The legend goes that there was a holy trinity of slightly older-in-spirit mascot platformer series iconic to the Playstation 2: Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, and Sly Cooper. It was one of those things where as a kid it felt like you did kind of have to BE FOR one of them and not the others, like there was this invisible, arbitrary competition between nine year old fans, and of course, obvious for anyone who knows me, I was dyed in the wool for my boy Jak. Did I play those games entirely out of order? Yes. Did I play Jak 2 like a decade after the other two? Yes. Did I EVER meet a kid who had played Sly Cooper? No. The big rival was always Ratchet and Clank. And those games looked cool, really, but when you’re a kid you gotta pick and choose. And now that all three of the studios who made these games have gone from informally cementing Sony’s brand with the quality of their exclusive series to being fully subsumed into Sony’s obnoxious first and second party AAA Cinematic Game Studio Network pumping out the most boring games of all time, Ratchet and Clank is the only one of these iconic franchises that’s still kicking, with the most recent release on PS5 in 2021 being ESSENTIALLY a launch title (ps3 has no games is BACK lol) and beloved by critics and making a shit ton of money. That one coming out did remind me that I’ve always wanted to play these but other than going through Deadlocked as a kid and maybe the first HALF of the first Future game a few years ago, I never got around to it. Since then I’ve developed my “you gotta play every series from the beginning” thing so now I have bought all of the original games on my PS3 and AWAY WE GO damn I sure hope I like these lmao I should think before spending forty dollars.
So the game itself, it’s a little weird! It definitely feels like a first try, a bit of a rough draft at what I know these will become. From a studio that cut its teeth on platformers it makes sense to make another game based around platforming and indeed as far as 3D platformers of the early PS2 era go I think all that Spyro experience shows here SORT OF. On one hand the level design is frequently great, with considered challenges that keep you on your toes, require regular use of your entire move set, and multiple paths on nearly every level that always loop back into each other very naturally. It gives the feeling that each level is made up of two or three obstacle courses, each with some kind of treat at the end, and I want to give the game kudos for making even the optional rewards feel rewarding pretty much every time. That can be hard to do in a game like this but they pull it off here, and even if they hadn’t I do think that the level design is strong enough that just playing through each path is fun on its own even without a carrot at the end of the stick.
On the flip side, there are some choices here that feel strange, particularly the movement. Ratchet’s movement is really imprecise. He turns in these big, wide arcs and he stops in these slow, long skids. He moves at a pleasantly speedy clip, which is generally good, but when the platforming becomes a little more demanding or you’re asked to walk along more narrow paths over death pits it becomes problematic. It just feels like a weird choice to me from the studio that’s coming off of three games starring Spyro the Dragon, who regardless of how you feel about the level design and verb set of the character, does control really tightly and stop like a dime. Additionally, there’s the Ratchet and Clank series’ most famous aspect, it’s array of over-the-top weaponry, which does get its start here in full force, but doesn't quite feel tuned correctly either.
I will applaud the variety of weapons – I know this series is famous for getting silly with things and I wasn’t expecting it to be all in on that right away but it pretty much is, shit like a gun that turns guys into chickens and a gun that sucks up small enemies and fires them like grenades and a gun that shoots little guys who run around and explode on the nearest enemy are fun highlights of a diverse arsenal. They unlock for purchase at a steady rate, the prices never seemed unfair to me, and I never had a problem buying ammo if I needed to, though I could usually find what I needed from ammo boxes in the world as well.
