Do you remember Jinx? He was one of the guys we escorted back in Jak 2 down to the sewers so that Krew could get the Ruby Key he needed to sell the city out to the Metal Heads.

Apparently, he’s with the Freedom League now, and he’s changed his hair color to boot. And this time, his assignment won’t put the entire city in jeopardy.

No better way to start a stream than endlessly failing a very fast and simple escort mission several times at the very end of it. Funny as it is, it’s also a reminder of just how different game design is today in comparison to what it used to be back in the early-to-mid 2000s. These days, escort missions have fallen out of vogue, and we rarely see them anymore.

That said, I have to appreciate how much variety we’ve found in the missions here today. Though all of them still use the fundamental gameplay systems of Jak 3, each one of them presented those systems in a different context that made them feel fundamentally different, even if we were effectively taking the same core actions.

It can be hard to pull something like that off, so give credit where credit is due.

It really is a miracle that the Freedom League lasted so long without us. They sure piled on a list of tasks that they needed us to get done.

And we’re still tackling it.

Not much to say for now, since we’re not really pushing the story along all that much. Next time though, we’ll have more to say.

We’re one boss fight away from returning to Haven City and rejoining the fight against the Krimzon Guard and the Metal Heads for control.

So I’m sure they have a few miscellaneous gameplay segments for us to do.

No wonder they needed Jak so badly. Without him and Daxter here, seems like none of the members of the Freedom League are capable of accomplishing much, aside from Tess who’s taken the time to learn how to build new guns.

On one hand, designers want to make sure Jak and Daxter have a lot to do since they’re the main characters and the ones we play as. However, it would be nice to get a sense of how the rest of the cast can manage on the days when Jak is otherwise occupied.

It seems that without him, they’re in dire straights.

Despite all of our protests to the contrary, we’re actually heading straight back into Haven City to hook up with the old crew and see how we can bail them out of trouble.

Veger is a strange character because he occupies a very tenuous position in the world and story. It’s hard to nail down exactly how much influence he has in Haven City and his political power as a result. And as the story goes on, that only gets worse.

Additionally, he’s fighting for screen time with other villains that we’re fighting more directly in our adventures. Lacks the charisma necessary to steal the spotlight when he’s on camera, he floats into the background. We hear about what he’s done, but rarely do we ever see it as it’s happening.

He’s not even fun to hate, just leaving us mildly discontent whenever he makes his presence known.

Turns out that Sig wasn’t exactly what he said he was, but that’s nothing new for the world of Jak and Daxter. Nor is a badly mishandled attempt to be brooding and edgy.

But here we are.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Jak to have hard feelings about being banished from a city he saved. Nor do I think it’s a problem for him to be reluctant to return. And going further, I think it’s fair for him to be reluctant to step up again after his last attempt at heroism ended near death after being dumped in the desert.

I do think it’s a problem that Ashlin is the one who bears the brunt of his anger when she’s the one who gave him a fighting chance in the first place with the beacon. It comes off as little more than lashing out like a teenage brat who didn’t get his way. There should be more nuance to this interaction than we’re seeing in the scene, but it doesn’t quite capture that nuance.

The other thing that bothers me about it is that we have this big fight over not wanting to return to Haven City, but our immediate next objective is to sneak back in any way. There’s nothing depicting how, when, or why Jak changes his mind here. He just does. I never noticed it as a child playing Jak 3, but replaying and rewatching the footage again here brought it into sharp relief.

This section feels incomplete, and I’m only just not noticing it.

Now that we’ve balanced the darkness with hallowed light, Jak is finally out of the bad place he’s been in for the past few years.

But he’s still a wastelander now, who needs to work for his fellows in the city of Spargus.

They start the foreshadowing with Damas way sooner than I remember. He’s almost immediately starting to show his paternal instinct towards Jak, even before we’ve built up much of a rapport with the man.

Hopefully, that doesn’t lead to any tragically timed last-minute reveals.

We’re only an hour in and we’ve already got one of my favorite guns and one of my favorite cars in the game. Things are already looking up.

Shame about that whole banishment thing.

It always feels weird to get a power like invisibility in a video game like this, because more often than not it’s used purely to give us “permission” to reach an area or perform a puzzle. We rarely get to use it outside of very specific contexts. In this case, we need to use specific Dark Idols in order to activate the power.

I understand why they impose such limits on us, but it’s a shame we can’t make use of it in a combat situation. It would be fun to use invisibility to make enemies stop chasing us, or to sneak up on them, but that’s tough to program for, especially in the PS2 era with limited RAM. It’s partly why once we go up a generation or two, we see devs making more inventive use of invisibility and similar mechanics.

We’ve been introduced to a great many systems and mechanics all at once, and the game is not likely to hold up anytime soon.

Get ready to put the peddle to the metal.

I know I also said this with Jak 2, but I forgot how quickly Jak 3 gets us up and moving from objective to objective. These tutorials are utilitarian, with only the absolute minimum required to ease someone who might be new to the genre in.

It almost feels like Naughty Dog is assuming that we’ve played Jak 2 before Jak 3, when during this generation it was a well-known fact that most franchises sold more as the series went on, just by virtue of being an established brand name. It also helped that most sequels served as stand-alone entries, requiring no knowledge of the previous games in said series. This was not the era of the grand Mass Effect-style trilogy where every choice from previous games would have an effect on the new one.

Then again, platformers were common in this era. It’s not unreasonable to assume the average player knew the basics. And if they did, a short tutorial means that they aren’t wasting a ton of time on a New Player Experience they have no need for.

I wonder how a new player would feel. For me, this is great, but I can’t help but think someone new to gaming might be overwhelmed.

Alright. It’s time for us to start on the next (and final?) game in the Jak and Daxter platforming trilogy, Jak 3. As it turns out, we didn’t save the day the way we thought we did at the end of the second game.

Which means we have work to do… or we would if we weren’t banished to the Wasteland.

As much as I clown on this intro, the truth is that in many ways Jak 3 is paying for the loose approach that the previous game took to worldbuilding. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing necessarily. After all, those details weren’t terribly important to the plot of the previous game, and keeping them open means that whoever is writing the scenario for the next game can fill in what they need for their own story.

The problem is that a lot of what is going on in this 7-minute opening scene relies heavily on details like the government structure of Haven City and its outlying regions, along with what it was like prior to Baron Praxis taking over, and still doesn’t put in the work to even create a rough idea of what that structure is like. If we’re going to play politics, we need to know how the game is being played.

And with regards to the council being “too powerful”… we’ll get to that later. Much later.

Now that we’ve wrapped up our time with Resident Evil 4, let’s talk about it!

Thanks again to David Phillips for joining me on this one.

One of these days, I might go back to play the original Resident Evil 4, but that’ll be a time far from now if it ever comes at all.

The next time we record, it’ll be the final PS2-era Jak and Daxter platforming game. We’ll do what Valve could never do, and count to three.