on my most recent playthrough of Jak 2 i came to realise that the game more or less exhausts all of its verb combinations leaving the design with nowhere to really go in further sequels. for example there’s exactly one point in the game where you are required to do the crouch-highjump under time pressure, one point where you have to jetboard-jump onto a moving platform then off again into a rail, one level with darkened rooms and light switches, one level exploring what you can do with conveyor belts, etc. i think if you continue iterating sequences of actions past a certain point it begins to lose its intuitive appeal and enters masocore territory, so rather than repeating themselves they made probably the right call and shifted the series’ focus laterally, making Jak 3 half into a vehicle sim, before going out with a straight up kart racer
what i found myself appreciating most was the amount of non-setpieces or “inverted” setpieces present in 2, which outside of its cutscene fetishism you’d never think came from the same people as Uncharted. unique one-time environment interactions would be casually thrown into the flow of level design, so effortlessly you might not even stop to notice.
i.e. during a level that alternates between platforming and turret segments you inadvertently shoot down a crane forming a bridge to the next platform. in another one, you shatter the glass of a massive window so that you can proceed by grinding along the sill. the game never coddles you with help tips or even so much as nudges the camera to bring something like this to your attention (unfortunately, Jak 3 is rife with this kind of crap); the path just ends there and you’re trusted to be trigger happy enough to figure things out.
around a third of the way into the game you’re given a mission to sneak into the big central palace towering over the hub city, by traversing one of its support cables which you can see hanging above you at all times (they light up at night which is a nice touch). in any modern game i feel this sort of build-up would be a cue to enter epic interactive cutscene mode, play some dramatic music and at most let you mash some buttons to stop the protagonist from slipping to their death. but you get there and it’s a fully fleshed out, tightly-paced level unto itself, with twists and turns, electrified surfaces, spinning blades and waves of turret fire. what was a piece of pretty window dressing is brought under the magnifying glass and elaborated into a coherent passage of design language. it’s so wonderfully videogamey and you can just sense how much fun the developers were having with their own project
