A Tale of Three Trilogies: Up your Arsenal

Talking about Jak & Daxter is a little bit like cheating, when you think about it. It’s a saga that has no meaningful relevance today. It has its followers, of course, but it seems pretty obvious that the people responsible for its creation don’t have any disposition towards creating a Jak 4. For better or worse, this work is firmly anchored to a time and era that feel further and stranger everyday, just like the boomer shooters and the GTA clones are starting to feel to many right now. I can’t apply that distance to Ratchet & Clank because, well, it’s keeping on existing. One could even say that it’s prospering right now, but what does that mean exactly?

I think the answer to that will vay depending on who you ask to and how. If we’re saying that Ratchet & Clank is prospering as the vanguard of a certain studio, or a company and console, then there’s no debate to be had about that. Everyone that’s played Ratchet & Clank on a console over the last 20 years can attest to that, and if they hadn’t they might have heard from it or even watch the movie. At any rate, it’s one of the few cases of an American franchise that manages to stay true to its style. Like many Nintendo games and a healthy amount of fighting games, there’s a continuity from the first game up until Rifts Apart. Beyond the faddis mechanics that might appear from time to time (like the fake 3D of the PS2 or the Move integration of the PS3) these games have an image of confidence that makes them stay on the front of the medium. If Call of Duty needs to constantly adapt to the propagandist needs of the moment and Far Cry has to fake its relevancy to stay afloat, Ratchet & Clank endures for the simple fact that it continues as a platform-action shooter that happens to have a sci-fi setting. This fortitude is the one quality that makes it an essential franchise to companies like Sony, and the one ticket that Insomniac has to be able to do whatever it pleases with it. But I’m also of the impression, after finishing the first trilogy, that for the studio itself that fortitude isn’t so obvious at first glance. It’s the only argument I can come up with to explain the weird setback that Ratchet & Clank 3: Up your Arsenal ended up becoming.

I don’t want to make it seem like Up your Arsenal is a bad game, because honestly, I had a good time playing it. I initially groaned at the idea of having to improve every weapon and collect every crystal again. But then I realized that the team had managed to make it much more bearable, and by the middle of it, I found myself enjoying that part even better than the levels. Is this the famous mental peace that some players ascribe to Disgaea’s grinding? The kind of relaxation that comes after doing a repetitive task? Maybe it’s just that the podcast I was hearing at the time were very good. But the truth is that I didn’t had a hard time with it, and over the way I was able to experiment with weapons that were pretty cool and fighting some bad guys that were kinda interesting. But a weird thing that I started noticing after maximizing a couple of weapons is that, though I was able to remember me traversing those levels, I wans’t able to remember to the story at all.

For a game starring Ratchet & Clank, this was striking to me. I suspected that this was due to a weak script or a more tenuous plot. It’s true that the villain isn’t half as memorable as Drek and Abercombrie. But the history chose to focus in what, to me, was the most interesting character of the story. We agree that Qwark is the most interesting character, no? But it seemed like his presence had been reduced to a bunch of easy jokes about failsons. Of all the new characters that pop up, Courtney Gears seemed the most complex at first, but her presentation is based around extremely tired jokes about pop divas that left a bat taste in my mouth. Which is a shame because the idea of a revolutionary pop singer is surprisingly forward-thinking for 2004. Instead, we’re stuck with the jokes and a pretty tired metaphor about oppressed robots. I have a complex relationship with android metaphors as it is myself, but whenever I seem them applied in games (like in Detroid: Become Human), I understand their appeal. It’s just that they don’t have a good track record in videogames, is all.