The real issue with the guns is the way the game is and is not built around them. The game really starts to feel, especially in the back third, like it wants to be a shooter as much as it wants to be a platformer, which is fine, it strikes that balance okay for the most part. The problem is that as the gunplay begins to take center stage in those last few levels and the enemies become more and more designed around the guns, they don’t really account for the fact that Ratchet himself is not really designed around the guns, at least not to the degree of precision that begins to be asked of you. There’s no manual lock on, the first person mode doesn’t allow movement while it’s in use, there’s KIND OF a strafe but it’s tied to an alternate control scheme introduced near the end of the game when you get a jetpack hover ability and almost all of your other movement and attack abilities are disabled while you’re using it and without a lock on for any weapon and coupled with how almost all of your weapons have extremely limited range and low ammo capacity it’s essentially useless to begin with even if it WASN’T criminally slow-moving. It gets to a point where all of the enemies in the final level fly and have attacks at such long range that essentially only three of my weapons could hit them at all, and they would come in such tight clusters and high numbers that encounters would be extremely tedious affairs.
There’s no life system or anything, but your ammo and money you’ve spent (like on ammo, for instance) don’t replenish when you die, and the checkpoints are NOT frequent, so you could be redoing as much as half of a level, which towards the end of the game could be long stretches of almost exclusively combat, and Ratchet’s verb set just doesn’t feel appropriate for it. I often felt like I was taking hits and losing health because Ratchet isn’t really able to dodge and shoot and face his enemies properly at the same time in situations where it felt like he was expected to, and the invincibility window after taking a hit is criminally small. You start with 4 pips of health and you can get a fifth one late in the game for a LOT of money, and I really think that SHOULD be enough, but it didn’t feel like it towards the very end largely because I felt ill-equipped in my moves. I really think there’s something here with the combat, and there are like 500 games in this series so obviously I am not alone lol. I think it would only really take one or two key changes to the way ratchet moves, and I know he’ll get them by the fourth game at least, which is basically just a shooting game with no platforming at all, so I’m hoping these control changes are implemented sooner rather than later.
Immediately the game’s aesthetics stick out intensely. It cannot go unsaid that the music slaps so hard, one of the sickest soundtracks of its era. The visuals lean into this late 90s alt comicky sort of vibe, a sort of Pixar filtered through a light Vaseline smear of Invader Zim or Aaahh!!! Real Monsters which match well with the irreverent tone. Captain Quark in particular is this really grotesque twisting of what a human being looks like in a way that I’m not sure is WHOLLY intentional because everyone looks a LITTLE fucked up in this game and things get really clean later in this series in a way that loses some of the charm, but here it really works for the style and theming. This is the kind of universe where all the alien names are like Blorgons and Flixops and shit like that, we’re cruising on pure vibes here and R&C nails the kind of irreverent tone it’s going for, like one notch of maturity and dignity above fart jokes. I looked into some behind the scenes stuff for this game and was surprised to find that Insomniac Games did not have actual writers at all until the third Ratchet and Clank game, which shocked me because while I don’t think this is a revolutionary or deep narrative experience or a moving character study, it is a work with strong themes that hangs really cleanly with itself. I would not have guessed that this was a case of “we already made all of the levels and now two of our animation leads are gonna bang out a story to fit it together” but really kudos to them. The character arcs I think are the most obvious symptom of this, with Ratchet’s developments and personality shifts being simultaneously abrupt in terms of when and why they happen in the story (particularly right at the end) and also really dragged out (the unpleasant middle chapter where they’re fighting seems to really just go on). But the story itself comes together pretty well imo.
R&C is about a little guy called Ratchet who’s a mechanic from a backwater planet in a big galaxy who wants to get off this fuckin’ rock, maaaaaaaan, who meets Clank, a defectively small robot who escapes from the production line of the evil corporation run by Chairman Drek, a guy whose homeworld is so P O L L U T ED (2002 buzzword) that he and his army are going around harvesting chunks off of other populated planets to make a new one. It is of course eventually revealed that Drek intentionally had his corporation devastate his world, and has sold all the land on this new one ahead of time, and once everyone is moved in he’ll just have his corporation operate the same way until this planet is unlivable too and they do it all over again, feeding his military complex and his real estate schemes, and he wins both ways. Clank wants to stop him and Ratchet wants to see the galaxy and both of them want to not be murdered by Drek’s corporate army so they team up to go find Captain Quark who is this like, famous intergalactic superhero, I guess? So they can let him know what’s going on and then he can stop Drek. This takes them across many planets, most of which are besieged by Drek’s forces, where they meet a colorful cast of assholes whose sole unifying characteristic is the grift.
