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fandomhigh_ooc2010-05-16 10:17 am
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Spotlight On Fandom: Jak & Daxter
First, as you all know I'm a big fan of visual aids, have a disgustingly catchy fanvid to bring you into my parlour.
Anyway. Let's start at the beginning...
In Ye Olde Times (also known as the Nineties), there was a little gaming studio that could called Naughty Dog. (Well, really, they kicked off in the Year of Len's Birth, 1986, but let's not quibble about details) They got their big break through a 3D action-platformer called Crash Bandicoot after a few bad go 'rounds with other franchises. As it turned out, 3D action-platformers did good, the company was bought by Sony, and they were sicced on the task of making another one under the new imprint.
That was the start of the Jak & Daxter series.
We'll start you off with some character descriptions, run you through the three main storyline games, and touch briefly on all of the surrounding games, woo!
CHARACTERS:
Many colourful characters inhabit the Jak universe, and I'm hardly going to be able to mention all of them. So let's stick to the game-changers that feature across at least two games.
Jak: Number one. The hero of our tale. The star of our story. His storyline is probably best covered in this fanvid, although it focuses mainly on his line of character development in Jak 3 (spoilers!). Starting off as an innocent, if cocky and adrenaline-addicted jungle boy, he was forced to grow up rather quickly when he found himself thrown into the future and tortured with dark eco for two years. His Generic Action Hero silence in the first game is frequently lampshaded in the later games, where he's learned how to speak. Via the magic of torture. As you do.
Basically: boy loves him some racing, boy needs him some adrenaline, boy has him some massive anger issues, but some heroism as well. He's just not the kind of hero who does stuff because it's the right thing to do; the fact that a lot of his actions across the games are motivated by revenge, necessity, or just plain liking the thrills are half the reason I find them interesting. (Going as far as walking away from Ashelin when she begged for his help to save... uh.. everything ever because he felt betrayed and was 'through saving the world', at one point) He also struggles a little with his sanity here and there.
Quoth the Dax: "My boy here goes all mean and nasty if you piss him off... so don't piss him off!" Not your garden variety hero.
Daxter: Jak's BFF. Daxter got turned into an Ottsel - an Otter/Weasel hybrid - because of an accident of Jak's making, and he's never let him forget it. That being said, he's possibly the world's most loyal friend, spending two full years working his butt off just to bust Jak out of prison. No matter what has happened, Dax has always stuck by him - even if Jak never did get around to turning him back to normal.
Dax is a massive flirt and a supreme boozehound. He frequently tries to hit on women by ways of the most ridiculous pick-up lines of all time, and wastes away his hours telling tall tales about his 'great and glorious battles', which usually get bigger and more impressive the more he talks.
He got his own chance to shine in the PSP game Daxter, and spends most of the games playing comic relief and passing sarcastic commentary on everything that goes on.
Keira: Nominally, Jak's love interest. I say 'nominally', because ND doesn't exactly put a lot of effort into its romantic storylines, preferring to lean on the 'we'll put in a kiss at the end and they'll buy it' strategy of romance. She was briefly punted from this position in game 3, where Ashelin got to observe the honours.
Keira's a mechanic, and Samos's daughter. She's highly demanding but also very intelligent in her own way. That doesn't keep her from having a certain level of moral tunnel vision - game 2 sees a rift between her and Jak because she can't get over the changes in him. (Of course, this storyline also only comes to the forward whenever it's convenient for the gameplay. Sigh, ND)
Samos the Sage: The ranty old Green Eco Sage Samos has been with Our Heroes from the start. He's... very cranky. He's also about three feet tall and perpetually wears a log on his head. And under his feet. He likes to rant and rave about destiny and why those young whippersnappers are doing it wrong.
In his youth, he functioned as the Shadow, the secret leader of the underground resistance in Haven. He was sent back with the boy Jak to raise him in the safety of Sandover Village. This... pretty much makes Keira Jak's pseudo-sibling, which is weird.
Torn: The Doctor Cox of our series. Torn is a gruff, angry former Krimzon Guard - Baron Praxis's main police force in the dystopian Haven City - who turned against Baron Praxis over the man's cruelty. Since then, he's been coordinating the resistance's battles. He finds himself relying on Jak more and more to perform his missions, something which he only grudgingly admits.
