Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy

Hot off the heels of the linear Crash series, Naughty Dog managed to successfully keep up with the logical progression of the Mario 64 framework, with a great open world with a few logical puzzle locks but no mechanical shortcomings/unlocks to hinder your exploration. Aided by the incredible draw distance, it makes for a hell of a journey, and the interweaving of every objective with few completely extraneous goals makes for an adventure that is always compelling, even if the narrative is not as developed as it should be despite some weirdly awesome voice acting inclusions (Dee Snider!). The setting feels like a hodgepodge of fantasy cliches, but through raw horsepower, great sense and tight humour, it is more than the sum of its parts. Started the franchise all guns blazing.

Deixando de lado a movimentação pouco precisa, é um ambicioso collect-a-ton que acerta no humor, personagens, ambientações, história e liberdade de exploração.

O equilíbrio entre desafios de plataforma e puzzles com dificuldade razoável combinam para uma experiência satisfatória, encorpada por uma narrativa leve e interessante em igual medida.

It probably sounds trivial, and I can't rule out memory being a factor in a replay two decades on (how could it not be?), but Jak has a real impressive weight to him. It's expected in 3D games now, but having your fingers wrapped around the triggers and thumbs feeling through the joysticks meant a physical anchoring from the hands to the controller that was revolutionary at the time, and was echoed back with vibrations and Jak's flailing limbs and thudding landings. Decades on it's still actively enjoyable to just move around as Jak, as he's both nimble and clumsy, and so grounded to the wacky shapes and paths of the landscape. Unfortunately the return trip makes it all the more obvious that most of the appeal is exhausted by the time you leave Sentinel Beach, which is the game's opening level and highpoint as a multi-layered open space that also vibrates with those stunning PS2 era colours. There's a grit and shadow that contours the three dimensional shapes but it's still dealing in palettes as bright as something from the previous generation console. After this it's an act of drawing things in, of adding snow or muck to surfaces in order to complicate Jak's fluid movement, or even introducing some of the more irritating platform puzzles from Crash. Along with the tedious vehicle stuff it's all clearly just padding, making The Precursor Legacy feel more like a next gen proof of concept for Naughty Dog than a finished game in its own right.

I’m very thankful to have grown up in the PS2/Gamecube era of gaming. It took the early, primitive foundations of 3D gaming and vastly improved on them with just one console generation. During that transition, the 3D platformer was still in full force and already established some modern classics in the video game medium like Super Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie/Tooie, Crash Bandicoot, etc. I of course did not grow up with any of these games because I was way too young at the time, but I constantly heard glowing reviews of them from people who were a little older than me. I went back and played all of these games eventually and I have a certain sense of respect and admiration for them for laying the foundation for some of my favorite childhood games. I still think the games that I grew up with are objectively better, however, regardless of how many people will say otherwise. I don’t think it’s a matter of not taking off my perpetual rose-tinted glasses when discussing these second-generation 3D platformers. I could argue the same for those who fondly discuss the 3D platformers of the previous generation that influenced the games that I grew up with. I still stand by my stance that the second generation of 3D platformers is better. The game that cements this claim for me is Jak And Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. This was an early title for the PS2 and the first of the “PS2 mascot series” to be released. Some criticisms I’ve heard about his game I grew up with is that it’s highly derivative, some even harshly deriding it as a “Banjo-Kazooie clone”. After playing the 3D platformers of the previous generation, I can’t ignore the fact that Jak And Daxter did borrow several elements from these games but if Jak And Daxter did anything, they took all of these elements from games like Banjo Kazooie and practically perfected them.

