Summary: 95/100

Introduction

You control a young blond man named Jak, who travels with Daxter, his human friend who has been turned into a ferret. Daxter's role is to ride on Jak's shoulder and offer wisecracks. For only the thinnest of excuses, your job is to travel through a dozen different 3D environments, each wonderfully imagined and exuberantly produced, collecting a variety of tokens. You achieve this by running around, attacking bad guys, and executing skillful maneuvers with your controller. The game is a sport, like tennis, rather than a story with a plot. You do meet up with a variety of other characters, but they exist only to to assign you tasks. There are two big bad guys to beat along the way, and one super bad guy at the end to defeat.

The Review

This game is firmly in the "platformer" genre. The category name comes from the earliest console video games, where players spent a lot of time jumping across moving platforms. Such games are epitomized by a few common traits: skill rather than story, third-person control of the lead character, a limited number of moves, a quest to collect some large number of arbitrary objects that just happen to be lying around, some hazards to be avoided, and bad guys to whomp along the way.

To my mind, the standard-bearer for all modern platformers is Nintendo's Mario World 64 (released for the Nintendo 64 console, the predecessor of the Gamecube). Jak and Daxter clearly follows on this tradition, but is a much richer expression of the genre: the environments are far more realized and interesting to explore, the graphics, sound, and motion are all significantly more complex and detailed, and the gameplay mechanics have been smoothed and polished to a shine.

The game itself has no real context. Alfred Hitchcock sometimes referred to something he called the "McGuffin": a catch-all term for whatever object everyone in the movie wants, often without explanation. The Maltese Falcon was a McGuffin, as was the Ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In Jak and Daxter there are two types of McGuffins, called Scout Flies and Power Cells. Basically the point of the game is to collect all of them from all the places you visit - why you're doing this doesn't really ever come up.

The game looks wonderful. There are a dozen completely different environments to explore, and while they start simple, they progress in complexity and richness. I often found myself stopping and just panning the camera around while standing on a hilltop or other high point: there's so much to see and it's fun to look at, not just because it's skillfully executed, but because its actually attractive architecture and design. The music is better than average, and the sound design is good but unobtrusive. The visuals are interesting with detailed and varied textures, the controller is lively in its handling, motion is very good, and the framerate is almost always smooth. The characters that occasionally talk to you are well written and performed, and their design and animation is simple but evocative. In particular, a recurring character named Leia is a standout in both vocal and animated performance.

Once you arrive in an environment, you can gather the Power Cells there in any order, which makes the game more interesting than if you were basically just going in a fixed sequence. I almost always knew where to go or what to do to collect the next cell I wanted, particularly with the built-in hints that Daxter provides along the way. Only twice did I find myself wandering around trying to figure out what to do next, and both times I found the way forward by discovering an entrance to a piece of the environment I'd overlooked before. There are almost no "hidden" or secret elements in the game, though you do have to go off the beaten path to find everything that an environment has to offer.

The difficulty level of platformer games varies a lot, depending on how precisely the designers demand you execute a move. For example, when you jump from one moving platform to another, some games make both platforms very small, move them very fast, and require you to land exactly on the other platform with both feet. It might take dozens of attempts to pull this off, and then if you fall off a later platform, you usually have to start again at the beginning and repeat all the difficult moves along the way. Easier games would reduce this challenge with larger platforms moving at slower speeds, and if you're close to the landing spot they will pull you in automatically.

The former, harder kind of games drive me nuts, and I often quit them entirely after a few repeated failed attempts to master some split-second button and joystick mechanics. On the other hand, overly-simplified games can be too easy to be fun. Until designers learn how to adapt a game to a player's desired difficulty level on the fly, they have to pick a place on this difficulty continuum. In Jak and Daxter, the designers picked a level that was just about perfect for me, and they stuck to it. Most of the time I could execute the moves I wanted, so the fun was figuring out what to do, rather than acquiring precise skills for doing it.

Note added later: According to the game designers, Jak and Daxter adapts the difficulty of its twitch events to accomodate the player. That's why it felt so perfect for me: tasks that were too difficult got subtly easier until I could achieve them, and tasks that were too easy got subtle harder through the game until they offered just enough challenge. This adaptation is invisible, but works beautifully.

Summary

Evaluating this game on any criteria other than those of the very limited platformer genre isn't fair - it's not trying to be anything else, and is clearly directed to that audience. I wouldn't have put myself in that group, but I found that this game was so rewarding, so visually attractive, so well-designed and executed, and just so darn enjoyable, that I just didn't want to stop playing, and I was left wanting more by the time I had finished. The visual and acoustic production values are excellent, the difficulty level is right where it should be, and the gameplay mechanics have been polished to a shine. .