There's some underlying romance with Ashelin there, too, which magically gets shunted aside in the third game to make room for the Jak/Ashelin romance.
Ashelin: She's my faaaavorite. Ahem. Ashelin is Baron Praxis's daughter, not that you'd know it to look at her. She's firey and dedicated, head of the Krimzon Guard, and finds her morality constantly in conflict with her father's policies. She's always had big dreams for Haven City, and the city's current state saddens her greatly.
Because of that, she's begun to secretly support the resistance, supplying them with under-the-table intel. Ashelin's a born leader, and it's pretty much insinuated that she's the one who truly takes on the job of running the city after Praxis's death. She's good at it. Well, as soon as they get that pesky invasion problem sorted.
She also functions as Jak's love interest in the third game, via the tried and tested ND method of sneaking it in at the last second. That being said, IMHO, YMMV, etc, considering that she exists as a character with a storyline outside of her romance with Jak, and the both of them have a lot of chemistry, I buy them as a ship a hell of a lot more than I do Keira/Jak. /soapbox This doesn't take away the fact that ND kind of sucks at romance plotlines.
Tess: Daxter's love interest, if you'll believe it. Buxom, blonde and ditzy, Tess serves as a waitress at Krew's bar downtown... so she can spy for the underground. It's insinuated that she's a lot smarter than she appears, and as we find out in the third game, she's absolutely amazing with - and fascinated by - guns. She and Daxter pair off in a not-dirty-ew way preeetty quickly, and she takes up the cause of threatening anyone who might as much as think about doing something bad to the ottsel with massive amounts of violence.
It's kind of cute. If scary. Really, really scary.
Pecker: Pecker is a monkaw. That's a monkeybird, for the lesser educated. Pecker has a 'vindictive mother' (a direct quote) who named him as such on purpose. As a result, he grew up to be very, very cranky and ill-tempered. He speaks with a heavy accent, functioning as a translator for the soothsayer Onin, who can't speak. He frequently insults everyone he talks to, and can't go five minutes without getting into a massive fight with Daxter.
Sig: Heavy for the mob boss Krew. He's a Wastelander - a man from the treacherous deserts surrounding Haven - who fulfills the Samuel L. Jackson tough guy stereotype in the game. He's bros with Jak and has his heart in the right place - he despises Krew. In the end, he always has Jak's back, especially in the third game, where he gets to play a slightly bigger role.
MAIN GAMES
The year was 2001, and the new game was called Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, and somewhere a weetiny Len bought her first PS2 with her first PS2 game. It was a fun game, a cheerful game, a simple game.
A fifteen-to-sixteen year old boy named Jak (and his gravity-defying hair) who lived in a beach town bordered by jungle took his best friend Daxter out to Do Something They Shouldn't: go to Misty Island. While on Misty Island, they accidentally ran into the evil Gol and Maia, who were training an army of bad guys called Lurkers to do their bidding for them.
Jak and Daxter fled to a higher-up platform that housed a pool of the evil gunk known as Dark Eco. The Lurkers followed them there. In a bid to keep them from killing him, Jak decided to activate an artifact he'd found. It worked: it blew up in the Lurker's face. Unfortunately, it also blew Jak back, who crashed into Daxter, who crashed into the dark eco and came out looking like a weasel/otter hybrid.
The goal of the game, as such, was fairly easy. There was only one person known to Jak's father-figure Samos who could possibly do something about Daxter's condition, except he lived on the other end of the continent. To get there, Jak needed to get a vehicle operational. To get the vehicle working, he needed Power Cells, artifacts left behind by the fabled Precursors.
Of course, at the end of the road it turned out that the guy Samos knew was in fact Gol, several important Sages had been kidnapped, and Jak had to kill the bad guys in order to save the world from being infected with Gol and Maia's dark eco.
Daxter did not turn back in the process. This did not make him happy.
Naughty Dog would have happily continued on producing games like this, as they had with Crash Bandicoot, had it not been for one history-shocking event happening shortly after The Precursor Legacy came out.