The world of Jak And Daxter is a very interesting one. The world’s lore is one that is established immediately from the first cutscene. The world has no specific name, but it has a very specific premise. An old, gruff voice tells the player about the precursors, the gods of this world who created this world and have left their essence in the form of eco. The voice tells of a great prophecy involving a teenage boy named Jak who is destined to align all of the universe’s great essences and bring balance to the universe. At the start of the game, Jak and his obnoxious buck-toothed friend Daxter venture off to a forbidden island. They witness a suspicious meeting and are accosted by one of the bone-clad soldiers when Daxter falls into a pool of dark eco. He is turned into a small, orange animal called an ottsel, a cross between a weasel and an otter, a fictional animal devised by Naughty Dog. They come back to the home of Samos the Sage, the narrator in the opening cutscene. He claims that the only way to turn Daxter back to his normal self is to venture far to the north and speak to Gol, the sage of dark eco.

Samos claims that the duo is too young and inexperienced for their journey, so he has the train on a nearby sunny island Geyser Rock. This tutorial level gives you a great feel of how the game plays. As you jump on the ledges and platforms in Geyser Rock, you’ll notice that Jak is one of the most fluid characters to play as in any 3D platformer. He can double jump, roll, jump higher when crouching, and execute a rolling jump when timed correctly. This move is guaranteed to be used as the roll in Legend of Zelda for traversal. He can do a punch that propels his whole body, a spin kick which can also double as a means to go further after a jump, a slam down on the ground, and he can perform an uppercut while crouching. Jak has the most versatile moves out of any platforming character I’ve played as considering all of these moves only require his body.

Jak can also use four different types of eco that all have unique uses. Green eco restores your health. Your health is displayed in a heart with four green chambers and you can get hit a maximum amount of four times before dying. Green eco is abundant in every level, usually stored in breakable boxes, but the problem is that each eco pellet is only worth one out of fifty to restore a chamber of your total health. There are bigger pellets of green eco that restore a full chamber, but they are found much less frequently. Thankfully, dying in this game is practically inconsequential. Blue eco helps you run faster, access some precursor doors and other devices, and can be used to activate jump panels. This eco is just as plentiful as the green eco and is arguably the most vital for traversing the levels. Red eco makes you hit harder and is fairly rare, but it’s not very useful anyway. Yellow eco makes you shoot fireballs for a brief period of time. Using it normally is always pretty cool but anytime you have to use it for an objective, you have to aim accurately using the goggles. It kind of ruins the fun of being able to shoot fireballs, you know? Dark eco is everywhere, but it’s used as a stage hazard instead of a limited source of power. If you fall into a pool of it, it does not turn you into an ottsel, strangely enough.

The orange rodent on the other hand perches himself on Jak’s shoulder throughout the whole game and doesn’t do anything of real worth. I almost forget that the plot of this game revolves around him. Daxter is only used as the comic relief of this game, bantering with Samos, Keira, and every NPC you come across. I suppose Daxter had to compensate for Jak being an archetypal mute protagonist with being ostentatious. He’ll scream obvious tips in your ear when you come across a more puzzle-based section and he’ll oftentimes roast you when you die. What a great friend he is! It makes you want to wring his yappy little orange neck. Besides the NPC’s you’ll encounter throughout the game, Samos and Keira are the other two main characters in the game besides the titular duo. Samos is Jak’s stern guardian who is also the master of green eco. In terms of archetypal adventure story characters, he definitely fills the role of the wise old aid like a glove. He mostly badgers you to keep on your toes and do the various objectives the game has to offer. Keira is Samos’s daughter and is a perky tech-wiz who is also a vague love interest for Jak. Also, she’s only fifteen, you degenerate . She is also the curator of the Zoomer, the primary vehicle in this game that you will use for a couple of objectives and travelling across the four main hub worlds. The NPC’s you’ll encounter don’t have the same weight as the main four, but they all serve the game well with their unique quirks.

