We’ve finally secured a way into the Baron’s Palace. But before we take advantage of it, we have one more task to complete from our new acquaintance, the soothsayer Onin.

Another pain point that will likely grow worse over the course of the game is the checkpointing system or lack of one. Thankfully, missions don’t take very long to complete on average, so this hasn’t turned into a massive issue. However, it can be annoying and demoralizing when one gets close to the end of a mission, dies, and has to restart back at the very beginning of it. Even worse, they’ve lost the ammo from their first attempt, so they’re in a worse-off position than they were before they started.

It’s not a huge issue, but it is a bit of added pressure that only starts to gnaw at us more the further we get through the game.

We’ve got a lead on a way to infiltrate the Baron’s palace, but it’s not going to be easy. Hopefully, one of our friends has the solution we need.

It wasn’t really until this particular recording block that I started to feel the monotony of the various open-world/vehicle missions inside the city. All of them are generally just minor collection missions that have the added pressure of guards swarming us to do minimal damage. Unless we’re mandated to use one of the Zoomer-type vehicles, almost any car in the game is durable enough that the damage guards do to it won’t add up fast enough to matter.

This game has a ton of strengths, but the vehicle missions lifted off GTA are not one of them.

Our list of contacts is growing by the minute. Looks like everyone in Haven City is going to know about us by the time we’re through.

We’re only a few hours into the game, which should take about 16 hours if How Long to Beat is to be believed, but we’ve basically met almost every major character in the game, give or take a few that won’t make their presence known until later.

It seems like nothing much has happened yet, but in fairness, this first act is still basically setting up the cast and the initial layout/scope of Haven City. We need to learn what life is like here before we can start challenging that status quo, or upping the stakes as we will in later acts.

There’s care that went into the sequencing of this game, and I’d like to take a moment to appreciate it.

We’ve made contact with another of the seedier elements of society. Fortunately for us, he’s seen fit to give us a few gigs and a few guns.

Could be useful in this city.

You had best get used to seeing that spin move with the Blaster Mod because it’s easily one of the most reliable ways to output damage in the entire game. There’s some degree of auto-aim on it, and it pumps out far more bullets than shooting the weapon normally world, meaning it can make short work of most small enemies.

Having said that, I honestly forgot how quickly they give you the jet board to experiment and play around with. We won’t get it for keeps until much later, but I assumed this little taste was closer to the mid-point than the early game.

We’ve gotten our bearing in Haven City, met some of the big players in the battle over its future, and started working with some of them to make big moves.

Let’s keep up the pace!

Something that only occurred to me when I was writing this, is that there’s an interesting side effect of having all of these important story bits crammed into such compact cutscenes. When I first played Jak II, I recall not knowing what was going on for most of the game, having much of the text and subtext fly right over my head. Part of that was because I was roughly ten years old when this game came out, but the other part was that if you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to lose important information that will become relevant later on.

Sure, I had a general idea of the key details, but if you asked me then when the Baron’s motivations were or what the political landscape of Haven City was, I wouldn’t know how to answer those questions.

I know them now because I’ve played Jak II countless times, but back then was an entirely different story.

Since we’re going through all the trouble of replaying the original Uncharted trilogy on stream, it only seems right to go further back and play some of their earlier experimentation with stories and games coming together with Jak II.

If you’re curious about what happened between the development cycles of The Precursor Legacy and Jak II, to explain the shift in tone and gameplay that the series went through, the answer is GTA 3, which more or less pioneered and popularized the urban open world that Rockstar’s signature series is known for the world over.

Whether this was chasing the trends or simply following the dev team’s energy is impossible to say. Whatever the case was, it’s a truism of that era in game development that sequels sell, almost regardless of whether the original game sold well. If I had to guess, I would assume that’s why this is a Jak and Daxter game rather than a new IP.

I posited a what-if, at the end of my run with The Precursor Legacy, where instead of this they kept the tone and feel of the original game. Part of me is still interested in the hypothetical, but honestly, if this is what they were interested in making, and I have no reason to suspect it isn’t, we’re better off with Jak II than with a company that feels locked into a style that they don’t have interest in.

We continue to talk about the troubles with Naughty Dog as they sell themselves in the bonus features of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

And next week, we use the Way Back Machine to play Jak 2: Renegade!

We’ve saved the day by preventing a supernatural bio-weapon from leaving an Uncharted island. Chris Redfield would be proud.

And with all that pesky business out of the way, we have the chance to view some of the extra content available to us. Let’s do that while reflecting on it in the context of what we know about Naughty Dog in modern times.

It’s strange to watch these little promotional videos disguised as behind-the-scenes features about Naughty Dog in 2023, knowing all we know about their crunch culture.

The features themselves are all surface level, but thankfully I’m learned enough about the industry to fill in the gaps that were left by the lack of detail in these shorts.

That takes care of the hard missions in this chapter of my campaign. Now, let’s take it easy for a spell.

And definitely not panic. Nope. Definitely not doing that.

I was genuinely surprised that I managed to get away with a double murder in front of all the guards and kitchen staff. Feels like I cheated but in a good way.

The campaign continues!

This treasure we’ve all been searching for turns out to be a biological weapon that turns people into ravenous mutant zombies.

Yeah… We should probably stop the evil British dude from taking it off the island.

At least the terrible final boss has the decency not to take too long. Once stream chat had the decency to remind me what its gimmick was, we were wrapped up in the span of a few minutes.

While Drake’s Fortune appeals strongly to my sense of nostalgia, there’s no denying that it’s more a rough proof-of-concept than anything else. That’s not necessarily anyone’s fault. It was a new console generation, with new hardware and a new franchise.

A lot of the criticisms people had about that game, even the one about killing an uncomfortably high number of ethnic minorities, are addressed in the sequel. Rather than dive straight into it, I’ll take a brief detour back to the PS2 era, to Naughty Dog’s earlier work with the Jak and Daxter franchise in Jak 2.

But first, we have extras to look at, next time.