Daxter has a pretty awful Jak model. That's all I can say about it.
Yes, TLF is far more… "out there" in terms of story. But although TLF has little to no place in the cannon of the series, I did enjoy playing TLF on PSP far more than I enjoyed Daxter.
What's wrong with Daxter's gameplay?
I'd say it's good for anyone who liked the first game.
TLF, to me at least, is only good when you're on the ground playing as Jak, which unfortunately is only about 40% of the game. And even then, it was a tad too simplistic when compared to other Jak games.
Not to mention that the story didn't have anything to do with something of smaller scale like SM, SAC and Daxter, therefore it wasn't as charming.
I said before that id didn't enjoy it for whatever reason. It just wasn't fun for me, and I can't quite out my finger on why exactly it wasn't fun to play.
I played TLF before any other Jak games, so I was going in blind and found it quite fun. Although now I've played all the others I realise how out of place TLF is. I still found it quite fun though so I'll stick with that.
I played TLF before any other Jak games, so I was going in blind and found it quite fun. Although now I've played all the others I realise how out of place TLF is. I still found it quite fun though so I'll stick with that.
Heh, it was similar with SM to me. It was my second R&C game after QfB, so it really impressed me. "I can travel to other planets? I can buy weapons? I can look for collectibles? The characters are actually interesting? This is way too awesome!" I replayed it lately and man… It was so mediocre!
Since it's kind of relevant, I wrote this while I had nothing to do today.
It's basically a review of the first Jak game and I don't know if it's any good, so you can read it if you want.
The game opens up with narration, mainly talking about the Precursors, beings that lived thousands of years prior to the game’s events that left their advanced technology behind. We are then introduced to our protagonist, Jak, who is on his way to Misty Island.
In this game, Jak is a mute, much like Link in the Legend of Zelda series or a great number of JRPG protagonists. I was never convinced of the benefits in having a silent protagonist. It’s supposedly so the player can relate to him more, but a fleshed-out character could end up being a lot more relatable due to them having an actual character.
Not to say Jak doesn’t have a character, he still displays emotions through facial expressions, although that just highlights how jarring and unnecessary having him be a mute is.
Instead we are forced to tag along with Daxter, who besides having an annoying voice and some cringe-worthy one-liners, has no real purpose.
Shortly after the arrival on Misty Island we’re introduced to the game’s main antagonists, Gol and Maia, who are planning to use Dark Eco to destroy the world and reshape it to their liking.
It’s never really explained how this would work, it’s not like Dark Eco can control people. Then again the effects of Dark Eco are never really clear…
Either way they’re not very interesting, the plot point of Gol being a sage gone rogue doesn’t really go anywhere other than to undermine how pointless the whole game really feels, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Jak and Daxter stumble upon a Precursor artifact that doesn’t really have any meaning nor is it ever explained and they’re attacked by a Lurker, the game’s main enemy type. Attacking it causes Daxter to fall into a pool of Dark Eco which turns him into a weird animal thing. This just serves to underline how the effects of Dark Eco are never explained. If Jak falls into it he dies for some reason, despite the fact that he should turn into an animal just like Daxter.
They go back to Sandover Village where they hope to get aid from Samos, the sage of green Eco. He scolds Jak and Daxter for going to Misty Island and tells them that Daxter’s only hope of being changed back is talking to the sage of dark eco, who lives on the far north.
At this point it seems like everything is ready to go in order to start the game off, but we still have a new character to introduce, Keira. Who tells us about Power Cells and how they’re basically the Power Stars of the game and are needed to progress.
It’s only after 10 minutes of cutscenes that the game begins properly, and even then we’re still in the tutorial level. By now we’d be nabbing our second Power Star in Mario 64.
Jak is a fairly versatile character. He can double jump, spin kick, punch, do a ground pound and roll. Not unlike Naughty Dog’s previous platformer character, Crash Bandicoot.
In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that Jak and Daxter is very similar to Crash Bandicoot from the tutorial level due to how linear it is.
