A tale of Three Trilogies: Jak 2

In the two years that lapsed between Precursor Legacy and its sequel, the commercial and artistic landscape of the PS2 was going through a period of standardization that brought about clear winners and losers. The battle to define what was going to be the console’s main experience had been dominated by a bunch of big, ambitious works. Whether that ambition was headed toward big worlds (à la Rockstar) or big stories (à la Square/Enix), it seemed clear that audiences had shifted preferences from a previous generation, and with that, the doubt and confusion that seemed to have reigned between 2001 and 2002 opened up for confidence and stability, which was good news for privileged studios but bittersweet ones for studios that had been fighting to get a hold on since the beginning.

It always caught my eye the way in which sagas that start as accidental experiments manage to flourish over the years, while solid and agreed upon ones stay behind. A part of me sees this evolution with a tinge of romanticism and is quick to lament how today would be impossible for studios to keep working on a concept that only received tepid responses. But the other remembers that, even in the best moments, the PS2 landscape always had the Sony’s shadow on their backs. None of the star teams of this period run a real risk to get laid off for a bad idea, and even at the worst hour, it’s difficult to imagine Naughty Dog suffering the same fate as, say, Sony Japan. Maybe that’s why works like Grand Theft Auto were able to make so many games in such a short time — and I can’t begin to imagine the crushing exploitation that came with that. It also explains how something like Jak II came out to be.

Independently of what I’m going to say about Jak’s second story, accusing it of “predictability” is not one you’ll hear me say. Though the aesthetic and tone shifts are the first thing that shock you when you go pass the intro cutscene, the real surprise comes when you realize that the previously unassuming platformer has become an action sandbox. Faithful to its new parameters, you embody the role of a sassy rebel with attitude that cannot tell between a foot soldier and innocent civilians. When he strolls aorund in his motorbike and showing off his mane, the only thing he cares about is to go forward, and let the rest deal with that. His secondary travel method, the flying skateboard, is even more vicious on close distances. I’m honestly surprised that this game didn’t come with graffiti spraying mechanics, because that’s what’s left for this surfer dude to really become a Bad Boy.

When I was playing Jak II, I couldn’t help to remember my short but intense memores playing Carl Johnson from GTA: San Andreas. I knew there were things I needed to do and narrative to follow, pero most of the time I was running around on motorbikes and doing flips at the stadium. I was always getting distracted by the collectables and the new zones, and though Haven City isn’t half as inviting as San Andreas, I can’t deny I lost myself looking for stuff a couple of times. The times I was able to get out of the city were the best ones no doubt, as they convinced me that the world was something more than a bunch of streets littered with innocent civilians.

It’s a shame that I’m not so young anymore and not so prompt to letting myself go on this kind of adventures. Today, I carry my backlog everywhere I go and I always have shit to do, so I feel pretty encumbered most of the time. Because the game urged me to keep going and collect everything, it never gave me time to breath and smell the flowers for a bit. And that’s due in part to the fact that those flowers don’t smell so good at 33 than at 16. The furistic world of Jak is interesting, but doesn’t have any detail that might interest me on a deeper level. The plot has some nice twists, and as I said, a more adult tone than the one from Precursor Legacy doesn’t save it from a certain adolescent whiff that tries to pose everything as cool. The moment where I can tell this more is during the cutscenes, which are carefully made but make me hate Daxter even more than I though I could. Also, this is as good a time as any to signal how this thing was marketed for boys. The regressive attitude that almost all these games possess when it comes to presenting female characters gets especially irksome in the Naughty Dog titles, as every lady here is a sexy lamp first and a compelling character second. Which is a shame when considering how these games could have spend more time developing its secondary characters.

That attitud is the one that makes it impossible for me to connect with the narrative premise of being a rebellious leader. In a decade like the 2000's, mass products changed their tendency to exploit the grunge and nihilist affects of the 90’s to exploit the Nu Metal, X Games and (with some luck) dubstep affects of the aughts. This is what was understood as “boy stuff” back then, and it’s what Jak II pined for to keep afloat among the younglings. It wans’t a bad call commercially by any means, despite what Jason Rubin might have thought about it, as the game was a success. But its lack of confidence made it impossible to keep afloat in later generations. Over the years, the saga became a confusing mess of contradictory ideas.