The fluid movement of Jak is due to the phenomenal presentation of this game. Platformers of the previous generations had dodgy framerate and rudimentary 3D animation. 3D graphics were still in the early stages of development, so those games can be excused, but it’s incredible how much more advanced Jak And Daxter looks and feels compared to those games. If every 3D platformer is relative to how long it came out after Super Mario 64, it’s unbelievable that Jak and Daxter came out only five years after. It’s hard to believe that Jak And Daxter came out in 2001. It must have been the most graphically advanced game there was at the time and it still looks great today. This is thanks to the animated graphical style the developers decided to go with. Every PS2 game with a more cartoony aesthetic aged much better than the games that didn’t. Every character is incredibly expressive and backed by a full-fledged voice acting cast that did a terrific job with each character (except for Jak of course. Having a silent protagonist is probably easier to budget). PS1 3D platformers may have had voice acting and charming animated graphics, but the presentation here could be pitched as an animated movie or a cartoon series. It’s that impressive.

The aspect that is even more impressive to me is the world of this game. Until I was exposed to the middle ages inspired world of Lordran, this was my favorite video game world. I guess I have a penchant for seamless, non-linear worlds in gaming. The game’s world is divided into three different hub areas with a couple of branching areas that act as their own levels with their own objectives. The branching areas are designed very similarly to the levels in Banjo-Kazooie. They are big open spaces without one clear objective, but rather a several objectives that can be cleared in any order. The levels in Banjo-Kazooie seemed kind of closed off. Each level felt spacious and rich with detail, but they always felt like there were boundaries that made each level feel restricted. Not only are the levels in Jak And Daxter rich with detail, but the seamless nature of the entire world also erases those superficial boundaries. Every single part of Jak And Daxter’s world is so geographically sound that I could map out every single speck of land in this game. To make the seamless nature of this world feel more organic, Naughty Dog opted out loading screens in place of long elevators and cutscenes to take you to some of the individual levels. I for one easily favor this instead of loading screens and can’t think of a single person who wouldn’t.

It helps that the seamlessly crafted world of Jak And Daxter is so interesting. The cryptic nature of the lore, the ancient precursors as an ambiguous force that encapsulates this land. The aspect of the precursors that is even more interesting than the eco is the bevy of ancient precursor technology scattered about. It gives Jak And Daxter a contrasting style between fantasy and science-fiction. It’s not quite a steampunk, but it has a quaint, old-world technology aesthetic all the same. The contrast between these can be illustrated from the two vehicles you use in this game. One is the Zoomer, a hoverbike with a propeller and a Flut-Flut, a fictional bird-horse animal that you hatch from an egg in an early level of the game. It can fly for a short period of time, break metal crates with its head, and it is as smooth to control as Jak is. I sometimes wish that it would eat Daxter and the Flut-Flut can be my animal companion like Epona from The Legend of Zelda.

The layout of the levels gives the player the impression that the precursors were intelligent beings and purveyors of radical ideas and burgeoning technology. The Forbidden Jungle has an ancient precursor citadel in the center of it that holds a hidden energy source. The Lost Precursor City is a technological wonderment submerged underwater. Almost every room showcases a different system of precursor innovations and is probably my all-time favorite water level in gaming. Gol and Maia’s Citadel is the apex of precursor architecture, a precursor skyscraper so gigantic that you can see at any point in the game. It’s like the scope of the precursor technology and architecture tells the lore without using the narrative of the main story. Considering the sub-levels of most 3D platformers in the previous generation had simple themes for level variation, this comprehensive way of world-building was incredibly advanced.

As the game progresses, it doesn’t really get any more difficult. The game maintains a consistent difficulty throughout. As I mentioned before, dying is practically inconsequential because there are checkpoints littered at every point and health is very easy to find, albeit taxing to collect. The enemies are creatures called Lurkers. I don’t know why they are the enemies of this world from a lore standpoint, but every character of the game speaks of them with disgust. At one point, a group of them attempt to blow up a large area of a mountain, so I guess they are intelligent and malicious enough to rationally dislike. The standard Lurkers are furry purple beasts that are proportional to something of a gorilla but apparently, every single enemy in this game is a variation of the purple monsters. Some of them are blue and have bone armor and some of them look like hopping ice crystals, but apparently even the fish, frogs, and the spiders in Spider Cave are Lurkers too. The only distinctive feature they all have that defines them are their big, creamsicle colored eyes. No matter what variation they are, they all die with one hit. Even the few bosses are an underwhelming exercise in waiting for an exposed weak spot three different times like we’ve seen in dozens of platformers before. I then realized that the progression in the game is not supposed to be in it’s difficulty, but rather the way the world becomes expanded and less familiar to the start of the game.

