/v/ - Video Games★

Glad I only ever played the first one.

Jak 2 is a solid game.

Weirdly enough the whole trilogy is pretty good.

>>16852783 (OP)

You can find some older interviews or whatever, I'm too lazy to find them myself right now. but basically I recall Jak and Daxter 1 was them following the trend of what a 3d platform was at the time, and Jak 2 was them choosing a direction they were more interested in, rather then making what they saw as another by the numbers platformer. but it's still blatantly obvious they were inspired by GTA's success.

>>16852828

Jak 1 is definitely a rote collectathon platformer, so I can see where they were coming from wanting to do something different. I don't see why that had to mean such a drastic change in tone and setting, though. They could have easily done a sandbox environment and guns in Jak 1's world, though I guess having car-jacking would have been more difficult.

>>16852825

Naught Dog just doesn't seem like the kind of devs, at the time, to shamelessly follow a trend for easy success, and, even then, that wouldn't have required the massive tonal shift Jak II took. Jak II was a huge creative departure from the first game, to the point it could have been a completely new series and nothing really would have been lost.

>>16852816

>>16852807

>>16852814

Jak 2 and 3 are fine games but they pale in comparison to the first one. If Naughty Dog had built more on the foundation they had with Jak and Daxter, both in terms of gameplay and story/world, the series really could have been something special. The sequels just feel like wasted potential.

That being said, Jak X is one of the best racing games on the PS2.

>>16852783 (OP)

ratchet and clank was doing better, it had guns and a futuristic setting, so they have jak II guns and a cyberpunk setting, and curse words too

>>16852885

>A lot of the dialogue in the game really tries it best to be edgy

Where? Jak is mute, Daxter is just a smartass, Samos is grouchy old sage, Keira is a cheery engineer, the villains are run-of-the-mill as can be, and all the NPCs are either goofy or inoffensive. The closest the game gets to being edgy is Jak subtly staring at Keira's ass during one cutscene.

>>16852897

I think edgy is not the right word, anon. I have a lot of time without playing it, but I remember some of it having that "I want to be mature" feeling, like in the swamp or that city that is under siege.

>>16852900

Tardcore? Alternatween?

>>16852900

It's still a far cry from "dirty cyberpunk city under tyrannical rule from a military dictator and the protag now has an inner darkness that makes him angrier." Jak 1 had some seriousness to it, but no more than a kid's cartoon targeted to a somewhat older audience, like Avatar. And the city under siege is taken pretty lightly. The resident gambler is more concerned with getting back enough money to buy some pants, and the last guy who tried to save the city is bawling his eyes out after being smacked around by the monster.

Ok

>>16852913

Tardcore is a very good word.

>>16852923

You'd be surprised, anon, Jak 2 isn't even as edgy as people make it out to be. Sure, Jak wants to kill Praxis, and there's Crew dying, but everything else is not that different from the original except in context. Even NPCs like that rebel leader is very safe, the worst offender probably being Erol. Jak 2 keeps a lot of that kind of humor. It is not as campy, obviously, but it barely changed, not even in 3. I mean, hell, the precursors are those Ottsel things.

>>16852828

There was an early demo of Jak II that was actually like Jak I, but a focus group got to it and called it "kiddy" and stuff, so they went to make GTAIII.

Jak I was basically just Crash Bandicoot 4, which made sense. They made Crash but never owned it. Now they're owned by Sony and don't have access to Crash, but clearly wanted to do more Crash. Daxter is basically the same character, only he talks. Jak's movement is very much like Crash, only he's in an open world, to take advantage of the PS2 hardware. But even then, the individual level designs, though linked with each other, are each still pretty linear, like Crash.

Crash is my favorite series ever, so I wish Naughty Dog just continued making Jak II as Crash 5.

>>16852874

>Jak X

CTR being popular with the remake, you'd think Sony would do something with Jak X. That's the real sequel to CTR, and it's arguably even better. I would have even bought UnKarted or The Fast of Us if Naughty Dog made those, even though I finally gave up on Naughty Dog like a decade ago.

>>16852885

>like sages somehow completely disappearing.

Well they're still there, just not talked about much, aside from Samos, who gets a lot of focus. They could have easily said Vin was a sage, along with some others. Also, The Lost Frontier, though a mediocre spinoff, does deal with sages a tiny bit more.

>>16853048

>Now they're owned by Sony and don't have access to Crash, but clearly wanted to do more Crash

Pretty sure they willingly dropped Crash. They tend to want to move on from things like that. And, in either case, current naughty dog is not by far like the original.

>CTR being popular with the remake, you'd think Sony would do something with Jak X. That's the real sequel to CTR

They'd need the same treatment Crash 1-3 got with N. Sane Trilogy but applied to Jak 1 to 3. I doubt that would ever happen. Jak X is a sequel to CTR only in gameplay, of course.

>>16853056

>Pretty sure they willingly dropped Crash. They tend to want to move on from things like that. And, in either case, current naughty dog is not by far like the original.

Crash was always owned by Universal, so when Naughty Dog was bought by Sony, they didn't have access to Crash anymore. They could claim they didn't want Crash anymore anyway, but the fact that the first game they made for Sony was basically a reskinned Crash game seems to imply otherwise.

>>16852807

Not really, it was like a chink ripoff of ratchet and clank combined with a chink ripoff of gta.