U Don't Know Jak (or Daxter)! Let's Play Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy! [Finished]

[Cullen]

You're gonna carry that weight, son. It's okay, Daxter is light.

The Game

Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (AKA just Jak and Daxter AKA Jak 1) is a collect-a-thon platformer released for the PS2 at the tail end of 2001 (December 4th in fact, we're almost at the 23rd anniversary for the game!). Much like Super Mario 64, the game revolves around roaming large 3D levels with complex maneuvers to collect a large number of shiny baubles to progress further into the game. Jak and Daxter owes much more of its core design to one of the earlier Mario 64 successors, Banjo-Kazooie. Much like Banjo-Kazooie, the levels are more akin to giant playgrounds with all objectives already active as opposed to Mario 64 treating most stars like their own course and booting you from the level upon collection. Jak and Daxter also features a nearly seamless game world with clever tricks to mask any loading that may happen over the course of the game. For such an early PS2 game, it is also a visual spectacle, with vibrant environments, impressive lighting with a beautiful day-night cycle, and highly detailed and bouncy character models. If you were an early adopter for the PS2, this was certainly an impressive showing at the time, and it still looks pretty great today in my humble opinion! I love collection style platformers and have been feeling the urge to replay this game and share it with the world. Funnily enough, I was late to the party for the Jak series and didn't play the games until their PS3 re-releases (though this LP is using the original PS2 version recorded from hardware, since that's how I roll*) and I was still very impressed with what was on display. Jak and Daxter doesn't reinvent the wheel when it comes to 3D platformers, but it is an extremely polished and tightly paced journey, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever enjoyed similar games! But if you lack the means to play it yourself, hey, that's what these videos are for!

*I wasn't happy with how the game looked with the upscaler I was using, so I switched to the PS4 version starting with, fittingly enough, Part 4.

The Let's Play

You know the deal, all Power Cells will be collected and all Precursor Orbs will be added to the bribery fund! Compared to other collect-a-thons, 100% isn't too arduous a task in Jak and Daxter and I'd dare say it's the truly intended way to finish the game. Certainly they're asking less of you than say, Donkey Kong 64, and the journey is hardly bogged down at all by a completionist approach. Along the way, there are also numerous NPCs to interact with, so we'll check out all the yapping they have for us too! It should be a nice breezy journey, and certainly something I can use to unwind in between my lengthy Persona 3 recording sessions. With that out of the way,

The Videos

Part 1, A Fuzzy Friend
Part 2, Sandover The Waves, Sandover The Water
Part 3, Jak of The Jungle
Part 4, Bird Up Beach
Part 5, All Misty Isle'd
Part 6, Hot Roddin'
Part 7, Precursor Basin Bike Challenge
Part 8, Lost World
Part 9, Dead Zeppelin
Part 10, Klaw Krushed and Mountain Passed
Part 11, Winter Wonderland
Part 12, Ultimate Spider-Man
Part 13, Last Ride
Part 14 (Finale), We're Not Gonna Take It

Full LP Playlist

Enjoy 3D platformers, both with and without a collection focus? Then you may very well enjoy my LPs of Psychonauts and SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom!

[Cullen]

Not much of an LP without a Part 1, now is it! After a roughly 6 minute establishing cutscene, Jak and Daxter let's you get your feet wet (no pun intended) at Geyser Rock. This is an exemplary Tutorial level, with no active threats and the only ways to die being your own ineptitude or self destructive tendencies. Who left all these spikes here anyway?

There are 4 Power Cells to collect and 50 Precursor Orbs. You cannot leave without the former, but the latter are not mandatory to collect. Even this early on, some can be easy to miss if you just focus on going forward at full speed, it took me an embarrassingly long time to find the orbs on the beach by the Blue Eco clusters on my first replay of the game.

There are 101 Power Cells and 2,000 Precursor Orbs altogether to grab in this game, plus 112 Scout Flies which make up 16 of the aforementioned Power Cells. You only need 72 Power Cells to finish the game, and only 1530 Precursor Orbs are required to purchase every possible Power Cell that they can get you. Strange numbers to be sure, though I have my guesses as to why that is.

Daxter mostly doesn't do anything except be Jak's shoulder monkey. He'll occasionally chime in on level objectives to either clue us in or let us know when we completed them, but otherwise he mostly just serves to make obnoxious quips when you die cause he's a fuzzy little asshole. Though I'd guess I'd be irate if I was devolved into rodent, so maybe some pricklyness is understandable.

All cutscenes in Jak and Daxter are unskippable sadly, as this was released before that became a standard consideration. Not a big deal for this LP, but it can make replays a little annoying. That does lead into my next point though!

