Now that we’ve discovered that Ultimate Supreme Executive Chairman Drek’s scheme personally affects our hero, Ratchet has finally decided to put a stop to it. We have the coordinates, and all that’s left is to travel back to our home planet, Veldin, and end this mess.
Though the game never pretends that Chairman Drek is anything but selfish and short-sighted, there’s still an impact when he doesn’t even bother pretending that he has any motivation aside from the capitalistic need to consume and profit off of whatever material he can take for himself. If he can make a quick buck by destroying everything around him, you better believe that he will.
In a way, he’s not all that different from Ratchet at the start of the game. They both did whatever felt right for them in the moment, regardless of the consequences. There’s a world in which Ratchet could have worked for Drek, since all he really wanted was to get off his home planet and have fun wrecking whatever we wanted.
And that’s why it’s important for Ratchet to start out as such a massive, egotistical jerkwad. When we get to the end of the game, he has learned to get over himself (even if one could argue that’s only because he has a personal stake in it now). Instead of abandoning his new friend, he takes Clank in and gives him a place to call home. The payoff from that final scene, as he walks away back to his garage, is all the stronger because it’s entirely believable that he would just leave Clank and move on with his life.
Rough as it was, this was the foundation for a franchise that still maintains a huge fanbase even to this day. We’ll continue with it in the future, but for now, we’ll pivot to another popular anthropomorphic protagonist. Next time, we start Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racconus.
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