Sandover Village is the starting place of this game: a cozy, unadorned place with Samos’s hut and a couple of townsfolk. The branching paths are only slightly off the beaten path in a few directions. Sentinel Beach hardly even feels detached from Sandover and Forbidden Jungle could potentially be a hiking trail if you forget about the giant snakes. The exception to the relative familiarity of Sandover Village is Misty Island, the spooky area from the first cutscene of the game. You fully explore with just a short boat ride over and you can still see Sandover from the shore. The areas between the hub-worlds are passages you navigate through with the Zoomer. The distance between the hub-worlds through these passages can’t really be determined, but each passage gets longer after each series of levels and they all direct you north. Rock Village is a dreary place in perpetual storm and it’s also on fire due to being under attack by meteors. The Lost Precursor City can expand itself as much as it wants because it’s underwater nature isn’t relative to the rest of the world. Boggy Swamp is much more miserable than the sunny Forbidden Jungle and the Precursor Basin is large enough where it’s strictly a Zoomer level. The third hub-world is inside of a volcanic crater. It’s a neutral zone without any enemies like the last two, but only an eccentric like an eco sage would dare to reside here. The levels that branch off of this hub are so big that the developers could only fit two sub-levels here because of restrictions.

The progressively bigger spaces make Jak And Daxter more difficult because this game is a tried and true collectathon, a staple of the 3D platformer genre. Fortunately, the game doesn’t get too ambitious and restrains itself to only three collectibles. The main collectibles are power cells, glowing metallic orbs that kind of look like golden atoms. These are the collectibles that you gain to further the story, a macguffin in the scope of video games, but used as a power source for the Zoomer to withstand heat levels in the lava- filled passages and to power a machine to lift a boulder. Everytime you collect one of these, a short cutscene occurs with Jak and Daxter celebrating by doing the robot or alley-ooping it into Jak’s backpack, accompanied by a victory jingle. Some say this gets old after a while, but I don’t feel the same. Another collectible is the scout flies, drone-like devices made by Keira to search for power cells kept in boxes. Good job, Keira. They’ll find lots of power cells confined that way. There are seven of them in each level including all of the passage levels and collecting all of them per level will reward you with a power cell. Fortunately, these little buggers make a lot of noise, so they aren’t that hard to find. The collectible that acts like currency is the precursor orbs. These can be used to trade for power cells from the NPCs in the hub areas and by the mystical, Dr. Claw-sounding precursor oracles. There are so many scattered about in the game that you needn’t worry about finding them to trade for power cells, but I don’t recommend collecting all of them if you’re a completionist. There will always be one missing precursor orb and it will always be in a huge area like Snowy Mountain. Trying to find all of them will drive you insane.