Some fun tips if you're ever looking to quickly replay this game! When creating a new game, you can reset the console after starting and load the file to bypass the lengthy opening cutscene if you just want to get down to business. Like most PS2 games, there's a lengthy start up for the game but it's still several minutes faster then watching the whole cinematic. Additionally, as mentioned in the video, turning off gameplay hints will bypass all tutorial cutscenes in Geyser Rock, which can save another minute or so. You may want to turn them back on after though, as hints being off disables ALL dialogue outside of cutscenes, which does actually interfere with knowing when you've completed certain objectives.

I don't know when else I'm going to be able to mention this, although I was late to the party on playing the Jak games, I do have strong memories of something relating to the first game. This commercial:



For some reason, I saw this on TV a lot as a kid. It actually took me a few minutes to find it on Youtube, and I was starting to wonder if it was one of those manufactured childhood memories. I had similar doubts about the game Buck Bumble. Anyways, Jak gets all the girls, and Daxter gets no respect Rodney Dangerfield style. Can't say he doesn't deserve it though.

[Cullen]

Part 2 is out! Aside from its proper stages, Jak has a variety of hub levels that also have their own objectives to complete. There are 3 (technically 4 but the last one hardly counts) hubs of the game and Sandover Village perhaps fittingly has the most for us to do. Funnily enough though, quite a bit of it can be skipped in as far as talking to people goes, as most of the objectives provided can be completed regardless of whether you are informed of them or not. Where's the adventure in that though?

Every area that has Precursor Orbs and Power Cells will have 7 Scout Flies to collect. This is the one consistent metric of the game, as Power Cell and Precursor Orb totals do slightly vary across the different areas of the games.

Jak has a day-night cycle that doesn't actually have bearing on gameplay, but it sure does result in a ton of cool variations in how every outdoor area looks!

The game does surprisingly little with swimming, certainly much less than its N64 forbears. The Lurkershark mostly just exists to let you know you're barking up the wrong tree when going to far from shore, though there is one instance where it can serve as a genuine obstacle.

While most of the initial conversations with the village folk can be ignored and you can just go about doing their tasks, the Precursor Orb trades must have their initial cutscenes viewed before the trades can actually be made. The one exception is the mayor, if you have completed his task in the Forbidden Jungle, you can immediately trade Orbs with him after collecting the reward for that.

Naturally speedrunners have found tricks to bypass the Fire Canyon without getting the Power Cells. In fact, the Jak and Daxter any % run is a mess of crazy skips that bypass almost all the content in the game and finish with little more than the Power Cells collected at Geyser Rock.

[Cullen]

Part 3 is out! We hit up Forbidden Jungle first since while it's not the intended first level, it's just ideal to go here since it removes needing to backtrack to Sentinel Beach later. In addition to opening up closed Blue Eco Vents, completion of this level gets us access to the Misty Isles where Daxter met his unfortunate fate. Naturally there are more Power Cells there, much more important than what happened to Daxter!

I made some changes to try and minimize the blurriness of the graphics, I do apologize these aren't the cleanest looking recordings of Jak and Daxter. I used to have a Dazzle many moons ago, but it's up in the air so I have to go full poverty set up and use upscalers to make my PS2 work with my El Gato. I've gotten used to it, but I understand it's not the best looking thing out there so apologies if it drags down the videos too much for you.

Though Keira makes reference to having to open up multiple Eco vents throughout the game, there's only 1 other vent type to open after Blue Eco and it's right at the end of the game. There's only two places where it even obviously matters that you open the second vent type. Methinks they had more plans with this system originally.

Speaking of Eco Vents, since we open Blue Eco Vents so early I'm not actually too sure how much it affects the game going forward. Sentinel Beach has one vent we need to open to complete the level fully, but after that a lot of the Blue Eco usage comes from orb pick ups or vents that are always open regardless.

Jak and Daxter is pretty light on boss fights, the Dark Eco Plant is one of three bonafide boss encounters we see throughout the game. Thankfully, the game doesn't have any other instances of sneakily hiding Precursor Orbs inside a dead enemy you need to jump on like Forbidden Jungle does.

It's LP tradition you screw up something you never have trouble with while recording. In this case, I lose the fishing mini game for the first time ever, in a very stupid way. Go me!

There's actually a code you can use while standing next to the fisherman to play a harder version of the fishing mini game, though this is purely for fun and serves no practical benefit.

On top of getting a Power Cell from him, completing the fisherman's mini game is the specific trigger we need to use his boat to get to Misty Isles. Whatever happened to the boat Jak and Daxter used at the start of the game is never addressed.