That event was called Grand Theft Auto II.
Suddenly, whimsical, straightforward stories about brightly coloured boys and their weasels were no longer economically viable.
This is how we get Jak 2: Renegade.
They decided to turn the game around rather thoroughly. Jak was catapulted into the future, tortured for two years, stuffed full of dark eco, and thrown back out with a massive amount of anger issues and a sudden penchant for committing crimes in a dystopian city called Haven.
Whether this is a massively brilliant case of character development, character subversion, or a total and utter OOCing of all the characters involved, is up to the viewer.
Anyway, the style of the game changed to GTA-style free roaming, with Jak taking various missions from both the evil crime baron Krew and the resistance leader Torn. See, the city was under the control of Baron Praxis, the same guy who tortured Jak, and he didn't do such a bang-up job. He was using the constant threat of evil creatures called Metal Heads to keep an iron grip on the city, while at the same time taking utterly ruthless action, like leaving entire neighbourhoods to die and simply sealing the walls behind him.
And that's excluding the fact he'd been feeding the Metal Heads dark eco for years so they'd help keep him in power.
Jak spent most of the game discovering bits and pieces of the city's past, and of the whereabouts of Samos and Keira, who had also been thrown into the future with him. In the end, Praxis was defeated, albeit not by Jak; Jak took out the Metal Head Leader, who had been keeping the city under siege for years; we found out that Jak was, in fact, from Haven, the heir to the city who was sent to the past to keep him safe; and Jak lost a good chunk of his anger issues and decided that Haven City was Worth Saving After All.
Oh, and we also found out that Sig's mom used to tuck him in with a bottle of milk and a teddy bear. There goes your image, tough guy.
The games had now been set up as a Trilogy, which meant there had to be a part three. Part three started with an exploration of what happens when you tell a city that's been under siege by dark eco-fueled creatures for yoinks that their great saviour and new leader is, in fact, a dark-eco fueled creature, and oh look: someone blew up the fortress in the middle of the city.
Whoever shall we blame?
Jak found his ass thrown out into the desert by people he'd considered his friends quicker than you can say 'scapegoat'. For some reason, this brought back some of those anger issues, albeit in a more sedate, grown-up fashion. Combine this with an evil ball of light slowly approaching the planet, the still-present Metal Head threat, and the fact that Haven was now the scene of a civil war between Praxis-loyalists and adherents of Ashelin's new government, and you can smell the trouble.
Jak 3 is probably my favorite: it's full of intrigue and betrayal, the true wizard behind the curtain (who has engineered a good chunk of Jak's life) becomes apparent, the story of Jak's background is finally fully revealed, and we find out Daxter is a god.
No, really.
If anything, Jak probably finds his true home in that desert; he quickly finds respect among the denizens of the desert city of Spargus, which is well-needed in a time where everyone seems to be out to hate on him for his abilities. At the same time, he finds his evil side balanced out by a pure, light eco side, finally putting to rest his occasional forages into insanity.
And, well. How much more can I say about Jak 3 without spoiling it completely? I can't. Go play it. It's a rockin' game, and it doesn't suffer from the massive difficulty spikes that Jak 2 had. The only frustrating thing is the racing missions, where the physics can occasionally really shake you.
It's a good game. Have a trailer.
OTHER GAMES
Outside of the Trilogy, Naughty Dog has produced several games in the Jak universe. My personal favourite is Daxter, the midquel (!) that covers Daxter's life in the two years between his arrival in the future and his rescue of Jak. (Trailer) It's a fun little handheld game that offers both awesome platforming (and god only knows I'm a massive platformer fan) and some fun insights on Daxter's character. He's a noble little skunk, even if he denies it.
Then there's Jak X (Trailer), the obligatory racing game. I would say 'the less said of it, the better', but it's kind of nifty, now that I've played it. The storyline is fairly simple, though: Jak and his friends are invited to the reading of Krew's will, and Krew uses the opportunity to poison them. From the afterlife. The only way they can get the antidote is if they win a big racing championship. There's some murder and betrayal and oneliners about knowing you're dead and taking the bad guys with you to the afterlife, but, hell. This is a Jak game. That's kind of par for the course.