Another MacGuffin the game implements is the warp gates between the three hub-worlds. In the language of video game tropes, these are teleportation devices making it easier to traverse through the game after a certain point of progression. In the language of the game’s story, Samos claims that the other sages haven’t turned on their warp gates in months, and it’s not because they seem like an invasion of one’s privacy. You discover that the sages have been captured by the two ominous figures from the first cutscene who intend to use their collective power to open the dark eco pillars to adulterate the entire world with dark eco. One of these characters is Gol, the sage of dark eco and the man who was supposed to bring Daxter back to his human form. Instead, he’s been corrupted by dark eco along with his partner (wife? sister?) Maia and Jak And Daxter have to stop them instead of changing Daxter back. It’s a good twist, but the game just becomes another “save the world” type of story. I guess this is par for the course considering how many typical fantasy elements are in this game. By the time you get to the citadel, Samos has been captured and Gol and Maia’s mission to bring darkness to the world is almost complete. The last level is their citadel and acts kind of like Ganon’s Castle in Ocarina of Time. It’s a gauntlet that tests all of the skills and eco powers you’ve been using to the fullest extent. Once you free all of the sages, they use their collective power as a shield and you have to battle a precursor robot on the roof of the citadel. Unlike the other bosses, this is an epic fight that proves to be a fair challenge. At the final stage of the boss, the sage’s collective powers form a mythical substance called light eco. This is apparently the substance that could turn Daxter back into a human, but he opts for saving the world instead. It’s the most admirable thing he does throughout the whole game. Jak uses the light eco to blast the precursor bot as Gol and Maia are sealed in the dark eco pillars forever. The heroes celebrate their victory on top of the citadel and Jak and Keira almost kiss, but Daxter deliberately cock-blocks him mid-kiss. I swear to god Daxter, I’m going to rip you off my shoulder and fling you into the mouth of a fucking Lurker Shark.

Saving the world is not the true ending of Jak & Daxter. If you collect all of the power cells, you can open a door on top of the citadel. Once you open it, it shines with a bright white light and apparently something so sublime that the characters can’t even describe it. This ending is not really worth the effort considering how ambiguous it is, but this is the true ending to the game considering the beginning of its sequel. Whether they initially had this in mind as a cliff-hanger, I’m not sure, but that’s how it turned out to be. The real ending to me is reloading the game at the start menu which will automatically take you to the top of the citadel, but this time there’s sunlight and no boss battle. From the top looking south, you can look at all of the places you’ve been to. You can make out the citadel in Forbidden Jungle, the blimp in Boggy Swamp, the mountains of Snowy Mountain, and take in the scope of your journey. Jak and Daxter look at how far they’ve come with a sense of pride while the wind from the high elevation blows on them. The music is both triumphant and bittersweet. The spectacle of this view had me awe-struck when I was a kid. This right here is one of the most beautiful moments in video gaming. It’s the perfect way to cap off this adventure. [/spoiler].

Jak And Daxter is definitely a product of years of refining and tweaking 3D platformer tropes. However, just because it’s not the most original video game doesn’t mean that it isn’t ideal. Jak & Daxter was a magnificent advancement for the genre and one of the first stellar entries that capped off the PS2 era of gaming. Every single element from titles like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie had been improved upon significantly from the seamless world design, the impressive presentation, and elevating the scope of the 3D platformer. It might just be the peak of the 3D platformer genre with the advancements it made and the influence it had on all of the 3D platformer games that followed it.

Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is a game whose legacy is intertwined with both that of its creators and their peers, one-third of the great factional split between PS2 owners: Jak, Ratchet, or Sly? Of the three, Jak is the series with the least coherent identity, having abandoned its foundation to compete with the raunchier, more violent third-person shooters that were entering the home console zeitgeist. If you'd grown up with the later games in the series, you might find it hard to believe the original entry in the series was Naughty Dog's lighthearted love letter to the collect-a-thon platformers of the previous generation, and overall uninterested in violent power fantasies or GTA-style mission hubs.