[Cullen]

Part 4 is out! Ultimately, I just wasn't happy with how the game looked on PS2 with my recording set up, so I decided to switch over to the PS4 version. Fortunately, the Jak bundle was 50% off and I had some gift money I had hung onto, so I got this plus Jak 3 and Jak X which I didn't have for free pretty much. This may or may not be foreshadowing, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The PS4 version has much cleaner textures and doesn't have any degradation in the visuals inherent with using upscalers, but this version does have the interesting problem of much more noticeable texture pop in. Not sure what the deal with that is, but hey at least it isn't my fault!

Sentinel Beach is ostensibly the intended first level, but it is not possible to fully clear it at the offset due to a closed Blue Eco vent. In an efficiency minded run (like you'd do for an LP), it's better to tackle it second so you don't have to do any backtracking.

You can wait around for the cannon to blow up all the metal boxes at the start, but that's not my idea of a good time.

Green Eco Vents appear very rarely, in fact I think just once after this level. Very frustrating, as health restoration is very slow going in this game.

You can very easily beat the Pelican to the Power Cell if you kick it out of him, but it's a lot funnier to just blow him up. Add another one onto the "Jak's Cruelty Towards Animals" counter.

We get our first appearance of Flut-Flut, who is spared detonation from Jak by virtue of being in a cutscene. We'll be seeing him later, though probably not as much as the devs intended when they came up with him.

Unrelated to the LP, I haven't used my PS4 in years. Last time I used it for games was LP'ing, in fact! I had used it to play Ninja Gaiden Sigma in my LP of Ninja Gaiden Black on Master Ninja mode. I went all in for that LP and committed to showing off Sigma alongside Black, also on Master mode. It made up probably about 10-15% of the overall footage despite me also playing through the whole game. Dedication to your craft sometimes involves colossal wastes of your time. Perhaps in retaliation for the neglect I have given it, the PS4 totally screwed up my capture card when I plugged it in and I had to spend several minutes trying to get it to actually record in OBS.

[Cullen]

Part 5 is out! We set out for the area that kickstarted the plot this time, Misty Isles. It's definitely the most dangerous locale around Sandover Village, which is fitting considering the extra run around you have to do to get here. Fortunately, we're still in the early game where many Power Cells are out in the open and don't require too much extra effort on your part to grab.

With more precise long jumps than I am consistently capable of, you can capture the Muse very quickly before it gets much of any chance to run away. I usually catch it around the mud pit platform but I screwed up I wanted to demonstrate more of the route it takes when it's running from you.

Despite their imposing presence and the fact Jak needed a holy hand grenade to defeat them in the opening cutscene, the Lurker Guards are surprisingly easy to deal with. Just be mindful of the knock back you'll suffer when hitting them. While we saw bottomless pits in the Forgotten Temple, this is the first area to make heavy use of them and incorporate additional obstacles to try and throw you into them.

The Zoomer has very simplistic controls, but it is important to know what they are. Holding X+Square gives you much slower forward acceleration, which is handy for sharp or narrow turns. You'll also want to know that you can hop it with L1 or R1 as there are several Power Cells that are either very difficult to get or flat out impossible to get with the extra boost you get from doing that when hitting jumps.

Red Eco is easily the most under realized Eco type in the game and we hardly ever see it. It won't be until one of the last levels in the game we see it again, and it only makes one more very brief appearance after that in the final level.

I remark on this in the video, but for some reason there's quite a bit of randomness in what you have to fight in the Lurker arena. Sometimes Guards will drop in to complicate things, but sometimes you get lucky and the game spawns nothing but standard variety Lurkers.

The game falls into very predictable patterns for trades. All NPCs will always request 90 orbs while the Precursor Oracle (we see him several times) will always have 2 cells for 120 a pop.

If you have 90+ Precursor Orbs by the conclusion of the Fire Canyon, you'll be able to fully collect everything in the next Hub area as well as access every level available there.

[Cullen]

Part 6 is out! With our big batch of Power Cells in tow, we're ready to travel through Fire Canyon. Each time you clear a Power Cell threshold, you'll be faced with a mini-level revolving around the Zoomer and some sort of time trial objective. In this case, we have to mind our temperature or the Zoomer blows up and sends Jak (plus Daxter) into a fiery grave. Make it through without that happening, and you've made it to the next hub area! Not that it can ever be just that simple, as the Zoomer levels have Scout Flies and Precursor orbs to worry about as well, but luckily they low ball it with this first one.

Don't be too worried about collecting everything in a single run. The game remembers what you've collected like it does with any other level, so there's no harm in slowing down to hit things and eating a couple deaths along the way. This was actually the first time I managed to clear this level in one go, usually I blow up around the 70% marker due to going to slow to manage my temperature.

Note that it is possible to clear the course as your Zoomer blows up, which is pretty funny. If you manage this, the game will thankfully have registered the check point and will spawn you by the Rock Village Zoomer pad, sparing you the trip back.