R&C is very much a product of its time, and by that I mean it’s not actively trying to say anything subversive to the status quo. There was a time in the late 90s and early 2000s, at least in American media, where the popular message was this kind of vague liberal anti-consumerism. We “knew” that “pollution” was bad and that “recycling” was good and uhhhh “buying stuff” I guess was bad because of maybe, plastic? And maybe it was bad that corporations were greedy. But the way to stop them was to simply, not buy their stuff. Recycle your plastic. Carpool! And this is all well and good by all means if you’re a guy who tries to limit their plastic footprint go nuts I’m all for it. But there’s a very pat nature to these critiques of…who, exactly? I feel like the answer was right in the name of the idea right? Anti-consumerism doesn’t put the onus on the systems that manipulate markets and consumers, on the powerful people and organizations and governments that controls the ways things are produced and advertised, it puts it on consumers as individuals. If we all just got our shit together and made better spending choices then we wouldn’t be in this mess, the world wouldn’t be in this mess, the planet wouldn’t be in this mess, things would get better. It is a blind-eyed belief that greater capitalist systems do not have power over us as individuals and it is of course hugely misguided, and wrong, and ineffectual, and ultimate aid to the very forces it ostensibly opposes.
Ratchet and Clank has not uhhh, thought about this. Ratchet and Clank does not care THIS much about what it’s saying. Ratchet and Clank is about a funny little guy and a funnier littler guy who has a propellor that comes out of his head. Ratchet and Clank was written by an animation director and a lead model rigger. It’s a game that wants to say “hey did you ever notice that corporations are evil but their ads are nice” and like hey, yeah lol, that is true you nailed it R&C. THE THING IS THOUGH, that Ratchet and Clank, in making its light, goofy satire of consumerist 90s culture, I believe accidentally stumbles into some deeper and more biting depictions of the ways that capitalism grinds all of us down regardless of our stations within it.
Like, it’s one thing for every level to be introduced via an over-the-top advertisement or for Captain Quark’s status as a Famous Superhero to mean he doubles as a corporate shill who hawks various products, but it comes out in darker and more truthful ways too. Quark is the secondary villain of the game, in Drek’s pocket in exchange for a publicity deal with his megacorporation which he sees as his path back to the limelight, a balm for his waning stardom. Even the people who are ostensibly at the top of the heap are actually precariously at the whim of greater forces, entirely dependent on the goodwill of the real powers of capital and influence. Quark isn’t actually as desperate and scrappy as anyone else in the game because he’s still wealthy and he still exerts his power cruelly over people beneath him (the game specifically calls out that he pays his bodyguard minimum wage, and he uses his celebrity and public image to manipulate Ratchet and Clank into a position where he can quietly assassinate them), but because he operates beneath Drek, who is ACTUALLY a man of true power and true wealth and true influence, Quark is made to FEEL like he has to scrape and fight to maintain his position, which drives his desperation and cruelty much further than it is implied he would act without prompting.
Similarly, every single character you meet in the game charges Ratchet for whatever good or service they provide, often at obviously absurd prices. Some of these are actual business owners, but often the circumstances are ridiculous and uncalled for. These cash gates are here for perhaps misguided gameplay reasons first and foremost (why would you make me spend this money arbitrarily when I could be spending it on a new gun but WHATEVER) but within the fiction these people are like this because the world they live in has forced them to be this way to get by. Most of them are not people of means, they’re modest, working-class people, tradesmen and plumbers and soldiers who were explicitly coerced into service by military benefits packages. This game came out about ten years too early for it but if it was a modern game I am confident that The Plumber holding up his finger and going “socioeconomic disparity!” would have been an early reaction meme on twitter.