The premise of Jak 1 is to embark on a dangerous quest through your home island to find Gol, a corrupted sage who is plotting the destruction of the world, and force him to turn Daxter back into a person. Along the way, you'll collect power cells to continue the quest past more dangerous obstacles by doing a variety of usual platforming things - climbing stuff, completing obstacle courses, and the occasional oddjob. Jak's movement is punchy and smooth, with jumps and attacks weaving into each other in fun ways. The aerial attack, a downward ground-pound, actually bounces Jak into the air which can be used to pull off higher jumps. The "long jump" has a small rolling build-up making it more situational than in, say, Mario 64, but as a tradeoff it also doubles as an attack. The O-button attack, a Crash-style spin used for crowd control, can be used in the air to slow your descent and slightly increase horizontal distance. In some of the more intense gauntlets, you'll be jumping and punching in strict rhythms under some time constraint, and the controls are definitely responsive enough to make these challenging without frustration. My one major control gripe is that Jak can only add a second jump to his leap if X is tapped again before he begins his descent, which is earlier on than one might anticipate and goes against more conventional "gamer logic" wherein the delay between the two jumps is maximized as a safety mechanism and correctional tool. You'll have to be a bit more careful and precise with Jak than many other platformer characters.

The major levels are seamlessly woven into the hubworld, with no loading screens at all, giving the world a sense of physical plausibility and cohesion - if you believe Guinness's Book of World Records, its the first of its kind. Every stage physically lies in the area that you'd imagine they do given their entrances, and you can even see landmarks from other areas if you can find the right vantage point. It's really incredible and the logical next-gen progression of the Banjo-Kazooie framework. The grounded setting is also a bit of a content downfall, though. It is difficult to create a platformer in a semi-realistic physical space (especially one in a tropical setting) that doesn't seep into some of gaming's oldest level theme cliches. Outside of an ancient, Atlantean-inspired underwater city, the theming is standard affair. The stages themselves are incredibly designed, however, with all of the power cells and collectible orbs available at all times. A heavy emphasis on loops and circular design lands the player back in familiar territory after platforming gauntlets and more linear paths. There's almost no backtracking to speak of, and doing a clean sweep of a level in one go is incredibly satisfying. The variety of challenges is also consistently high, with some instant classics like punching a power cell out of a giant bird's stomach and racing it to the landing, or punching cows back into a stable, or ascending an underground construction site of an ancient mech. While not all cells are major setpieces, they are logically placed and rewarding to find.

Like many games in the genre, there are a series of minigame cells that are of variable quality. Some are collected in vehicle-only sections on your trusty Zoomer, all of which I have no problems with because the thing controls like a dream, with sharp cornering and a reasonable top speed - most importantly, the game never asks too much from the player in these areas, as it's not the focus. However, a few cells are completed while atop the child of the giant bird mentioned previously, and its slippery control scheme was just different enough from the base controls to feel frustrating to reign in. This compounded with the ice physics in Snowy Mountain felt like too much of a diversion from the skills you're meant to accumulate across your journey. Finally, there are two different one-off minigames that are completely out of place - a fish collecting game with twitchy controls and a defense shooter in first-person that lies about its instructions in its introductory cutscene. These were bizarre inclusions to say the least and they stick out as particularly unwelcome, but it's worth mentioning that they are optional and merely 2 of 105 cells across the entire game.

Beyond some bizarre difficulty spikes with some side-missions, a sort of unconventional feeling character to control, and a fantasy-generic setting with dialogue on the kid-friendly and cartoonish side, Jak is a thoroughly well-thought out game with many decisions made to bring the collect-a-thon framework into the 6th generation of consoles. The cohesive world and lighthearted tone lend itself well to a sense of adventure, and the outstanding level design keeps progress fast and satisfying. It's one of the few games I'd say a majority of people 100% just because it's so accessible and fast-paced in its structure. Minor grievances aside, this is a highly-replayable landmark title for the genre and one of the very best of its ilk in the 6th generation. To this day, Naughty Dog's gritty, trope-riddled reboot of the series in the later entries is one of the more disappointing directions a series has ever taken.

It’s an absolutely stunning game with varied gameplay, a huge world to explore and really tight platforming. Some people might say this game is boring compared to jak 2, but in my opinion it’s way better than jak 2 and jak 3 with their linear mission based structure and empty worlds. I recommend this game for any platformer fan.