You can hop back on the Zoomer and go through courses in reverse if you'd like to pick up anything you missed that way. It's not a bad option, since the checkpoints are located at the beginning and end of the course. Traveling the course in reverse, you can pick up what you missed and then just blow yourself up intentionally to warp back to the course's end. There's a few instances in the game where you can save a bunch of time by death-warping like that.

Dark Eco Crates were a thing on Misty Island, but this is the point in the game where they start to really become obnoxious obstacles. The game loves to stick them in places where you can easily clip them with your Zoomer and eat a point of damage, which can add up quickly. An upcoming level features this in spades.

Remember to connect the teleporter as soon as you reach Rock Village! Precursor Basin is completely inaccessible until you do so, and a portion of Boggy Swamp also cannot be completed until the connection is made.

Speaking of the teleporter, it serves as a quick way to travel back to Sandover Village, should you have left anything undone and wanted to go back to finish it off.

The Archeologist and The Gambler must be spoken to in order to activate their relevant objectives in the Precursor Basin. This is the one time in the game where you must actually talk to the relevant NPCs for a level task in order to perform it. Amusingly, Samos also has a task in the Basin but you don't have to talk to him for it.

The strong man is the one time a Precursor Orb trade results in something other than a Power Cell being obtained. He needs to be paid off in order to restore the pontoons leading to the Boggy Swamp and the Mountain Pass, which correspondingly also needs to be done to complete the game. The Lurkershark is extremely aggressive in that section of the water, so your odds of getting past him without the pontoons restored are slim at best.

I've been meaning to mention this for awhile, it really annoys me how the main collectibles of this game both start with the letter P. I keep mixing up Precursor Orbs and Power Cells despite my best efforts. It definitely doesn't help the Precursors get brought up a ton, so that word is on my mind a lot more!

[Cullen]

Part 7 is out! We tackle the most Zoomer intensive level in the game, Precursor Basin! I always have to stop myself from saying "this is the one Zoomer-only level of the game" because obviously the connecting levels between hub areas are also Zoomer-only. This is the only main level with the standard 8 Power Cells that is done strictly on the Zoomer, is the more accurate way to put it. Interestingly, it's also the last time we see the Zoomer in a main level. I guess they blew all their objective ideas on this one!

Starting with a general LP tip, always keep back up saves when making an LP! I was just about finishing up the video when a momentary power outage hit my apartment and shut down all my devices for a second. One second is all it took to undo all that work! If I hadn't been copying my save file before the start of each video, I'd have had to redo the whole game up to this point. Don't let that happen to you! I'm just thankful it didn't happen when I was recording the Yakushima vacation in Persona 3 Reload yesterday. That'd have been an hour I would have been livid to lose. Luckily Jak and Daxter is a short game and I'm making short videos, so it was only a minor annoyance.

The Basin time trial is remarkably simple. So long as you keep moving forward, you can actually clear it with a couple seconds to spare without hitting any of the time savers. It's arguably better to do it that way as jumping off lurkers or taking blue eco has a nasty tendency to send you into a wall and end up costing you time.

I didn't get to mention it in the video, but if you take a jump off any of the Lurkers, they don't respawn after the race. You'd need to blow up your Zoomer to get them back and have them available for a re-attempt, which is kind of silly.

In the lost recording, I got the Thunder Mole task done ridiculously quick. Easily the fastest I've ever gotten it, they all dived into the hole at the first opportunity, at one point two of them dived in at once. In this way, it was kind of good I lost the initial recording because this video shows a much more typical attempt of the task. The game is very finnicky about how the moles need to approach in order to dive into the hole, so don't be surprised if you have to make several laps around the first Basin area to get them to go in.

As long as you take turns and corners tighter than the flying Lurkers, it's not too tough to take them out. You are also ever so slightly faster than them, so if you're struggling with that you can eventually tail them enough that you overtake them.

I ended up getting my fastest clear of the Dark Eco Plant (not to be confused with the boss we fought previously) task. I feel like the plants regrow faster on the PS4 version, but that just might be paranoia. I think it is possible to clear every plant in one pass, but it won't shock you to find out my driving isn't nearly good enough to pull that off.

This is the last time we see a Green Eco vent in the game. Thankfully it's also in an area where we are constantly clipping dark eco boxes, so it can be put to good use.

Make sure you now how to hop with the Zoomer! The Power Cell hanging over the second Basin area cannot be collected without that, and several of the Blue Ring challenge jumps also need a hop to clear.

For the most part, the timers on the ring challenges aren't too demanding. Any ring that requires a jump or is on an overhead pass you can fall from will expire if you screw up though, so I'd recommend just driving back to the start of the challenge if that happens.

