In this episode, I both spoil a big twist in the endgame of Jak 3 in order to explain a thought that just occurred to me: One that made me question much of what we learn in the late game.

To reiterate here what I said in the video, Sig is a spy for Damas, who was working in Haven City in order to find Damas’s lost child. We will later learn that his child is the heir to the throne we protected in the first, who turned out to be a younger Jak.

In other words, Jak is the child that Sig was supposedly looking for, a fact that Sig should know since he was part of the team and would have likely had the story explained to him. And if Sig knows that, and he was working for Damas, Damas should know that. But the end game reveals that Damas never knew that Jak was his son, despite all the foreshadowing to the contrary.

Either Sig is a terrible spy, or he just neglected to tell his boss the thing he was supposed to figure out.

We’re finished all of our chores in Haven City, so let’s return to the wasteland to see what our “fellow” outcasts are doing.

Just don’t let them know we’ve been let back into the city.

Thinking about it now, it’s strange that the topic of Jak’s return and readmission into the city never comes up again as a plot point. Doubly so since that’s what brought us to Spargas in the first place. I don’t think Damas would mind, but it feels like a topic the should come up in conversation.

And as we’ll get to next time, there’s another topic that should have come up at some point, but clearly didn’t. We’ll talk more about it next time.

Remember what they said when we were banished to the wasteland for life? They told us that the council was too powerful. There was nothing they could do.

I want you to keep that in mind as you watch this episode.

Everyone who has done a retrospective on Jak 3 has already pointed out how the council goes from being “too powerful” to something Ashlin can just dissolve suddenly and without warning, but that’s just because it’s one of those things that one starts to notice when replaying the game with fresh eyes.

It’s not that there isn’t a plausible explanation for it that one could concoct. I’m sure there are ways for a political body to lose that much influence so rapidly. The problem is that there’s no build-up. One minute, Vegar has the authority to banish Jak, and the next he’s immediately stripped of all power.

While this ultimately doesn’t matter because our story is largely just an excuse to justify the gameplay scenarios we’re given, Vegar’s machinations are the inciting incident that set the entire plot into motion. He is one of our major antagonists, but in one fell swoop he loses his place as a genuine threat. Considering who the other major antagonist is, that means no one is doing much heavy lifting to keep our interest in the story going.

But he’ll get to him later.

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.