Strap in motherfuckers, cause this one goes deep.
I recall the very first game I ever played on my brand new PlayStation 2 on that Christmas morn. I was a small child, just barely starting to form coherent memories. It was Jak and Daxter, and to this day it's one of my favorite, most cherished platformers ever. My siblings rarely agreed on what games we all liked, but we all loved Jak and Daxter. For me, it was one of the first games to truly spark my imagination and has stuck with me roughly 17 years later.
I waited what seemed like an eternity for a sequel, I mean there had to be one for a game like that, right? Then two years later (a borderline lifetime for a kid), I hear about a new Jak game coming out and I instantly became excited.
Only problem was, the game was rated T, and my parents were probably the only people who ever gave a damn about game ratings. So I unfortunately wasn't allowed to play it.
Some more years pass, and my expectations rose unreasonably for Jak II. The original game was one of my favorite games ever, and I wanted to see the story continue. Plus, on the Naughty Dog website they had trailers showing snippets of gameplay and even a few moments of Jak, a previously silent protagonist, talking! As a kid who only saw Jak as a silent protagonist, it blew my mind. I was excited, not just for the new guns and the continuation of the story, but for the possibility of one of the defining video game heroes of my childhood actually speaking. And bear in mind, this was before YouTube so I had no way of knowing what the game was actually going to be like.
Eventually, the exact year escapes me, my parents lifted the ban on T ratings, and all that was left was to get the game I had been wanting for years. Then one Christmas, we actually, finally, received it as a gift.
I popped the sucker in my PlayStation 2, watched the opening sequence of Daxter activating the title and prepared myself.
Hours later, I was shocked. And very, very disappointed.
Jak II had changed from the collect-a-thon, colorful, lighthearted adventure to a dark, depressing, gray open-world. As a kid, the overworld bored the hell out of me. It was nothing but gray. There was color with the zoomers, the Krimson Guards, and the people's clothing, but there was nothing visually interesting. And it was way too big too; it took minutes to get from one corner of the map to the other, and the game made you run back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. You could travel to any given location in a matter of a couple minutes in the original, but it felt like an ordeal in the sequel.
The story was also a lot less likable from the previous game. Jak had become an angry asshole, a far cry from the more laid-back characterization he had in the previous game. He had started talking, yes, but his first words were threatening to kill someone. The story was actually kinda stupid too; I predicted pretty much everything that happened in the game, and some of those predictions were straight-up jokes that ended up actually happening.
The gameplay was also equal parts boring and frustrating. The game got really hard not far in, and some of the missions required Jak to do stuff around the city. That's not fun, I thought. I wanted to go to Snowy Mountain, an underwater Precursor temple, the inside of a fucking volcano, all these imaginative and wonderous places in the original game, not some dank and depressing city. And when you did get to go to some new location, it was always muted and oppressive. It says a lot that my favorite sections back then were the jungle missions, since there was some actual color in the environment, and was more about platforming, which was what I came for.
Simply put, Jak II was not the sequel to Jak and Daxter I was expecting, and it certainly wasn't the one I wanted.
As time went on, I did begin to soften towards Jak II, especially when I became aware of Grand Theft Auto and it's massive influence on gaming as a whole, but it took a really long time for that to happen. Even now, I don't really enjoy playing the game. I can appreciate it for what it is, and the reasons why it changed so much from the original, but it's not something I replay endlessly, not like the original.