I think Naughty Dog was pretty enamored with the Zoomer gameplay, because for better or worse vehicles become a much bigger focus of the Jak series as it goes on. The 4th game, Jak X, is a pure racing game even!

[Cullen]

Part 8 is out! We venture into the Lost Precursor City this time, an easy level that I am terrible at! Funnily enough though, on this recording my major blunders are on one of the easiest parts that I've never had problems with. Gave me a chance to learn something new at least.

There's no visual cues for when the water will become electrified (aside from when it turns yellow, obviously), so you just have to get a feel for the cycles. There are also no consistent cycles, every pool is slightly different. Some are constantly electrified to serve as a persistent obstacle.

The rotating pressure platforms are a beautiful dual example of an underused game mechanic. Not only is this the only level with these kind of platforms in the game, they are so slow and cumbersome to work with and the layout of the level allows you to just ignore them entirely. It is much faster and easier to just blow past them and get through the rooms containing them with effective uses of your jumps.

Relatedly, the vacuum pipe challenges give you way more time than you could ever need for getting the scout flies if you ignore the rotating platforms. There is a chance to fail the Power Cell challenge, but the time given is generous enough that you can wait about on the retracting platform cycles and still make it with plenty of time to spare.

The light up platform task is ridiculously easy and I can't believe the stupid puffer dragon invited so many errors on it from me. It works like any other puzzle of this type, all platforms need to be lit up and you can't double back to a previously lit platform. The jumping route is very simple, and the only potential rub is if you fall in the permanently electrified water, which resets the platforms. I actually did not know this before doing this recording since I've never done that on this task before. Go me!

You have no way to slow Jak down when he's sliding (another mechanic that is exclusive to this level), so don't be surprised if you blow past some of the Precursor Orbs along the way. Luckily the slide is rich in ways to blow yourself up and try again.

The orbs you need to charge with Blue Eco have a timer that's just about equal with a full Blue Eco charge. Should you run out before powering them all, they'll begin to deactivate in sequence. The room has a simple layout though, so this shouldn't be a big problem.

The escape sequence at the end, like the vacuum challenges, is very generous with time. If you miss any retracting platform cycles, you have more than enough time to wait for them. Slow ledge climbs also won't set you back too much. So long as you've collected every Precursor Orb to this point, the escape ends with you getting the last of the 200 you need. Be prepared for a jaunt back through the entire level if you had the misfortune of missing any!

Since the Blue Eco Chamber takes you out of the city to get the Power Cell it has, it's ideal to do it after the Dark Eco Escape. Otherwise, you get a slow cutscene to leave the city, then have to watch it again to go back, and then see it a third time since this is the fastest way to leave the City once you're done.

[Cullen]

Part 9 is out! Our destination this time is the dour Boggy Swamp, a fairly easy though somewhat ugly and annoying level. Doesn't quite have the character drama of Dagobah to get me invested in it. Fortunately, it's all uphill from here!

I was watching speedrun history for the game and I learned from it that you can dash punch off a ledge and perform an uppercut mid-air by pressing the jump button (you can also dash punch into an uppercut from the ground with the same inputs). Depending on your timing with it, you can get considerable air time and momentum with this, particularly when extended with a spin attack! It kind of reminds me of how you could roll off a ledge in Donkey Kong Country to perform a mid-air jump. Had I known this move prior to the LP, I probably would practiced with it more to find my own personal uses for it. We'll see if I find anything cool to do with it in the future!

Yellow Eco is a lot more realized that Red Eco, and considerably more is done with it from this point forward in the game. There are plenty of crates you need it to bust, and the two boss fights remaining in this game both revolve around usage of it.

It doesn't come up in a serious capacity in this level, but you can press Triangle to go into First-Person view and aim with Yellow Eco to fire it at specific targets. This will be a major feature of a future level with Yellow Eco.

I'm positive there's some specific type of jump I'm supposed to make at that orb trail by the first tether, but I can never figure what it's supposed to be. I have a particularly embarrassing hard time grabbing the last orb in this recording.

We get our first and also penultimate appearance of Flut-Flut as a ride in this game! I have a feeling more was probably intended to be done with Flut-Flut but it just never came to fruition. Darn, she's a good Yoshi for this game. Anyway, the section she is in is very brief. We'll get a more interesting challenge in her second appearance.

The shooting mini game can be quite frustrating but I did pretty well in it for this recording. Just keep yourself centered as much as possible, and periodically pan the camera if you're worried something might be heading off to the right or left that you didn't see. Always keep yourself focused on the things that are the closest as well, and you should get through this with minimal issues.