Ratchet himself can’t escape from this. He’s cynical and detached. Even before this game’s turn where he becomes completely laser-focused on finding and killed Quark, his reactions to the suffering of people on other planets are not unsympathetic, but certainly of a “well that sucks for them but what are we gonna do about it?” bent. (Because what ARE they gonna do about it? Ratchet and Clank can’t fight an army, and they don’t, really, the evil plan does go through all the way to the very end, you stop it at the eleventh hour, I would assume billions die during this game.) Part of this is Ratchet being characterized as a Very Marketable In 2002 Funny Cool Skater Bro Guy but he’s a poor person from a backwater planet, he is also a a victim of this system. Time and again in this game Clank’s earnest appeals to people’s better natures simply don’t work, and it’s Ratchet’s manipulative dealsmanship that gets them what they need to continue their quest. Ultimately his compassion shines through this sour armor he wears but it takes almost the entire game for that to happen – he’s as naturally beaten down and bought into the system as everyone else is, and Clank only isn’t because he is an outsider to it who is literally only just born at the beginning of the game.
I must assume that the true tendrils of implication here are unintended by the writers of the game, but this is just how it goes, right? No matter how hard we try, it is impossible to craft a story and a world that is separate from our own values and biases, even for excellent writers. I do think Ratchet and Clank is entertainingly written, but it wasn’t written by people who even consider themselves professional writers at all, and a story that was conceptualized as a light and obvious satire of consumerist culture was inevitably going to be a mirror into the darker truths of the realities of capitalism, and that’s exactly what happened here.
It's a solid first try. I may have become frustrated with the combat towards the end and had my issues with the controls, and I don’t expect to find as much to dig into narratively in future games, but I do think that what’s here at face value is good too. Ratchet and Clank both have a lot of personality and they work well as a pair. The jokes are by and large amusing if not LAUGH OUT LOUD funny. It’s a good template. You could, feasibly, have these guys go on an adventure every year or two for the next twenty years and I bet people wouldn’t even get that tired of it. Right? Yeah. Surely.
So the game itself, it’s a little weird! It definitely feels like a first try, a bit of a rough draft at what I know these will become. From a studio that cut its teeth on platformers it makes sense to make another game based around platforming and indeed as far as 3D platformers of the early PS2 era go I think all that Spyro experience shows here SORT OF. On one hand the level design is frequently great, with considered challenges that keep you on your toes, require regular use of your entire move set, and multiple paths on nearly every level that always loop back into each other very naturally. It gives the feeling that each level is made up of two or three obstacle courses, each with some kind of treat at the end, and I want to give the game kudos for making even the optional rewards feel rewarding pretty much every time. That can be hard to do in a game like this but they pull it off here, and even if they hadn’t I do think that the level design is strong enough that just playing through each path is fun on its own even without a carrot at the end of the stick.
On the flip side, there are some choices here that feel strange, particularly the movement. Ratchet’s movement is really imprecise. He turns in these big, wide arcs and he stops in these slow, long skids. He moves at a pleasantly speedy clip, which is generally good, but when the platforming becomes a little more demanding or you’re asked to walk along more narrow paths over death pits it becomes problematic. It just feels like a weird choice to me from the studio that’s coming off of three games starring Spyro the Dragon, who regardless of how you feel about the level design and verb set of the character, does control really tightly and stop like a dime. Additionally, there’s the Ratchet and Clank series’ most famous aspect, it’s array of over-the-top weaponry, which does get its start here in full force, but doesn't quite feel tuned correctly either.
I will applaud the variety of weapons – I know this series is famous for getting silly with things and I wasn’t expecting it to be all in on that right away but it pretty much is, shit like a gun that turns guys into chickens and a gun that sucks up small enemies and fires them like grenades and a gun that shoots little guys who run around and explode on the nearest enemy are fun highlights of a diverse arsenal. They unlock for purchase at a steady rate, the prices never seemed unfair to me, and I never had a problem buying ammo if I needed to, though I could usually find what I needed from ammo boxes in the world as well.