Finally, there's the latest and the one I know the least about, Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier. It's a PS2 and PSP game, reportedly features massive OOC on the parts of our lead characters, and from what I can tell, fugly model design. But that's all I know. I haven't gotten myself to buy it so far, because the trilogy is so awesome and I don't want my memories tarnished if it sucks as much as they say.
WHY AND HOW SHOULD I GET THESE GAMES?
The trilogy rocks the socks and has an awesome storyline - if you're willing to ignore the massive plotholes in regards to the romantic plotlines. Which shouldn't be too hard, because they really don't come up that often.
They've got very varied gameplay, especially in the latter two halves, although in my opinion they're the best when they're straight-on platforming. Listen, you don't get a lot of good 3D platformers these days - take them where you can. I'm an old-school platform fan who picked up the first game on a whim years ago and never regretted it. Sometimes, it will make you yank your hair out in frustration, but trust me: that's part of the fun.
The games walk just the right tightrope between high, dark drama and Disney: you'll never hear anyone cursing loudly while having it off with someone, but story elements can be satisfyingly complicated and morally grey in their own way. I've honestly rarely been as excited by a plot twist as I have been by the start of Jak 2 (the only other plot twists I've found that interesting were found in StarCraft and Legacy of Kain, if those names mean anything to you) and it was handled in a fascinating way. Well. IMHO. YMMV, etcetera.
The games are all set either on the Playstation 2 or the PSP. The PS2 might be old, but it's still popular, so most game stores will probably still carry a copy of at least one of the games. And they're all available on Amazon. So. Yes. Go forth, and play!
Is gaming not your thing, but you want to see how this story plays out? The cutscenes for almost all of the games have been uploaded to YouTube. I shall point you to the main trilogy:
Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy
Jak 2: Renegade
Jak 3.
Or if all of that looks too daunting, be a lazypants and watch The Jak Trilogy In Sixty Seconds, By Daxter. (There's also a 'movie' that was produced by ND that covers all of the cutscenes vital to the immediate story, but I don't think there's a full version of that to be found online)
Questions, comments etc?
Anyway. Let's start at the beginning...
In Ye Olde Times (also known as the Nineties), there was a little gaming studio that could called Naughty Dog. (Well, really, they kicked off in the Year of Len's Birth, 1986, but let's not quibble about details) They got their big break through a 3D action-platformer called Crash Bandicoot after a few bad go 'rounds with other franchises. As it turned out, 3D action-platformers did good, the company was bought by Sony, and they were sicced on the task of making another one under the new imprint.
That was the start of the Jak & Daxter series.
We'll start you off with some character descriptions, run you through the three main storyline games, and touch briefly on all of the surrounding games, woo!
CHARACTERS:
Many colourful characters inhabit the Jak universe, and I'm hardly going to be able to mention all of them. So let's stick to the game-changers that feature across at least two games.
Jak: Number one. The hero of our tale. The star of our story. His storyline is probably best covered in this fanvid, although it focuses mainly on his line of character development in Jak 3 (spoilers!). Starting off as an innocent, if cocky and adrenaline-addicted jungle boy, he was forced to grow up rather quickly when he found himself thrown into the future and tortured with dark eco for two years. His Generic Action Hero silence in the first game is frequently lampshaded in the later games, where he's learned how to speak. Via the magic of torture. As you do.
Basically: boy loves him some racing, boy needs him some adrenaline, boy has him some massive anger issues, but some heroism as well. He's just not the kind of hero who does stuff because it's the right thing to do; the fact that a lot of his actions across the games are motivated by revenge, necessity, or just plain liking the thrills are half the reason I find them interesting. (Going as far as walking away from Ashelin when she begged for his help to save... uh.. everything ever because he felt betrayed and was 'through saving the world', at one point) He also struggles a little with his sanity here and there.
Quoth the Dax: "My boy here goes all mean and nasty if you piss him off... so don't piss him off!" Not your garden variety hero.
