![]() ![]() Haven City, the game’s main hub world, bustles with people and vehicles. The second game introduces a gun with four different types of firearm modules and collectible ammo for each, and a Dark Jak transformation with its own set of combat skills. Jak and Daxter are promptly locked up, and Jak is experimented on with Dark Eco, which radically transforms his personality into something much edgier than we previously knew, and also gives him a voice, which he didn’t have in the first game. What starts out as a hopeful and ambitious experiment ends up separating the two heroes from the Sage and his daughter, and lands them in a strange world – Haven City, one that is far more industrialized than the lush Sandover Village that they are used to. After the villains of the first game are successfully defeated and their home world is saved, Jak and Daxter are invited by the Sage of Green Eco and his daughter to test a device that opens a portal. It’s important to establish and talk about the types of worlds traversed in and the tone of the first game, because as anyone who has played the second game will tell you, Jak II was a marked departure from the first title. Given what Crash Bandicoot had “established” on the Playstation the generation prior, it’s fair to say that the first Jak and Daxter game was a worthy successor while creating its own identity as a franchise. The tone is mostly cartoony and uncomplicated. The design of the game is such that players progress through world hubs which contain a varying number of levels each. ![]() The greater part of the game’s progress involves collecting Precursor Orbs and Power Cells, scattered about throughout the various levels that Jak and Daxter travel through. It was a colorful fantasy adventure, wherein a silent protagonist (barring some noises here and there, but no words) and his wise-cracking otter-weasel sidekick, try to prevent their world from being transformed by dark Eco, an evil version of Eco, a type of energy found throughout their world which governs life on their planet. The first Jak and Daxter game would release a year after the launch of the Playstation 2. Naughty Dog, which worked on the first three Crash Bandicoot games (and would later go on to work on the The Last of Us and the Uncharted series, if you’re familiar with those,) developed the first three games and Jak X. After Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, though both not first party franchises, saw great success debuting on first Playstation, the Playstation 2 saw the introduction of both the Jak and Daxter series, and the Ratchet and Clank series as vibrant, fun, and unique platformers that would diversify the first party output for the Playstation 2. The Jak and Daxter series is primarily a 3D platformer series. “Don’t step into the light, Jak and Daxter! DON’T STEP INTO THE LIGHT!” So since it’s been about a decade, we have to ask, especially with the wildly successful revival of the Crash Bandicoot series – what the hell happened to J ak and Daxter? And then on the PS4, the first three games and JakX received a physical re-printing, alongside the games being made available digitally, but those aren’t new games. There was the Jak and Daxter Collection released for both PS3 and PSVita later. But fast forward to 2019, and we have not seen a new game from the franchise since Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier on the PSP. The Jak and Daxter series was a name that kept the idea of “mascot platformers” alive, despite the marked turn in tone that the games took after the first game. During that generation, the Jak and Daxter series, a Sony franchise the first release of which was on December of 2001, was especially popular. This is especially so up until the sixth console generation, which was marked by Sony again warring with Nintendo after the successful introduction of the first Playstation, the arrival of the Xbox onto the console war scene, and Sega’s last console wars hurrah with the Dreamcast. The 2D Mario games, most of the early Sonic games, and all sorts of franchises including Mega Man, Castlevania, and more, were names that illustrated how platformers were a force to be reckoned with, notably during the 90s and the early 2000s. ![]() For a long time in gaming, platformers were a dominant genre. ![]()
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