The real issue with the guns is the way the game is and is not built around them. The game really starts to feel, especially in the back third, like it wants to be a shooter as much as it wants to be a platformer, which is fine, it strikes that balance okay for the most part. The problem is that as the gunplay begins to take center stage in those last few levels and the enemies become more and more designed around the guns, they don’t really account for the fact that Ratchet himself is not really designed around the guns, at least not to the degree of precision that begins to be asked of you. There’s no manual lock on, the first person mode doesn’t allow movement while it’s in use, there’s KIND OF a strafe but it’s tied to an alternate control scheme introduced near the end of the game when you get a jetpack hover ability and almost all of your other movement and attack abilities are disabled while you’re using it and without a lock on for any weapon and coupled with how almost all of your weapons have extremely limited range and low ammo capacity it’s essentially useless to begin with even if it WASN’T criminally slow-moving. It gets to a point where all of the enemies in the final level fly and have attacks at such long range that essentially only three of my weapons could hit them at all, and they would come in such tight clusters and high numbers that encounters would be extremely tedious affairs.
There’s no life system or anything, but your ammo and money you’ve spent (like on ammo, for instance) don’t replenish when you die, and the checkpoints are NOT frequent, so you could be redoing as much as half of a level, which towards the end of the game could be long stretches of almost exclusively combat, and Ratchet’s verb set just doesn’t feel appropriate for it. I often felt like I was taking hits and losing health because Ratchet isn’t really able to dodge and shoot and face his enemies properly at the same time in situations where it felt like he was expected to, and the invincibility window after taking a hit is criminally small. You start with 4 pips of health and you can get a fifth one late in the game for a LOT of money, and I really think that SHOULD be enough, but it didn’t feel like it towards the very end largely because I felt ill-equipped in my moves. I really think there’s something here with the combat, and there are like 500 games in this series so obviously I am not alone lol. I think it would only really take one or two key changes to the way ratchet moves, and I know he’ll get them by the fourth game at least, which is basically just a shooting game with no platforming at all, so I’m hoping these control changes are implemented sooner rather than later.
Immediately the game’s aesthetics stick out intensely. It cannot go unsaid that the music slaps so hard, one of the sickest soundtracks of its era. The visuals lean into this late 90s alt comicky sort of vibe, a sort of Pixar filtered through a light Vaseline smear of Invader Zim or Aaahh!!! Real Monsters which match well with the irreverent tone. Captain Quark in particular is this really grotesque twisting of what a human being looks like in a way that I’m not sure is WHOLLY intentional because everyone looks a LITTLE fucked up in this game and things get really clean later in this series in a way that loses some of the charm, but here it really works for the style and theming. This is the kind of universe where all the alien names are like Blorgons and Flixops and shit like that, we’re cruising on pure vibes here and R&C nails the kind of irreverent tone it’s going for, like one notch of maturity and dignity above fart jokes. I looked into some behind the scenes stuff for this game and was surprised to find that Insomniac Games did not have actual writers at all until the third Ratchet and Clank game, which shocked me because while I don’t think this is a revolutionary or deep narrative experience or a moving character study, it is a work with strong themes that hangs really cleanly with itself. I would not have guessed that this was a case of “we already made all of the levels and now two of our animation leads are gonna bang out a story to fit it together” but really kudos to them. The character arcs I think are the most obvious symptom of this, with Ratchet’s developments and personality shifts being simultaneously abrupt in terms of when and why they happen in the story (particularly right at the end) and also really dragged out (the unpleasant middle chapter where they’re fighting seems to really just go on). But the story itself comes together pretty well imo.