We're quite a bit ahead on Precursor Orbs and Power Cells at this point! Once we make it to the next hub area, we'll be able to perform most available trades and technically only need a handful of cells to finish the game. The final Cell count you need is 72, so we're only 6 off from that!

[Cullen]

Part 10 is out! We hit up Boss 2 of 3 with the giant Lurker Klaw, who is thankfully a much more involved fight than the Dark Eco Plant. Afterwards, we get our obligatory Zoomer connection level, get our equally obligatory bombshell plot reveal, and then clean out the rest of our new hub area.

Klaw can be quite frustratingly random. While he generally shoots to the platform you're on, sometimes he'll just decide to wing a shot towards the opposite side to throw you off. It becomes pretty annoying on the final cycle where he shoots so fast, he can chuck rocks in a nearly undodgeable pattern. It's best to just do a lap back and forth across the three platforms and keep a hawk's eye on the rocks as they fire once you hit phase 3.

The remaining Zoomer levels do have orb trails in addition to boxes when it comes to Precursor Orbs. It is much harder to maintain a clean line to collect these, and I've never been able to get them all in a single run.

The race in Mountain Pass itself is quite easy. While the Lurkers do get a head start, your general speed is a decent amount faster than them. A single Blue Eco boost will allows you to easily overtake them, from which point you can essentially just cruise to victory.

With some very precise platforming, it is possible to get the final Power Cell in the Mountain Pass on foot. I don't really consider that to be worth going out of my way for though, and we eventually need to open up Yellow Eco events anyway.

Turns out our goal for this quest (fittingly named Gol) is actually the bad guy! Fun fact about Gol, in some of the most random celebrity casting for a game I've ever seen, he's voiced by Twisted Sister lead singer Dee Snider. Guess someone at Naughty Dog has recently heard We're Not Gonna Take It and felt he'd be perfect for the game.

Volcanic Crater is distinct from the previous hubs in its almost complete lack of NPCs, no real objectives given beyond the one Samos has, and there's only two main levels for it. There was a planned third level called Yosemite, which I believe even has remnant map data buried in the game code, but for some reason or another it got cut. The lack of this level is probably the reason for the strange cell totals for finishing the game and why the levels past Sandover Village suddenly have a higher Precursor Orb total.

Incidentally, the game's design docs revealed that there was originally supposed to be 5 hubs (one for each Eco Sage) with 20 distinct levels altogether. This was far too ambitious to put into what is just about a launch title for the PS2, so it got pared back to the 3 hubs and 12 main levels that are in the final game. This also leads to the amusing introduction of the Yellow Eco Sage out of nowhere in the final level, a character who otherwise goes completely unreferenced. Personally, I don't think it was the end of the world that some levels got cut, since the game ended up being just about the perfect length.

The Gondola to Snowy Mountain requires that you grab at least two Power Cells after reaching Volcanic Crater in order to use it. Considering you can easily buy up the Miners entire stock when you get here, I'm not even sure why they really bothered with this particular progression gate.

Navigating to Spider Cave is by far the most annoying thing to do in the game. You either have to ride the extremely sluggish mine carts (especially on the middle track) or you have to finagle your way across the track via jumping, and it is way too easy to fall between the obnoxiously spaced slats. There was like 4 minutes cut from the recording of me just barely missing a standable piece of the track and falling to my death.

[Cullen]

Part 11 is out! After re-powering the Gondola (the most arduous sidequest in the game, for sure) we can now ascend Snowy Mountain and pick up a whole pack of Power Cells we don't actually need! It's worth it for the fun though, as Volcanic Crater is home to some of the most complex levels we'll find ourselves faced with in Jak and Daxter.

The snow Lurkers respawn infinitely, and they are damn annoying because it's remarkably hard to judge the correct distance to strike them from with how much the deep snow obscures Jak. To make matters worse, they can pop in right over us if we're unlucky. Don't be surprised if you eat a few deaths from these clowns.

This level is quite rich in annoying enemies actually. The little bouncing Lurkers move incredibly erratically, and the ice Lurkers charge you like a bat out of hell once they spike up and cannot be hurt again until they damage you. With the snow and ice severely hampering Jak's foot movement, the damage can rack up quick and there isn't nearly enough Green Eco to offset it. Thank god this game doesn't have a live system.

While there is one more instance of Red Eco in the final level of the game, this level is the last time anything is really done with it in a meaningful capacity. They did at least come up with some cool ideas for it with the glacier troops and the bouncer gauntlet.

The Precursor Blockers are quite annoying to deal with as the game is very inconsistent with letting you clear the barrier. There's also nothing in the level telling you you're supposed to jump on these things, and the wonky hit detection can make it easy to think these are pure obstacles. It's not uncommon to see people get confused about how they're supposed to complete the Precursor Block task.

