Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier

Am I deranged, or just the odd duck? The reading I got before diving into this game, driven by what I thought was morbid curiosity, was that this was the nadir of the series, described in heavy phrases like "steer clear" and "it doesn't exist", the mine that sunk the franchise frigate, that it was perhaps a colossal embarrassment pushed out as cheaply, lifelessly, and as passionless as possible just to fulfill some contract. Those who dared to speak its name did so in this avoidant, hushed tone, as if they were ashamed just to remember its existence, let alone admit to having played it. So it was all the more a surprise to me, after braving playing it, that it eased me into the same feeling I got playing Daxter: it's rough, but it's fun, it has passion, and I'd be happy to play it again.

Maybe I'm just more accustomed to it than most. This is a difficult series to enjoy, I can tell, but if it's to your tastes then I think you're gifted a generous deal of tolerance, patience, and forgiveness for its bullshit. Jak II is a tonal mess, but it's somehow still engrossing, unforgettable, and one-of-a-kind. All the bullshit bounces right off you when you're having fun. If you hated that game, I understand completely why you might have hated this one more, because it's an even bigger mess.

The Game

For starters, this may as well be two games under one roof. It's still a 3D platformer at its core, but wrapped around it is, of all things, flight combat. Maybe this was Sony's attempt to revitalize the series by injecting into it elements from its sister series Ratchet & Clank, still steadily trucking on— which is to say that the flight combat feels like a shameless crib of everything in Going Commando. The controls, the damage model, the space (or in this case, air) pirates, the way you pick up currency by destroying planes, the race side-missions, the very way your plane is upgradable— it's hard to ignore. I also want to say, albeit with less evidence, that the way you destroy big ships piece by piece is lifted from Star Wars: Battlefront II, of all games.

But the game makes more out of it than that— this is one place where the passion shines through. As all this is going down you can use a grappling hook to launch Daxter straight to an enemy plane (a process called Daxterjacking in game) where he then tears out and steals components, as cheerfully as ever, right on the wings. When your plane gets too damaged you're treated to a discreet animation where he, again, gets out onto the wing and does a repair on the spot, opening a panel and pulling wires taut. It's so adorable and full of character, and such a great touch that didn't need to be included, but was. He even pulls down his goggles while he's out there! I don't think he did that more than twice elsewhere in the series. It's touches like these that are full of character and prevent the air sections from getting rote. This comes to a glorious climax when Dax uses his talents to hitch a ride on a surface-to-air missile, hijack its guidance system, and then steer the thing right back into the silo like that scene in Dr. Strangelove. Max Casella delivers his usual all throughout all of this. It's clear that he got good direction throughout and that, even eight years on, he was thoroughly enjoying his role.

The plane controls are serviceable. I haven't played many flight combat games, but I've played the two that this seems to be aping, and the planes here don't handle any worse than the spaceships there. I'd even say that it's a little better than either— again, where some passion shows —because you have extra degrees of movement in loops and a quick 180-degree turn, the latter of which especially making dogfights and successive strafing runs quicker and easier.

The plane upgrades support several styles of play and really get interesting over time. By late game, you can upgrade your plane's armament to be so powerful, and with such a high volume, that it almost felt reminiscent of Tyrian. I felt so giddy when I got the laser cannon, the vulcan cannon, and the cluster bombs all together at last. I'd just line up targets into my crosshairs and they'd disappear, like shooting empty soda cans off a fence with a garden hose.

The side missions give you a good boost of supplies, but I admit that the races (really more like moving shooting arenas— there's curiously no actual races anywhere in this game) in particular are stupidly, trivially easy. They're no competition— even in early game, when I had no idea what I was doing, my strategy was no less brutish than just holding down the thruster and fire buttons while vaguely tracking the target drone, and I finished handily with an 80-point lead. One race in late game goes on for what felt like five straight minutes or more. The density of targets was unbelievable. Maybe the intent here was that that many targets was supposed to make this the most tense and neck-to-neck race yet, but my same boneheaded "strategy" only benefited further, and my lead over second place must have been 220 points. You would need to exert more effort to place in second or third.

Now, the 3D platforming. The big issue here, and the very first one you'll encounter as the game hands you the reins, is that the FOV is way too narrow— much more so than it was earlier in the series. The camera is also frequently pitched down more than it needs to be, giving you a very short sightline, and most of all the game bizarrely took away your ability to free look— an audacious move for a 3D platformer published the month after A Crack in Time.. All this serves to often make the game's environs look and feel remarkably claustrophobic and narrow, and the lack of free look can make it a frustrating affair to gauge scale, depth, and your orientation in the level. The FPS are also capped to 30 even in the PS2 version. Considering this was co-developed for the PSP the frame cap is understandable, but free look being taken away is not, because Daxter had free look (and a lower camera angle)— and that was a PSP exclusive with three fewer buttons to cap. The environs were also much more open there on the whole. This is one of the more frustrating aspects, especially because the environs in The Lost Frontier seem like they'd be great to gaze at. The one you start in looked beautiful in the opening cinematic: an archipelago perched precariously on the edge of the world with waterfalls marking where land ends. This game seems to be built on a lot of external references, and while I didn't yet go through the concept art gallery to see if I could confirm it, the keen-eyed music-listeners of this site might side with me in recognizing this as strikingly reminiscent of a Roger Dean landscape— more specifically, the inner gatefold of Close to the Edge by Yes.