Daxter: Jak's BFF. Daxter got turned into an Ottsel - an Otter/Weasel hybrid - because of an accident of Jak's making, and he's never let him forget it. That being said, he's possibly the world's most loyal friend, spending two full years working his butt off just to bust Jak out of prison. No matter what has happened, Dax has always stuck by him - even if Jak never did get around to turning him back to normal.
Dax is a massive flirt and a supreme boozehound. He frequently tries to hit on women by ways of the most ridiculous pick-up lines of all time, and wastes away his hours telling tall tales about his 'great and glorious battles', which usually get bigger and more impressive the more he talks.
He got his own chance to shine in the PSP game Daxter, and spends most of the games playing comic relief and passing sarcastic commentary on everything that goes on.
Keira: Nominally, Jak's love interest. I say 'nominally', because ND doesn't exactly put a lot of effort into its romantic storylines, preferring to lean on the 'we'll put in a kiss at the end and they'll buy it' strategy of romance. She was briefly punted from this position in game 3, where Ashelin got to observe the honours.
Keira's a mechanic, and Samos's daughter. She's highly demanding but also very intelligent in her own way. That doesn't keep her from having a certain level of moral tunnel vision - game 2 sees a rift between her and Jak because she can't get over the changes in him. (Of course, this storyline also only comes to the forward whenever it's convenient for the gameplay. Sigh, ND)
Samos the Sage: The ranty old Green Eco Sage Samos has been with Our Heroes from the start. He's... very cranky. He's also about three feet tall and perpetually wears a log on his head. And under his feet. He likes to rant and rave about destiny and why those young whippersnappers are doing it wrong.
In his youth, he functioned as the Shadow, the secret leader of the underground resistance in Haven. He was sent back with the boy Jak to raise him in the safety of Sandover Village. This... pretty much makes Keira Jak's pseudo-sibling, which is weird.
Torn: The Doctor Cox of our series. Torn is a gruff, angry former Krimzon Guard - Baron Praxis's main police force in the dystopian Haven City - who turned against Baron Praxis over the man's cruelty. Since then, he's been coordinating the resistance's battles. He finds himself relying on Jak more and more to perform his missions, something which he only grudgingly admits.
There's some underlying romance with Ashelin there, too, which magically gets shunted aside in the third game to make room for the Jak/Ashelin romance.
Ashelin: She's my faaaavorite. Ahem. Ashelin is Baron Praxis's daughter, not that you'd know it to look at her. She's firey and dedicated, head of the Krimzon Guard, and finds her morality constantly in conflict with her father's policies. She's always had big dreams for Haven City, and the city's current state saddens her greatly.
Because of that, she's begun to secretly support the resistance, supplying them with under-the-table intel. Ashelin's a born leader, and it's pretty much insinuated that she's the one who truly takes on the job of running the city after Praxis's death. She's good at it. Well, as soon as they get that pesky invasion problem sorted.
She also functions as Jak's love interest in the third game, via the tried and tested ND method of sneaking it in at the last second. That being said, IMHO, YMMV, etc, considering that she exists as a character with a storyline outside of her romance with Jak, and the both of them have a lot of chemistry, I buy them as a ship a hell of a lot more than I do Keira/Jak. /soapbox This doesn't take away the fact that ND kind of sucks at romance plotlines.
Tess: Daxter's love interest, if you'll believe it. Buxom, blonde and ditzy, Tess serves as a waitress at Krew's bar downtown... so she can spy for the underground. It's insinuated that she's a lot smarter than she appears, and as we find out in the third game, she's absolutely amazing with - and fascinated by - guns. She and Daxter pair off in a not-dirty-ew way preeetty quickly, and she takes up the cause of threatening anyone who might as much as think about doing something bad to the ottsel with massive amounts of violence.
It's kind of cute. If scary. Really, really scary.
Pecker: Pecker is a monkaw. That's a monkeybird, for the lesser educated. Pecker has a 'vindictive mother' (a direct quote) who named him as such on purpose. As a result, he grew up to be very, very cranky and ill-tempered. He speaks with a heavy accent, functioning as a translator for the soothsayer Onin, who can't speak. He frequently insults everyone he talks to, and can't go five minutes without getting into a massive fight with Daxter.