Ice movement is quite rough in Jak and Daxter. Your starting momentum is abysmal but you carry it into jumps heavily, so it's easy to bump enemies or fall off cliffs as you slide along it.

Normally I usually rack up a few deaths due to health loss in this level, but this recording instead I stumbled on the platforming a lot. The path to the Yellow Eco Vent release can be quite trick to deal with due to the ice physics and the locked perspective you're given that makes it hard to judge jump distance or even just angle yourself properly.

Speaking of Yellow Eco, aside from the Mountain Pass Power Cell we needed to open the vents for, there are some Precursor Orbs in Spider Caves that can only be obtained with the vents opened. Past that, this unlock doesn't see much use. There are no Red Eco Vents to open in the game, and given how Keira didn't have any comment for this one, they likely just considered the whole system an afterthought at this stage.

This is the last time we see Flut-Flut in the game, but at least it's a cool platforming segment for her!

Mountain Pass can actually be crossed on foot once you clear the race, and with some very precise platforming you can obtain the Power Cell that requires the Yellow Eco vent to be open without said vent being open. It's pretty tricky to pull off though, and we had to open the vents anyway if only to get the Cell it held, so it's not really something to seriously consider.

We clean up the remainder of the trades in the game. There are 470 excess Precursor Orbs left to collect, and there is no reward for getting them all beyond formally getting 100% on your save file. Shame they couldn't put any unlocks behind them like the sequels did, although the Orbs there are basically a completely different system to this one.

[Cullen]

Part 12 is out! After a playthrough that was merely pretty smooth up to this point, this time I punch through and deliver something that's truly master class in garbage gameplay. We all have those levels that go pear shaped for us, I'm sure.

As you can see at the start, the timing is quite tight for getting the final Volcanic Crater Power Cell. You can definitely make it with about a quarter of the yellow eco gauge left with a really clean route and no ledge grabs, but I instead just finished by the seat of my pants. The one mercy is that the lock on for hitting the metal crate is quite generous, so it's not a huge deal if you only barely make it in range.

You can hit almost all the Crawling Lurkers from the first Yellow Eco Vent, but it is quite slow and difficult to do so. It's a fun self imposed challenge to grapple with this game's absolute dog water first person view though!

The Dark Eco Crystals can be broken in any order, with the final one broken being the one to spit out the Cell. Come to think of it, I'm not sure that if the final one is submerged in water, if the broken crystal spits the cell out of the water? Something for the folks at home to try!

You don't need to light any of the Eco Crystals to make it through the blackout section, but I didn't feel like memorizing the route so I played it pretty standard.

It's quite easy to miss Precursor Orbs in this level, so be extra thorough, and remember that most of the Crawling Lurkers drop some as well! This is the last time in the game enemies drop Precursor Orbs, something we haven't seen since the Dark Eco Plant.

The Spider Caves has the second and last moment (to my knowledge anyway) that you need the Yellow Eco Vents open for, and this one cannot be bypassed by slick jumping. The 2 crates containing 10 Precursor Orbs altogether in the Spider's Nest cannot be blasted with any other source of Yellow Eco, it has to be that Vent.

With a precise jump from the second Blue Eco Platform by the scaffolding, you can jump to the top section of the scaffolding to grab the last Scout Fly and be closer to the Power Cell at the top, but we have to grab all the orbs anyway so it's little more than a cool novelty in a 100% playthrough.

I swear the timing is different for swinging from poles in this version of the game. Input lag, or cope? You decide!

[Cullen]

Part 13 is out! We've made it to the final Zoomer level of the game, Lava Tube! Functionally this place is pretty similar to Fire Canyon, though the temperature mechanic pretty much becomes a non-issue past the halfway point. In fact, if not for the collectibles this may just be the easiest Zoomer level in the game. Having to grab Precursor Orbs and Scout Flies does complicate things a bit, but mostly it just serves as a source of maybe 1 or 2 deaths in the first half. Since the video would be quite short if I just did Lava Tube, I also start a bit of the game's final level, Gol and Maya's Citadel!

All the Precursor Orbs for Lava Tube are in the first half, and they can be rather obnoxiously placed. They are mostly located in curved lines along the side of the track, and in one case there's a jump where you have to actually brake to make sure you don't vault over the last couple orbs in the trail. Even more obnoxiously, one trail is located on the opposite side of the tube from a Scout Fly, which will ratchet up your temperature if you fail to get them and then quickly move to the opposite side. Thankfully, we only have to worry about orbs in the first half of the level, as mentioned previously. I kind of suspect this level originally had 100 Orbs, since the varying paths in the second half are kind of needless without any orbs to collect, but they felt they had to redistribute them when they decided to cut the third Volcanic Crater level. That's just speculation though.