Up your Arsenal is to me the game where the franchise finally found its reasons to perpetuate itself during the oughts. To make sure of that, it repeated the same levels once, twice and even thrice. Where earlier titles showed ingenuity and creativity, Up your Arsenal only has corridors and arenas to offer. Whereas Going Commando had you facing the need to look at every nook and cranny of each planet, here they are uncomfortable appendices to a central stage that’s the center of each level. The only levels that are allowed to be unique are the ones that recycle past mechanics. We don’t have space dogfighting anymore, but one dedicated to collect crystals. Whereas early planets resonated with themes and a desire to make you feel you were inhabiting a space with history and conflict, here we have barely disguised theme parks — the planet starring Clank and his artistic career is a puerile joke about special effects and blockbusters, Nation Annihilation is made up of cheap reality show knock-offs, and don’t ask about any other because I can’t barely recall them. And the fact that we’re beginning most levels jumping off a plane and occupying hills that are very obviously multiplayer maps don’t make me feel inclined to remember them. The only thing that allowed to go through these were the robots’ gossip, but I wasn’t able to tell if they were there because they were an extension of the robot’s metaphors or cheap Vietnam movie jokes.

There are plenty of forms of comedy I don’t vibe with for entirely personal reasons. I don’t like prank jokes if they aren’t animated, and the pedantic humor of Stupid White Men or several late-night shows is a little too up its own ass for me. But the referential humor that obfuscates those reference with a veil of irony is unjustifiably lazy. Even at their worst hour, Ratchet & Clank se felt like it treated kids with respect and didn’t condescend. That’s why I think the themes of the original titles felt very interesting to me, as simple as they might have been. But this game remined me of those soulless endeavor that you can find on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon that can only justify their existence by trying to stay relevant with the zeitgeist. It’s a kind of inmmature humor that people wrongly think kids prefer, and for that, it’s irrespectful to me, a particularly obscene way to keep children entertained with the laziest stuff. Up your Arsenal wasn’t, then and now, the worst case that you could find of this type of humor, but it stands out precisely it hadn’t done it until now. Later entries would only make this worse, as far as I know, so I’m honestly glad I don’t have to keep playing them for the time being.

This is all very sad for me, because as I already said, the game was still entertaining to play. It’s true that most corridors are nothing but pointless tasks, but they’re refined enough that you never trip off. The moments where you need to disguise yourself are dull and boring, but they are better designed than the stealth sections of the original title. Everything’s here for a good enough reason and doesn’t pad out, so we don’t have hours travelling through the desert nor rail sections again. Exploration in general is greatly diminished in the game, which is strange considering the pedigree of Insomniac’s early titles, but logical if you consider that they starting developing Resistance around this time. With Going Commando I talked about the feeling of endlessness that the skill trees and abilities provided, here, everything is subordinated to jumping and shooting.

Here I was going to say that Ratchet & Clank reminds me more of Megaman than Spyro, but then I remembered the Qwark side missions and I stopped. Maybe it’s an unfair comparison because despite their similiraties, the Capcom games followed a strict formula that allowed them to create progressively more intricate maps. It didn’t always delivered good results, but I understand that design philosophy, but it didn’t belong to Ratchet & Clank until now. The franchise lost with Up your Arsenal one of its original signs of authenticity, and in the meantime, they created a scheme of movement that could be easily replicated for years to come. If you ask me, I don’t it was a worthy sacrifice, though maybe it was for Insomniac, because they were finally able yo know what to do with the Lombax and the robot.

Throughout these entries I have deliberately tried to to assign a key temr to the aesthetic element that these games were promoting, in an effor to find out what would define triple As in later years. For Ratchet & Clank I talked about endlessness, but with the third entry, the word that came to me the most to descibre wasn’t that, but conformism. And above everything else, it’s the one that I think rings more true to the intentions behind this game than anything else. At the end, Ratchet couldn’t help but feel like a generic triple A title.

So, while Jak was trying to go big and not managing to reach it, Ratched started with grand illusions but eventually settled down. Others would decide to preemptively quit, but would do so with a bang. And that’s what we’ll talk about when we start talking about Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, one of my favorite games ever.

Originally published at http://laeradelvideojuego.wordpress.com on September 20, 2021.