There’s a rope bridge that rests at the entrance to the
Forbidden Jungle. It hangs loosely, as you’d expect any such crossing residing
in any such abandoned area to do. There are a fair few boards missing and it
creaks and tussles worryingly as you first step onto it. Even more terrifying –
as you cross the mid-way point, you’ll hear the bridge sigh.
Hang on.
Take a peek through one of the many cracks below and you’ll find
that it’s not the bridge that’s given a lonely gasp, rather a burly, intimidating
fisherman. As Jak and Daxter question the troubled soul, he leaps to life with
the kind of spritely, Pixar-esque animation that gaming was all too new to in
2001. He tasks you with catching 200 pounds of fish in exchange for a rare and
precious artefact that will help rid the world of evil. His thick, exaggerated Irish
accent bellows at you while you dart a small net back and forth, enthusiastically
screaming “Here comes a big one!” with genuine joy in his heart.
Catch the fish, and it isn’t just the power cell that’s your
reward, it’s the fisherman’s delightful reaction.
Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is bursting with this
kind of life, the kind that others were just beginning to scratch the surface
of as we moved away from the jaggy, box-shaped puppets of the PS1 era and into
the rich environments and detailed character designs that the PS2 enabled. This
was only the start of the journey, and it wasn’t long before you met other
characters that were just as happy to wave their arms up and down and throw
their head from side to side as they let loose a plea for help.
Naughty Dog’s ambitions may have moved from simple corridors
to a much more technically-demanding open world, but the studios’ spirit and
personality remained exactly the same. The original Crash Bandicoot series is
one of the few PlayStation titles left to still hold up visually, but The
Precursor Legacy is still leaps and bounds ahead of it. Snowy mountain tops
soothe you as patient, silent snowflakes drift to the ground, while, deep below,
forgotten kingdoms hold majestic, industrialised sights and mighty creatures to
battle. There’s a real magic to the team’s creation here, managing to be one of
the first to truly capture the feeling of exploring a virtual wonderland. It’s
a fantasy that doesn’t escape from the true meaning of that word.
That all this is managed in the space between a spin-off
cart racer and a significant hardware upgrade is astounding, but the Precursor
Legacy doesn’t stop there. Its gameplay is filled with some of the best
adventuring this side of the plumber. Ratchet was never one for jumping, and Sly
kept to the shadows, but Jak leaps across bottomless caverns and battles toothy
threats with the best of them.
The quest for power cells is really Mario 64’s star system
in a somewhat streamlined disguise. Head to any area and you’ll have a list of
objectives to fulfil, each one rewarding you with an ancient trinket. You
explore every nook and cranny to find all the collectables, while the world’s
chirpy inhabitants ask you to rescue abandoned eggs, protect crops from greedy
rats and save wildlife by chasing them back into their underground burrows. Variety
is never in short supply in the Precursor Legacy, nor is it ever there for the
sake of it. There’s plenty to be done off of the game’s rock solid jumping and
fighting mechanics, but there’s a whole host of other things to see and do too.
Quests like this usually feel overly structured, with a
defined path, but the Precursor Legacy simply drops you in three sprawling
towns and leaves it up to you to meet the requirements to proceed. Reach the
Rocky Village, and the game will be indifferent to if you first journey to its
swamps or seek the sunken city below the water. There’s a liberating sense of
self-control to your adventuring. You might want to just scratch the surface of
each area before proceeding, or dive right in and grab every power cell and
precursor orb.
Personally speaking, there’s another sizeable reason why the
original Jak has a special place in my cold heart. At the end of 2001, I was
11. I’d spent my first decade with Pikachu, Gordon Freeman, Snake, Samus, Link
and many others, but above all of them was Crash. He’d been a regular Christmas
present, a welcoming friend to meet up with after every dreary school day and
was always up on time for a Saturday morning. When I got my PS2 for that eleventh
birthday, I selected a load of random games to play, none of which really hit
home. A few months later, I bought my first ever game not because of what it
was about, but because of who made it. Naughty Dog, the creators of Crash
Bandicoot, had made their next great platformer, and I had to get involved.
It was that first time that I took my thumb off of the analogue
stick, stopped commanding Jak onwards, that I first saw Daxter casually stretch
out and lean on his best friend’s head from his perch on his shoulder. That was
when I knew I was about to fall in love all over again.
Having battled the dark eco plant, swam to land’s end and reached
the top of the tower, it’s time to return to the bridge to leave the jungle
behind. This time, you don’t hear a sigh, but a thundering crackle of a
belly-laugh. Look down, and the fisherman is holding his sides together as he
leans back and soaks in the joy of your triumph, a heap of fish bouncing up and
down beside him. It’s a sight I haven’t forgotten in over ten years.
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