Scout Flies aren't too bad, when charged with Yellow Eco you can blast crates to automatically obtain flies when on the Zoomer. I'm not sure how many, if any of these vents, are tied to the vent release in Snowy Mountain, but regardless there are clusters around for the one moment you do need Yellow Eco, and all the flies can still be obtained by driving over the crates regardless.

I mention this at the end of the video, but in most copies of the PS2 version of the game there's a famous error in Gol and Maya's Citadel that can allow you to skip the entire level. After the initial cutscene with Samos upon entering the Citadel, the game didn't actually have a proper load in point for if you save your game at this moment. So, as soon as the cutscene ends you could save your game, instantly load the file, and the game would place you at the top of the Citadel in front of the door to the final boss (since it has to put you somewhere), bypassing the need to rescue any of the Sages who normally allow you to reach that point. Most American copies of the game, including the Greatest Hits print from what I hear, have this error. Most international releases and the subsequent PS3 and PS4 ports fix this exploit.

All of the Sages are past platforming challenges, some iterating on old concepts and some introducing new obstacles at the 11th hour. The Red Sage has a fairly straightforward path, with his main obstacle revolving around combat instead. The rotating platforms can be a little tricky to navigate though, I cut out quite a bit of falling as I literally fell victim to my own impatience.

[Cullen]

The grand finale is out! We clean out the Citadel, save the day, and Daxter comes to terms with the fact he's going to be a fuzzy rodent for the rest of his life. Time for some miscellaneous ramblings and some final thoughts!

I feel like the path to the Blue Eco Sage was supposed to be platforming challenge and the Launch Pad challenge, but they couldn't come up with anything for the Yellow Eco Sage and just divided the two challenges to give the Yellow Eco Sage SOMETHING to make getting to him tough. It's funny how he's the only Sage that doesn't feature his Eco type at all for the unique challenge to rescue him. I mean I guess Samos also doesn't, but at least Green Eco is everywhere.

While you do need 101 Power Cells to truly get 100%, you only need 100 Cells to see the full bonus scene after the credits finish. It's not really clear why that is, though I remember reading a long time ago that some copies of the game had a bug in the Precursor Basin where the Gambler's race challenge only gave you 1 second to complete it. Supposedly the Cell total was set to 100 to account for the possibility of this bug so no player would be denied the bonus scene, but I'm skeptical if that's actually true.

Sadly, we don't actually get to directly fight Gol and Maya which is a big shame in my opinion. I like to think that was something they were planning, a multi-stage fight with Gol and Maya capped off with the Precursor Robot, and then that just had to be scrapped as the deadline closed in and only the robot phase was retained. Certainly wouldn't be out of place with the other bits of cut content in the game!

I'm going to hazard a guess whatever they had planned for that gate in the bonus scene originally, it wasn't at all like what ultimately happens in Jak II. Or maybe it was a Kingdom Hearts thing where they created a striking visual sequence and then wrote in meaning for it later on.

And that's the game and the LP! I had a blast coming back to this game. Jak and Daxter isn't a game that will light the world on fire, but it is extremely solid in design with nearly perfect pacing. About the only stumble point is the end, where the conclusion definitely rushes in, but that only becomes super noticeable on replay. It reminds me a lot of Donkey Kong Country in terms of how I feel about it. It's definitely derivative of something Mario has already done, and doesn't necessarily innovate on that formula, but it does streamline aspects of it for a very fun and engaging experience you could easily spend a single afternoon on. I especially appreciate the complex movement mechanics plus the genuine effort to try and make a seamless game world. The game is an impressive early showing of the capabilities of 6th gen consoles versus their 5th gen predecessors, and numerous visual effects of the game still hold up quite well. Certainly, it hasn't aged as poorly as other early PS2 games, with the cartoony style working very well with the rubbery textures common in 2001-2002 PS2 games. Do I plan to play Jak II after this? I'd certainly like to! I'm always floating game ideas around, and while I do have one thing I'd certainly prioritize over Jak II, that thing is completely up in the air for when I'll be able to make anything for it. I do need to get at least a couple practice playthroughs under my belt before I tackle that game, but it is absolutely on the table in spite of me usually not committing to LP'ing sequels.

As just a final thing, thank you so much to everyone who watched the videos and everyone who posted in the thread! Big ups to Tenebrais who was a consistent source of additional commentary on the game in the thread and pointed out some things I either never noticed or just didn't think about. I also should shout out Carbon dioxide, who probably unintentionally fired me up to try and make this the best I could with what I had available. Hoping to catch you all in the next thing I do, whether it be Jak II, Persona 3, or something else.