R&C is about a little guy called Ratchet who’s a mechanic from a backwater planet in a big galaxy who wants to get off this fuckin’ rock, maaaaaaaan, who meets Clank, a defectively small robot who escapes from the production line of the evil corporation run by Chairman Drek, a guy whose homeworld is so P O L L U T ED (2002 buzzword) that he and his army are going around harvesting chunks off of other populated planets to make a new one. It is of course eventually revealed that Drek intentionally had his corporation devastate his world, and has sold all the land on this new one ahead of time, and once everyone is moved in he’ll just have his corporation operate the same way until this planet is unlivable too and they do it all over again, feeding his military complex and his real estate schemes, and he wins both ways. Clank wants to stop him and Ratchet wants to see the galaxy and both of them want to not be murdered by Drek’s corporate army so they team up to go find Captain Quark who is this like, famous intergalactic superhero, I guess? So they can let him know what’s going on and then he can stop Drek. This takes them across many planets, most of which are besieged by Drek’s forces, where they meet a colorful cast of assholes whose sole unifying characteristic is the grift.
R&C is very much a product of its time, and by that I mean it’s not actively trying to say anything subversive to the status quo. There was a time in the late 90s and early 2000s, at least in American media, where the popular message was this kind of vague liberal anti-consumerism. We “knew” that “pollution” was bad and that “recycling” was good and uhhhh “buying stuff” I guess was bad because of maybe, plastic? And maybe it was bad that corporations were greedy. But the way to stop them was to simply, not buy their stuff. Recycle your plastic. Carpool! And this is all well and good by all means if you’re a guy who tries to limit their plastic footprint go nuts I’m all for it. But there’s a very pat nature to these critiques of…who, exactly? I feel like the answer was right in the name of the idea right? Anti-consumerism doesn’t put the onus on the systems that manipulate markets and consumers, on the powerful people and organizations and governments that controls the ways things are produced and advertised, it puts it on consumers as individuals. If we all just got our shit together and made better spending choices then we wouldn’t be in this mess, the world wouldn’t be in this mess, the planet wouldn’t be in this mess, things would get better. It is a blind-eyed belief that greater capitalist systems do not have power over us as individuals and it is of course hugely misguided, and wrong, and ineffectual, and ultimate aid to the very forces it ostensibly opposes.
Ratchet and Clank has not uhhh, thought about this. Ratchet and Clank does not care THIS much about what it’s saying. Ratchet and Clank is about a funny little guy and a funnier littler guy who has a propellor that comes out of his head. Ratchet and Clank was written by an animation director and a lead model rigger. It’s a game that wants to say “hey did you ever notice that corporations are evil but their ads are nice” and like hey, yeah lol, that is true you nailed it R&C. THE THING IS THOUGH, that Ratchet and Clank, in making its light, goofy satire of consumerist 90s culture, I believe accidentally stumbles into some deeper and more biting depictions of the ways that capitalism grinds all of us down regardless of our stations within it.
Like, it’s one thing for every level to be introduced via an over-the-top advertisement or for Captain Quark’s status as a Famous Superhero to mean he doubles as a corporate shill who hawks various products, but it comes out in darker and more truthful ways too. Quark is the secondary villain of the game, in Drek’s pocket in exchange for a publicity deal with his megacorporation which he sees as his path back to the limelight, a balm for his waning stardom. Even the people who are ostensibly at the top of the heap are actually precariously at the whim of greater forces, entirely dependent on the goodwill of the real powers of capital and influence. Quark isn’t actually as desperate and scrappy as anyone else in the game because he’s still wealthy and he still exerts his power cruelly over people beneath him (the game specifically calls out that he pays his bodyguard minimum wage, and he uses his celebrity and public image to manipulate Ratchet and Clank into a position where he can quietly assassinate them), but because he operates beneath Drek, who is ACTUALLY a man of true power and true wealth and true influence, Quark is made to FEEL like he has to scrape and fight to maintain his position, which drives his desperation and cruelty much further than it is implied he would act without prompting.