That’s probably why coming back to it now feels like coming back to the awkward growth phase of the action genre. The elements that make it stand out are here, but there are many aspects to refine. Navigating the world is nice and even relaxing, but everything seems too far away or inaccesible. Getting into fights with the authorities is way too easy and seems beyond your control at times. The game also has a tendency to make you repeat the same task over and over again. The ones that are just minigames are the most cumbersome, because you can tell they’ve been added awkwardly, but the ones that are about going from point A to point B are always the same thing. Sometimes you need to escort someone and sometimes you need to take down some targets, but unless the sequence is particularly well-made you’re gonna get tired of them real fast. The quests that happen outside the city are the most interesting, but that’s mostly because they’re allowing you to navigate through places that you wouldn’t traverse normally. Besides, what the hell, some of them are straight rip-offs of Precursor Legacy and even Crash Bandicoot maps. One thing that left me particularly troubled was when I was going through a tomb and started playing as Daxter in a sequence that was straight out of Crash 2. It’s not like I’m agaisnt referencing past works if they’re done well, but was it necessary to include here, between all these puzzles and moving blocks?

I’m complaining a lot here and that’s unfair, because the has undoubtedly gotten better since last time. Daxter isn’t such an annoying presence anymore (out of the cutscenes, at least), and he even does stuff from time to time. Levels are no longer weirdly distributed, and characters are no longer in the background. My complains are more about pedantic nit-picking because I have to recognize the studio’s merit of moving from one style of design to another. Youtubers like GamingBrit have exhaustively exposed the way in which Jak II manages to keep its identity without thrashing the original titile in the process, but in the end, all this is faint praise to what was ultimately a desperate attempt to stay relevant. Jak II simply faced the same problem that other franchises did — maintain an impression of transgression, but sooner. It’s fortunate that the original team took care of the shift, unlike what happened with Far Cry 3 or Dead Space 3. At the same time, it’s not that much of a praise to say that something didn’t end up like Dead Space 3, now is it?

At this point I’m more rambling than forming an argument. I want to go back to the original point of the work and discuss how Jak II contributed to the consolidation of the triple A experience. If the first game was firmly enclosed in the past, Ratchet began to show the signs of a new style of gameplay, while Sly had opted to insufflate life to a genre that felt too rigid. Jak II now talks the language of a new paradigm. With the eye fixed on those newly discovered possibilities, the dynamid duo faces these challenges with an air rebellion and resistance agaisnt authority. Unlike what would happen in later years, there are still plenty of platforming challenges to overcome, and the game isn’t going to forgive you any slip. Learning to use your weapons is surprisingly entertaining , but using Dark Jak always feels a little bit unruly. You can also do the same backflips from the previous game, which is pretty cool.

Jak II was also a pioneer in a particular aspect of triple A design that I’m finding hard to define. It’s the feeling of a total experience that tries to sell you on the idea that the world that you’re innhabiting is potentially endless. I call it Holisticity to give it some weight, but the truth is that I can’t define it properly. What I’m referring with that word is a certain artistic motivation that as far as I can tell can be found in almost every game now. If a traditional platformer always made me feel like I knew where the goal was, not knowing when the story will end seems like a deliberate design choice in here. Maybe it’s because the feeling of endless content has been a topic of discussion for a long time. Today it’s almost impossible to talk about this boring thing without getting into an endless loop, but it always caught my eye that it’s something barely discussed around truly inexhaustible games like Minecraft and almost any MMORPG.

At any rate, I’m sure that Jak II would lead up to several discussions about this if it was released today. And though much of that belongs to the paratexts of the game, it can also be found within it. Games have managed to hide their true ending since the beginning of time, but for a moment it felt like that tendency had been changed for a more formalist attitude towards embedding proper stories in videogames. With Jak II, that formalist attitude seems to be done for, but sometimes it feels like we’ve done for the sake of a couple of repetitive tasks. Not much later than this game, Fallout 3 would ask us to look after our father, and in the way, would entertain us with all sorts of meaningless jank. Compare that tendency with the one found in Kingdom Hearts or the PS2 Castlevania, where everything seems predisposed towards some kind of resolution.

So then, Jak II managed to define, before many others, the thing that ought to define many games in the subsequent years. Though we have had some alternatives since then, we’ve gottent used to it long enough to make it difficult to question it. Especially when it comes from a game that’s perceived as triple A or triple I. It’s certainly a paradigm that Sony, Electronic Arts and Annapurna stakeholders like to have, largely because it adjusts well to market demands of endless content. Although it might look like a rebelious, juvenile title, Jak II is firmly steeped into neoliberalism. And though the result of that is a better and more interesting game than Precursor Legacy, it’s difficult to not see this evolution and sigh a little bit.

Originally published at http://laeradelvideojuego.wordpress.com on August 30, 2021.