assuage the conscience of the public, Jak is thrown into the desert to die. Daxter is thrown out as well because heaven forbid we miss any one of his quips. Jak is found by a civilization that has learned to thrive out in the desert and nursed back to health. He ends up having to prove himself and ultimately returning to the city to save it and the entire world. Also, Jak might be a god? I don’t know, I’m not %100 on that, I’ll let Reddit have that one.
In terms of tone, Jak 3 is Jak II Part 2. Or, more appropriately, Jak II Part II. Since this game came out so soon after the last one, it feels like they didn’t have time to critique what worked and what didn’t with Jak II‘s narrative. The same melodrama is present and accounted for but now the cast is expanded even more. In fact, so much screentime is given over to newer characters, it becomes a serious issue. There ends up being no time left for established characters to explore long-running character dynamics. It’s to the extent that Keira, one of the original characters of the series and the heavily-pushed love interest, is given about three lines in the game. And she never talks directly to Jak except over a phone call. There are a few instances of this, like there being way too many scenes with newcomer Kleiver that amount to “Hey, I don’t like you but if you need an abusive bear daddy, I’m your bloke.” It’s a really strange call to not capitalize on what the games have built up and to continually move forward. There are some interesting turns in the story though. In contrast to how the characters are utilized, the story itself wraps things together quite nicely and reaches back into its past in order to pay things off. It’s still not high-art but it’s a fun romp and I think it’s ultimately the better story between Jak II and 3.
The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same
The biggest addition to Jak 3 is the introduction of the desert and its special type of vehicle. In the desert, you drive souped-up dune buggies compared to the hovering tubes that you drive in the city. They control beautifully, feeling weightier and having plenty of options for control. There’s a handful of different types and they all have different levels of armor and handling ability, with most of them having unique weapons. And it’s a good thing these cars feel so good because you’re going to be spending a lot of time doing missions in the desert. Driving to artifacts in the desert, hunting giant roaming beasts, you’ll get some mileage on these buggies. Naughty Dog has spoken pretty candidly about biting another Rockstar property for this game: Smuggler’s Run. They’ve talked about playing the game constantly in the office and once you watch some gameplay and see Rockstar’s dune buggies careening around hilly locations in the desert, it’s hard to not side-eye Jak 3 a little bit. Let’s just say there’s lifting an idea or two and then there’s this. But thankfully, these sections were given the polish that they needed and they’re mostly really fun. It’s no surprise they decided to lift this system and just make a straight-up racing game later on.
But aside from the desert, what else has changed in Jak 3? Well, a lot. Most of the changes are iterative, just adding onto what was there before, but it’s welcome all the same. Haven City returns, sporting new areas of the city alongside some familiar sights. The hovering vehicles are back as well and they’ve been thankfully tuned up so that they control a bit more responsively. The hoverboard is back and is just as radical as before. There’s a new Light Jak transformation that’s mostly used to solve puzzles and heal in the middle of combat. And the morph gun comes back as well, sporting the biggest change. Whereas before, you only had four unique weapon types, the morph gun in Jak 3 trounces that with twelve unique weapon types. Or, more appropriately, XII unique weapon types. And these new weapons can absolutely crush the game. Sending a flying disk out to clear a room of enemies never doesn’t work. And if you’re feeling catty, you can just fucking launch a nuke and wipe the entire screen of living things. It’s incredibly overpowered and incredibly fun. Although I think I lied. It turns out, the morph gun isn’t the biggest change in Jak 3. I think that the biggest change that Naughty Dog made was in the addition of checkpoints. Although the actual mission length and difficulty wasn’t really tweaked between this game and II, the reason that Jak 3 isn’t known as one of the hardest games for the PS2 is that when you fucked up, you didn’t need to practically start the whole game over from the title crawl. This ends up making Jak 3 much less frustrating of a game and makes its missions a lot more palatable. I mean, at least for the missions that are actually good.
The Thrill Is Gone
There’s a lot of missions in Jak 3. And there’s much more variety than Jak II. But in this case, variety isn’t an objective improvement. You have your standard driving missions, your desert missions, and your on-foot jump-and-shoot fare all accounted for. And for the most part, it’s good. But alongside that, you also have a top-down Smash TV-alike mission, numerous turret missions, and Pac-Man. These are just a few examples, but I promise this isn’t even close to the extent. It gets to the point where this game is mostly about driving in the desert and playing minigames. And this lack of focus hurts the pacing at times too. The beginning a game should hook the players in by flexing its set pieces or teasing what gameplay’s to come. In Jak II, the third mission is climbing a crumbling tower to retrieve a flag and prove yourself to the Underground. The gameplay was interesting and it mattered narratively. In Jak 3, the third mission is DDR with no music. While Jak II had a small handful of missions where you were in a turret or a mech suit, the vast majority of the gameplay was based around the platforming, the shooting, and the driving. It’s almost criminal that in Jak 3, where the mechanics have been tuned to such a satisfying degree, that there’s less reason than ever to engage with them.