Sig: Heavy for the mob boss Krew. He's a Wastelander - a man from the treacherous deserts surrounding Haven - who fulfills the Samuel L. Jackson tough guy stereotype in the game. He's bros with Jak and has his heart in the right place - he despises Krew. In the end, he always has Jak's back, especially in the third game, where he gets to play a slightly bigger role.
MAIN GAMES
The year was 2001, and the new game was called Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, and somewhere a weetiny Len bought her first PS2 with her first PS2 game. It was a fun game, a cheerful game, a simple game.
A fifteen-to-sixteen year old boy named Jak (and his gravity-defying hair) who lived in a beach town bordered by jungle took his best friend Daxter out to Do Something They Shouldn't: go to Misty Island. While on Misty Island, they accidentally ran into the evil Gol and Maia, who were training an army of bad guys called Lurkers to do their bidding for them.
Jak and Daxter fled to a higher-up platform that housed a pool of the evil gunk known as Dark Eco. The Lurkers followed them there. In a bid to keep them from killing him, Jak decided to activate an artifact he'd found. It worked: it blew up in the Lurker's face. Unfortunately, it also blew Jak back, who crashed into Daxter, who crashed into the dark eco and came out looking like a weasel/otter hybrid.
The goal of the game, as such, was fairly easy. There was only one person known to Jak's father-figure Samos who could possibly do something about Daxter's condition, except he lived on the other end of the continent. To get there, Jak needed to get a vehicle operational. To get the vehicle working, he needed Power Cells, artifacts left behind by the fabled Precursors.
Of course, at the end of the road it turned out that the guy Samos knew was in fact Gol, several important Sages had been kidnapped, and Jak had to kill the bad guys in order to save the world from being infected with Gol and Maia's dark eco.
Daxter did not turn back in the process. This did not make him happy.
Naughty Dog would have happily continued on producing games like this, as they had with Crash Bandicoot, had it not been for one history-shocking event happening shortly after The Precursor Legacy came out.
That event was called Grand Theft Auto II.
Suddenly, whimsical, straightforward stories about brightly coloured boys and their weasels were no longer economically viable.
This is how we get Jak 2: Renegade.
They decided to turn the game around rather thoroughly. Jak was catapulted into the future, tortured for two years, stuffed full of dark eco, and thrown back out with a massive amount of anger issues and a sudden penchant for committing crimes in a dystopian city called Haven.
Whether this is a massively brilliant case of character development, character subversion, or a total and utter OOCing of all the characters involved, is up to the viewer.
Anyway, the style of the game changed to GTA-style free roaming, with Jak taking various missions from both the evil crime baron Krew and the resistance leader Torn. See, the city was under the control of Baron Praxis, the same guy who tortured Jak, and he didn't do such a bang-up job. He was using the constant threat of evil creatures called Metal Heads to keep an iron grip on the city, while at the same time taking utterly ruthless action, like leaving entire neighbourhoods to die and simply sealing the walls behind him.
And that's excluding the fact he'd been feeding the Metal Heads dark eco for years so they'd help keep him in power.
Jak spent most of the game discovering bits and pieces of the city's past, and of the whereabouts of Samos and Keira, who had also been thrown into the future with him. In the end, Praxis was defeated, albeit not by Jak; Jak took out the Metal Head Leader, who had been keeping the city under siege for years; we found out that Jak was, in fact, from Haven, the heir to the city who was sent to the past to keep him safe; and Jak lost a good chunk of his anger issues and decided that Haven City was Worth Saving After All.
Oh, and we also found out that Sig's mom used to tuck him in with a bottle of milk and a teddy bear. There goes your image, tough guy.
The games had now been set up as a Trilogy, which meant there had to be a part three. Part three started with an exploration of what happens when you tell a city that's been under siege by dark eco-fueled creatures for yoinks that their great saviour and new leader is, in fact, a dark-eco fueled creature, and oh look: someone blew up the fortress in the middle of the city.
Whoever shall we blame?
