A Tale of Three Trilogies: Jak 3

If one goes back to the reviews at the time, the path that trilogies like Jak, Ratchet & Clank and Sly Cooper would seem to follow is one of continuous ascent, of expectations surpassed and new horizons reached. This kind of breathless praise is common to many instances of the game press, and feels as predictible as any subsequent revision of those praises. Up until now, people tend to consider Jak 2 the superior work and treat Jak 3 as the first step towards mediocrity, followed by an interesting detour in Jak X.

The reasons that are used to defend this view are suspiciously similar to the one used to assert that Dark Souls 2 is worst than the first game, or that Super Mario World is better than Super Mario Bros 3. There seems to be a lot of irrational disposition towards conjuring up these opinions, and many times people make use of well known fallacies (“the team in charge wasn’t the same as before”) or an ideal of design purity that only exists in their head (“The game is a less authentic expression of what the team wanted to say”). All of that feels symptomatic of a need to validate certain positions about some videogames, and though I’m sure we’ll see a lot of debate about their merit, I we musn’t let them impose on our own criterio when we experience these works in a more personal way. All of this is to say that I liked Jak 3 better than Jak 2.

There are many small factors that explain my attitude towards this game, some of them related to the context of the franchise and some outside of it. On the one hand, Daxter talks a lot less (though the idea of having to share his screen time with Pecker was a sucker punch). On the other, I just prefer deserts to futuristic cities. Over the years, I’ve become used to associate crowded cities with IAs and subroutines that trample over each other. By contrast, empty worlds like this one evoke on me a feel of familiarity, sprung from decades of decades of walking through barely populated corridors and marveling at rooms where the only thing that moves are my avatar and the enemies. In an almost unconscious way, I’ve taken for granted the stillness of most gameworlds. In that aspect, I wonder if videogames aren’t more near to the same aesthetic pulsion that moves architets to built cathedrals, mosques and gardens, spaces that aim to provide a sense of temporal and absolute paralysis but always finds problems when recreating the vicinities of those buildings.

It’s possible that the struggle against silence that these games perform is just a way to fight against that tendency. In Jak, you can see that contradiction throughout the whole saga. The soundtrack of the first games, for instance, tends toward quietude and muteness, despite Daxter’s constant observations and the Krimzon Guard’s chitty chat. Curiously enough, the opposite happens in Jak 3, and the voices and dialogue tend to be muted while the soundtrack is a lot more struendous. That doesn’t necessarily imply tha the game stops being comical, but it does show the signs of the path that Jak’s story already took since the second entry. It’s fortunate for that reason that the game decided to stop the story here, even if it did leaving some plots unresolved.

I’m talking a lot about the space you innhait in Jak 3 because it’s the really interesting thing here. It’s an interesting space because it evokes the same feelings that Shadow of the Colossus’s desert instilled on me. There’s an impulse to find something beyond the next dune, and the joy of finding some hidden ruins remined of that time I took a trip to the Sahara. It’s difficult to explain, but I believe that every player use to spend entire hours walking around in an MMORPG will be able to get it. The world of Jak 3 is full of histories and artifacts, and the game rewards you for finding them. Just like the last entry did with the city (and which we visit once again here), the space is an excuse to litter it with minigames. But here I feel like the journey towards those minigames is a lot more interesting than those minigames at times.

It’s almost poetic to reflect on the idea, towards the end of our journey with Jak & Daxter, it’s the moments of silence and not the moments of humor, or action, that have been imprinted on me. The joke compilations you can find in Youtube sell you a quite false idea of their quality, because they miss the context through which they’re transmitted. In a world as bloated and solipsistic as Jak’s, rivals tend to repeat themselves and prophecies abound. Jak’s at some time solid romantic interest gets blurred for some other girl, which makes it clear how little the team cares about consistency at this point. Having said that, that pragmatic approach permeates every aspect of Jak’s fictional design The rebelious attitude that the game bolstered before gets obscured by one of exploration and plunder. The way to represent that plunder is much less gross than with Tomb Raider, but doesn’t show as much maturity as it shows embellishment of what was already there. If earlier we used to jump around and shoot at natives, now we walk around and then glide for a short while. The game tries to justify the sacking by making you its rightful, divine heir, but no one is getting fooled with that excuse. 25 years later, the intuiton that many designers follow when designing worlds is the same one that Gary Gygax did when creating Dungeons & Dragons.

