Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy

2025-11-19
We love a mid-tier platformer in this house. A double jump with a weirdly clunky timing window? Check! A mute protagonist paired with an unidentifiable rodent-like creature who won't shut the fuck up? Check! Checkpoints that vacillate wildly from "so frequent you'll never notice them" to "Jesus Christ I have to go back HERE?!". Cheee-eck! Yes, that's right, kids, Jax and Dakter has it all.

It's especially enjoyable coming back to Naughty Dog's games before they got a PhD in shooting people and dogs in the face because you see so clearly that the one thing they've consistently been good at is making games that look a generation ahead of their contemporaries. The fact that they put this gorgeous interconnected world of levels together with no load screens is still a technical marvel twenty years later. But then my eyes focus again and I remember Naughty Dog also lowkey didn't know how to make a terribly fun video game till uh Uncharted 2. Despite however much I might have tricked myself as a child in a PlayStation-bound household that I loved Crash Bandicoot, while truthfully longing lustfully for Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie. (Ok, ok Crash Warped slapped.)

I will say I do appreciate the incredibly 2001 vibe of the whole thing. The cheesy humor (see "annoying rodent"), the "hot girl" love interest that Jak keeps leering at from behind. It's very Of Its Time and I'm here for it. Consider it a trip down memory lane. Just not a very fun one for yours truly.

2025-05-13
Jak & Daxter is a subpar platformer. Where Mario has precise controls and charm Jak & Daxter has...uh jeese it has a double jump! That, well, actually doesn't really work that well because it has a weird timing window on the actual second jump. So not that.. Oh wait I know it has a uh--a uh rat...? A rat gopher thing! Yeah Daxter... or Jak...one of those. Who's really annoying... Hmmm oh! It has levels spread across a seemingly-seamless open world with no load screens. Yes! Ah dammit another Naughty Dog game where the most impressive part is the technical feats instead of the actual gameplay.

And that's why coming back with 0 nostalgia I found Jak & Daxter incredibly underwhelming. Sure it's gorgeous--no really how did they make a PS2 game look so good--it's got fun enough levels and the little mini-games interspersed throughout are fun diversions. But the actual core platforming is fiddly (see "double jump with shitty timing window") and the checkpoints vacillate wildly from "so frequent you'll never notice them" to "Jesus Christ I have to go back HERE?!". I will say I do appreciate the incredibly 2001 vibe of the whole thing. The cheesy humor (see "annoying rat"), the "hot girl" love interest that Jak keeps leering at from behind. It's very Of Its Time and I'm here for it. Consider it a trip down memory lane. Just not very fun one.

???
I never played this when it came out-- I only ever played Jak 2-- so I have no real nostalgia for this game. As a result I wasn't the biggest fan of it's second-rate 3D platforming. Especially after playing the likes of Mario 64 which, while incredibly frustrating in parts, had really tight controls. Things like the fact that you can only double jump in a very specific window feels incredibly clunky and led me to failing one boss fight in particular many, many times. Level design is fine and pretty fun. But again, playing a platformer from 2001 in 2022 is terrible. Too few checkpoints plus clunky controls means you're redoing the same annoying parts over and over and getting increasingly frustrated.

Things I did like were the amazing seamless environments and transitions between those environments. There's one part where you're in a big lava zone and ride a little cart up to the a frozen mountain zone and it's done without any load screens. Pretty amazing stuff they were doing with the PS2 in this era. I think this lines up with the fact that Naughty Dog have been known for pushing Sony's systems to their limits.

I also kind of enjoyed the dated 2001 videogame vibe of the whole thing. The cheesy humor. The "hot girl" love interest of the main character with a ridiculous figure and scenes of Jak leering at her from behind. It's very Of Its Time.

I actually also enjoyed the variety of games. The little fishing minigame, the shooting rats minigame, the little cart you race around sometimes. Again, these become incredibly frustrating because you often have to make almost no mistakes for an extended period of time and have no checkpoints BUT they are fun nonetheless.

So yeah would I recommend anyone playing it in 2022? Without nostalgia? Absolutely not. With nostalgia...I dunno man that's on you. It's an ok platformer.