On a more sentimental note, the world of Jak 3 just doesn’t feel as reactive anymore either. In Jak 2, one of the joys that I’m sure attracted many of its fans was getting into chases with the guards. The world was demonstrably rough. You could run over as many people as you wanted to, shoot whoever you saw, right in front of the guards, but they wouldn’t care at all. But as soon as you tapped a guard on the shoulder, the entire force was after you and they were after you hard. That gave the city some character. People don’t matter, so long as order was being kept. In Jak 3, everything is in ruins and guards are busy dealing with the monsters and robots that are ravaging the city. You can’t get in trouble anymore. At most, you can get two or three guards after you before they go off to check their tweets or die somewhere. Though there’s a battle going on, you don’t matter as much to the city. You can help take care of the monsters but taking out waves of mooks just doesn’t give the same kind of giddy fun as getting chased by the cops.
So, is Jak 3 worth playing today? Yeeaaaaahhhhhh? The long and short of it is if you liked II, then you’ll like 3. Although it stumbles in places and isn’t as cohesive a package as II, Jak 3 is also a fun game with fun ideas. When it finally decides to settle down and flex its fundamental gameplay, it can be some of the best stuff in the series. The issue comes when it starts to spread itself too thin, both gameplay and narrative-wise. But it serves as a fine cap to the end of the trilogy. Although there have been other spin-offs since, the Jak and Daxter property has remained quietly in limbo, with the only signs of life coming from re-releases and concept art. And with no rumblings of a sequel as of this writing, there it may stay.
Another Slumbering PlayStation Giant
So the question remains: will Naughty Dog ever return to the series? It’s possible, as most things are. They could do whatever they want with their next project. But personally, I think that they’re done with Jak. After seeing where the company has gone with their Uncharted and Last of Us series, I can’t see how the company would go backward. In Jak 3, you can practically feel the developers getting increasingly bored with the world. They really just didn’t care as much as they did before. Established narrative threads from previous games are just forgotten about. The cast gets too bloated to go into any kind of depth with any one of them. Naughty Dog has crafted far more complex and thoughtful characters in both of the franchises that followed Jak and Daxter. Joel from The Last of Us is more morally dubious and interesting a character than any villain from the Jak series. And they even figured out how to do banter really well with their Uncharted series, breaking free of the “exposition-exposition-Daxter quip” flow chart that used to put Naughty Dog on autopilot. But more than anything, Naughty Dog just got bored with the platformer genre. Jak 3 is so stuffed to the brim with extraneous gameplay modes because Naughty Dog was pushing up against the walls of what they could do in their jumpy-jumpy-shooty game. The lack of any strong direction (besides the Smuggler’s Run-inspired desert sections) led to a game that almost seemed like a band getting tired of playing their hits. So Naughty Dog could certainly go back to their Jak and Daxter series. The only question would be if they would even want to in the first place?
Regardless of whether Naughty Dog ever dips back into the Jak well or not, the games remain. And the games that are here tell a story. A very jagged and uneven story, with some tremendous highs and gameplay peaks coupled with a low valley filled with contrived romance subplots and turret sections. But I still think these games are worth playing. Beyond the morbid curiosity of watching a company morph its values and direction in real-time, these games are also just pretty fun. They are enjoyable and they deserve to be remembered and talked about. And who knows? Even though Sony seems content to just keep bolstering its lineup of high-profile, cinematic games, maybe they’ll give Naughty Dog or some other company the go-ahead to start work on another Jak and Daxter. And regardless of everything I’ve said, I think that’d be pretty cool. Because I think a new generation could stand to see the return of Orange Lightning.
If you want to see Ashelin become the love interest for one game, you’ve got some options. I got all my impressions from the original PS2 verisons of Jak II and 3. But I also hear pretty good things about the PS3 collection. That one comes with the first game as well so that one is highly recommended. I’ve heard middling things about the PS4 versions, so proceed with caution on those.