There are good reasons why this is — after all, I had a good time plundering all the tombs. The problem always was that we’ve gotten used to enjoy that plundering without thinkin too much about it. A lot of times we’ve tried to unveil the reason that we fall into these tropes again and again, and the answer we usually tend to find is that videogames “be like that sometimes”. And it’s true that, from a certain perspective, that’s what they are. But that realization shouldn’t make us feel less weary of it. During the PS2’s dominance, it seemed like games wanted to aim towards a more rebellious and anti-establishment crowd, one that lacked a specific ideology but resisted authority. This was the golden age of GTA after all. And with that new crowd came the need to reach higher levels of aspiration. I’m not trying to include all videogames here — I’m mostly referring to the action and reflex-oriented ones. If we take a glance to this genre’s history, we can see a lot of pulsions and influences permeating its story. The influence of traditional sports followed shortly after its inception and doesn’t show signs of disappearing. From the Spectrum onwards, a new interest in simulating absurdist scenearios materialized in the genre. And during the 90’s we had a clear turn towards cinematic action. Alongside this “cinematist” (to quote Lamarre) aesthetic came a lot of tropes and images that cinema had been carrying for a decades, one that we saw reflected in games Tomb Raider, Driver and Half-Life. That influence brought with them their innherent tension, and the way in which their presence in the medium altered the medium was more than significant.

So we had significant changes in technology and with that, we tried to alter the meaning of those images. But instead of revising them in a meaningful way, we just embellished them a little better. What 1996 allowed to show, 2005 wouldn’t be so keen towards. The lesson learned wasn’t that we needed to stop plundering tombs, but that we needed to plunder them in a more responsible manner. And a pretty effective way to do that was making us the underdog in the story. With that nagging feeling of repeating old colonialist themes out of the way, we kept on breaking vases and sacking ruins like good old times. Jak reached frankly ridiculous amounts of justification to assure this, to the point of even making us the titular hero of the prophecy.

What this artistic strategy suggests to me is that the lesson of works like Super Mario 64, Tomb Raider and Quake when creating 3D spaces was that you should be able to do with those spaces as you pleased. By the beginning of the PS2, that lesson was so internalized that seeing Fumito Ueda substract from it felt revolutionary. Even today it feels weird to see it. And in a most insidious way, whenever an open worlds makes us do more than we should ever, they get more and more layers of justification. Like misery tourists that need to be convinced of their moral superiority when travelling to marginalized zones, triple A games today need to believe that you doing all the things they ask you to do is morally justified.

Jak 3 isn’t so much a sign of things to come but a things of how things were already becoming. The holisticity reached with Jak II came about with a certain critique against killing indiscriminately. In this game you’re still allowed to kill everyone, but they will defend themselves. There’s no longer a tyrannical government to overthrow, but you still have a cosmic threat to deal with. And any other mystery you’ll find will always come back to Jak and to Daxter.

Meanwhile, I prefer to remember the quite walks across the desert, and all those hours wasted while exploring those ruins. Letting myself go by Jak’s elegant movement set and the not so elegan jeep set. If there’s a clear lesson you can take from this, is that bigger games like this tend towards more fragmented experiences. That fragmentation is to me key to understand of many triple A games today. Something like Far Cry 6 will make sure that you stay with the parts that appeal to you the most and make you forget the parts that you disliked. Many of these games’ posmortems reveal that that’s more than intentional on the designer’s part.

With this, I think we’ve reached a fine conclusion towards one of the essential characters of the modern triple A — a disposition towards creating bigger worlds that allow to do wathever but want you to stay in the parts that appeal you the most. The result was that players tended towards more fragmented and intermitent styles of play. Most open world games would favor this approach in subsequent years, until reaching our current status of general blandness permeating entire sagas and franchises. If the 90’s showed us how cinematic and involved 3D spaces could get, the aughts showed us how boring and formulaic they would eventually become. Ratchet & Clank would opt towards a slightly different route, but as we’ll see, its way of tackling its arcade sensibilities would result in something pretty similar to this game.

Originally published at http://laeradelvideojuego.wordpress.com on September 13, 2021.