Jak found his ass thrown out into the desert by people he'd considered his friends quicker than you can say 'scapegoat'. For some reason, this brought back some of those anger issues, albeit in a more sedate, grown-up fashion. Combine this with an evil ball of light slowly approaching the planet, the still-present Metal Head threat, and the fact that Haven was now the scene of a civil war between Praxis-loyalists and adherents of Ashelin's new government, and you can smell the trouble.
Jak 3 is probably my favorite: it's full of intrigue and betrayal, the true wizard behind the curtain (who has engineered a good chunk of Jak's life) becomes apparent, the story of Jak's background is finally fully revealed, and we find out Daxter is a god.
No, really.
If anything, Jak probably finds his true home in that desert; he quickly finds respect among the denizens of the desert city of Spargus, which is well-needed in a time where everyone seems to be out to hate on him for his abilities. At the same time, he finds his evil side balanced out by a pure, light eco side, finally putting to rest his occasional forages into insanity.
And, well. How much more can I say about Jak 3 without spoiling it completely? I can't. Go play it. It's a rockin' game, and it doesn't suffer from the massive difficulty spikes that Jak 2 had. The only frustrating thing is the racing missions, where the physics can occasionally really shake you.
It's a good game. Have a trailer.
OTHER GAMES
Outside of the Trilogy, Naughty Dog has produced several games in the Jak universe. My personal favourite is Daxter, the midquel (!) that covers Daxter's life in the two years between his arrival in the future and his rescue of Jak. (Trailer) It's a fun little handheld game that offers both awesome platforming (and god only knows I'm a massive platformer fan) and some fun insights on Daxter's character. He's a noble little skunk, even if he denies it.
Then there's Jak X (Trailer), the obligatory racing game. I would say 'the less said of it, the better', but it's kind of nifty, now that I've played it. The storyline is fairly simple, though: Jak and his friends are invited to the reading of Krew's will, and Krew uses the opportunity to poison them. From the afterlife. The only way they can get the antidote is if they win a big racing championship. There's some murder and betrayal and oneliners about knowing you're dead and taking the bad guys with you to the afterlife, but, hell. This is a Jak game. That's kind of par for the course.
Finally, there's the latest and the one I know the least about, Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier. It's a PS2 and PSP game, reportedly features massive OOC on the parts of our lead characters, and from what I can tell, fugly model design. But that's all I know. I haven't gotten myself to buy it so far, because the trilogy is so awesome and I don't want my memories tarnished if it sucks as much as they say.
WHY AND HOW SHOULD I GET THESE GAMES?
The trilogy rocks the socks and has an awesome storyline - if you're willing to ignore the massive plotholes in regards to the romantic plotlines. Which shouldn't be too hard, because they really don't come up that often.
They've got very varied gameplay, especially in the latter two halves, although in my opinion they're the best when they're straight-on platforming. Listen, you don't get a lot of good 3D platformers these days - take them where you can. I'm an old-school platform fan who picked up the first game on a whim years ago and never regretted it. Sometimes, it will make you yank your hair out in frustration, but trust me: that's part of the fun.
The games walk just the right tightrope between high, dark drama and Disney: you'll never hear anyone cursing loudly while having it off with someone, but story elements can be satisfyingly complicated and morally grey in their own way. I've honestly rarely been as excited by a plot twist as I have been by the start of Jak 2 (the only other plot twists I've found that interesting were found in StarCraft and Legacy of Kain, if those names mean anything to you) and it was handled in a fascinating way. Well. IMHO. YMMV, etcetera.
The games are all set either on the Playstation 2 or the PSP. The PS2 might be old, but it's still popular, so most game stores will probably still carry a copy of at least one of the games. And they're all available on Amazon. So. Yes. Go forth, and play!
Is gaming not your thing, but you want to see how this story plays out? The cutscenes for almost all of the games have been uploaded to YouTube. I shall point you to the main trilogy:
Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy
Jak 2: Renegade
Jak 3.
Or if all of that looks too daunting, be a lazypants and watch The Jak Trilogy In Sixty Seconds, By Daxter. (There's also a 'movie' that was produced by ND that covers all of the cutscenes vital to the immediate story, but I don't think there's a full version of that to be found online)
Questions, comments etc?