The melee mechanics are good. All the moves from the trilogy are still here, but there's more. Dark eco's function here is to give you points that you can spend by talking to Keira and converting it into one of four colored ecos— in other words, you can upgrade Jak's stats. Red eco is focused on melee attacks, yellow eco is passive attacks, blue eco is… I'm not sure what to call it, and green eco is health. Like the plane upgrades, these seem to cater to more than one style of play, but I chose to max out red and green first to have maximum punch damage, maximum health, and the ability to siphon health from enemies just by punching them. The end result is the game frequently presenting me with the choice to save ammo and just punch my way to the next setpeice. Punching lizards, punching giant spiders, punching robots, punching pirates, punching giant dark eco apes twice Jak's size. I had a blast just repeatedly doing the punch + uppercut combo, socking enemies on the jaw and then jumping right over their heads to do it again. This combined with a yellow eco fireball every time I punched meant I could lob a couple suckers downstream while I was at it.

The blaster mods aren't anything special. There's nothing new here except that the Peacemaker was renamed the Lobber and behaves more like a grenade launcher. The scattergun, blaster, and vulcan fury are otherwise basically unchanged from Jak II, except that the ricochet mod from Jak 3 has been included. This part is a bit of a let down, since most of the modification you get for the blaster is relegated to just incremental damage upgrades.

You also get a new set of eco powers— sort of like the Dark and Light Jak abilities from Jak 3 except for the four colors of the eco rainbow. Red eco gives you a big ball of energy that you can shoot to deal extra damage (you'll probably never whip it out except when the game forces you to), yellow eco gives you a rocket jump (flames that shoot from Jak's hands to make him jump higher), blue eco gives you Eco Reflexes (just Flash Freeze from Jak 3 with a different name), and green eco gives you— get ready for another game this cribbed from —a Super Monkey Ball [スーパーモンキーボール] ball. You use this one to walk over dark eco like Jesus or to just shield yourself in combat. There's also a teleport ability, but you can only use this in specific puzzle sections because you can only use it to swap places with Precursor statues. The puzzles are not incredible but they're quite good.

Dark Jak is absent from this game, but has been replaced by Dark Daxter. Yes, you read that right. While Daxter transformed into an ottsel in the first game by being submerged in a vat of dark eco (this apparently isn't already his dark eco form), it's revealed to us in this game that getting exposed to dark eco again makes him… transform harder, I guess, and turn into something like a three-way cross between a Rampage character, Taz from Looney Tunes, and the Giant Clank sections from R&C (again with the cribbing from this series). The three Dark Daxter levels are hectic, chaotic, and extremely confusing at first, but I eased into them, too. None of these serve any real purpose in the plot and they all end as quickly as they begin. I think these are just here to add variety to the gameplay— and perhaps to give Max Casella yet another arena to chew the scenery. Daxter gloating so hard as he Hulk smashes everything in his path in a power fantasy come true is incredible, and hilarious. Dax really is the star of this show, maybe even more so than he was in the trilogy.

I'm saving the story for the last like I did in my review of Daxter because it's not much to write about… again. But that's something of a hallmark for the Jak series. The world is running out of eco (apparently— there sure doesn't seem to be a great shortage of it in-game), this apparently is causing the world to disappear, it's causing eco storms (whatever those are— just some kind of imbalance?) Keira is studying to be a sage, there's pirates, an opulent society called the Aeropans (is that a pun on 'Europeans'?), they want to stop the pirates, you have a Precursor device that finds light eco and there's an eco core at the center of the earth… eh. Nothing offensive but also far from interesting. I like the vaguely steampunk (crossed with dieselpunk?) age-of-adventure styling, but it's pretty thin. Captain Phoenix is voiced by Robin Atkin Downes, and Tara Strong reprises her role as Keira. Jak has good interplay with Daxter, but Dax is really the centerpiece throughout it all once again. Your eyes are always on him, more than anybody else, and he often dictates how a scene moves. In sort of the same way that Frodo seemed at first like the main character of The Lord of the Rings, but then it becomes clear that Sam really was all along (as Tolkien intended), Dax almost feels like the true main character here, too. The cutscenes are well-made in spite of the weak story. They're quite fluid and animated, not nearly as stiff and under-animated as the cutscenes in Daxter were. It's nothing like Naughty Dog's jerky animation timing, but it's consistently nice to look at, and there's not an egregious amount of characters just standing in a circle or walking-and-talking (again, often thanks to Dax). Thank you, Daxter.

Conclusion

I went into this expecting the worst, truly, and the game did not start off promising— but as I kept playing and eased in I went from bracing myself, to conceding that there were things I found charming, to smiling and laughing, to just plainly having a good time by the end. This is definitely not the best entry in the series, and it isn't even as good as Daxter. It's rough, it's visually cluttered (and sort of ugly), it's probably trying to be too many things at once, and it may be an even tougher sell than Jak II, but if you can forgive that game for its failures, I think there's a chance you can forgive this one for the same. I'd recommend this to any big fan of the trilogy, at the very least to give it a fair shake and your own opinion. There's a fair amount of goodies to grab on to here scattered around the bullshit, which any big fan of the trilogy should already know how to do handily.