Similarly, every single character you meet in the game charges Ratchet for whatever good or service they provide, often at obviously absurd prices. Some of these are actual business owners, but often the circumstances are ridiculous and uncalled for. These cash gates are here for perhaps misguided gameplay reasons first and foremost (why would you make me spend this money arbitrarily when I could be spending it on a new gun but WHATEVER) but within the fiction these people are like this because the world they live in has forced them to be this way to get by. Most of them are not people of means, they’re modest, working-class people, tradesmen and plumbers and soldiers who were explicitly coerced into service by military benefits packages. This game came out about ten years too early for it but if it was a modern game I am confident that The Plumber holding up his finger and going “socioeconomic disparity!” would have been an early reaction meme on twitter.
Ratchet himself can’t escape from this. He’s cynical and detached. Even before this game’s turn where he becomes completely laser-focused on finding and killed Quark, his reactions to the suffering of people on other planets are not unsympathetic, but certainly of a “well that sucks for them but what are we gonna do about it?” bent. (Because what ARE they gonna do about it? Ratchet and Clank can’t fight an army, and they don’t, really, the evil plan does go through all the way to the very end, you stop it at the eleventh hour, I would assume billions die during this game.) Part of this is Ratchet being characterized as a Very Marketable In 2002 Funny Cool Skater Bro Guy but he’s a poor person from a backwater planet, he is also a a victim of this system. Time and again in this game Clank’s earnest appeals to people’s better natures simply don’t work, and it’s Ratchet’s manipulative dealsmanship that gets them what they need to continue their quest. Ultimately his compassion shines through this sour armor he wears but it takes almost the entire game for that to happen – he’s as naturally beaten down and bought into the system as everyone else is, and Clank only isn’t because he is an outsider to it who is literally only just born at the beginning of the game.
I must assume that the true tendrils of implication here are unintended by the writers of the game, but this is just how it goes, right? No matter how hard we try, it is impossible to craft a story and a world that is separate from our own values and biases, even for excellent writers. I do think Ratchet and Clank is entertainingly written, but it wasn’t written by people who even consider themselves professional writers at all, and a story that was conceptualized as a light and obvious satire of consumerist culture was inevitably going to be a mirror into the darker truths of the realities of capitalism, and that’s exactly what happened here.
It's a solid first try. I may have become frustrated with the combat towards the end and had my issues with the controls, and I don’t expect to find as much to dig into narratively in future games, but I do think that what’s here at face value is good too. Ratchet and Clank both have a lot of personality and they work well as a pair. The jokes are by and large amusing if not LAUGH OUT LOUD funny. It’s a good template. You could, feasibly, have these guys go on an adventure every year or two for the next twenty years and I bet people wouldn’t even get that tired of it. Right? Yeah. Surely.
4 Comments
oh you know what i did actually play the remake too i completely forgot about that because i did think it was one of the most boring games i've ever played in my entire life lmao
it's very funny because i guess the remake is a tie-in to the ratchet and clank movie where they just completely rewrote Ratchet's character because all kid movie protagonists are pixar ripoffs and like earnest little sweet babies now but ratchet in R&C1 is like a full on asshole snarky edgy coolguy with a surfer accent which is just such a 2002 thing but there's also just by default SO much more to that character template than a little dweebass loser who's like "gee whiz i want to be a cop!"
Yeah, I think it was around the swamp planet where the combat started feeling like a chore for me. I recall a few years ago when I tried to replay this that the last third is just tedious without having a real strafe and shit to deal with the enemies.
The remake apparently just makes Ratchet and Clank like instant friends, I haven't played that one but at least here they actually have squabbles and develop themselves even if Ratchet is a dick.
The remake apparently just makes Ratchet and Clank like instant friends, I haven't played that one but at least here they actually have squabbles and develop themselves even if Ratchet is a dick.
MeowPewterMeow
1 year ago