It isn’t until after it that the game really opens up and shows its true colours. Jak and Daxter is, for lack of a better word, Mario 64 but bigger. The game’s main selling point was its seamless open world devoided of loading times, which is not entirely true.
The game is divided into three hub areas, each containing three levels. In order to travel between each area you need to either use a teleporter or go through a loading screen disguised as an arbitrary vehicle section.
Going back to Jak’s controls for a second, he seems to be identical to Crash Bandicoot, which is not necessarily a bad thing, Crash does control really well, the problem here is the level design.
Jak is not nearly as fast as he should be in a game like this, you can sort of remedy this by rolling, but it still takes an unnecessarily long amount of time to get from place to place.
This remedied somewhat with the Eco power ups, which unfortunately are timed. Blue Eco speeds Jak up and makes collectibles attract to him. It’s also the only Eco power to have context sensitive abilities due to its ability to interact with Precursor technology.
Red Eco gives Jak double strength, which ends up not really meaning anything because most enemies die in one hit anyway. It seems that even the developers realized this, as there’s only about 2 areas in the entire game where it appears in.
Yellow Eco gives Jak the ability to shoot fireballs, which is useful albeit a little situational due to the fact that most enemies are pretty easy to take down with melee attacks.
The main objective of the game is to collect Power Cells, which are this game’s Power Stars. Unlike Mario 64, however, you’re not booted out of a level every time you collect one.
This can be both a benefit and a detriment.
On one hand, the player doesn’t need to retrace their steps whenever they collect a Power Cell just to go back to where they were.
On the other hand the developers weren’t able to create many unique set pieces due to the open levels and the constant need to backtrack.
Despite supposedly being an open-world collect-a-thon, there are a handful of levels that are fairly linear where, instead of being an award for completing several tasks scattered throughout the level, Power Cells are simply a way of showing that the player’s making progress and following the correct path. Again, not unlike Crash Bandicoot.
After the first few levels the story quickly becomes irrelevant, it seems like the only reason you’re collecting Power Cells is for the sake of powering up a machine that will then unlock more levels. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, as I think a platformer shouldn’t interrupt the player due to an arbitrary story event happens. Instead each area houses various villagers that will give you tasks and reward you with a Power Cell for completing them. In essence, if you don’t know what to do on a given level then it’s a good idea to go back to the hubworld and talk to people for a bit. This gives inexperienced players a little safety net if they happen to get stuck while not impeding the progress of players more familiar with the game, something less and less games are doing nowadays .
However the game seems to constantly introduce new gimmicks with each level, some good and some bad.
Unfortunately I think there far more bad ones then there are good.
For example, in The Lost Underwater City the player is forced to constantly use these rotating set of platforms in order to advance, simply because some ledges are a bit too high.
In the Snowy Mountain level the player must constantly deal with ice physics and infinitely spawning enemies.
The only pure platforming level in the game is the final level, in which the player must go through 4 fairly linear platforming sections in order to rescue each sage.
After a fairly anticlimactic boss battle with a giant Precursor robot in which you spam Yellow Eco until it dies, the game ends on a cliffhanger which would ultimately lead to its sequel, Jak 2.
Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is not a bad game by any means, however it is simplistic and the only thing it has going for it is its seamless world with no loading times. Other than that it’s a fairly standard platformer.
It’s sad to see that the developers behind the Crash Bandicoot games weren't able to craft games of that caliber on the PS2, however it was new technology at the time and it wouldn't surprise me if the whole purpose of Jak and Daxter was to showcase the PS2’s power and to assure Sony that, even without Crash Bandicoot, Naughty Dog was still able to create a mascot platformer with little difficulty.
Despite this the game was a huge success and it spawned 2 more sequels on the PS2.
Who knows, maybe later on Naughty Dog was able to create something even grander than this game, as now they had more creative freedom due to their success…
darkstar so you dont like jak 1
darkstar so you dont like jak 1 ? you also dont seem to like any ratchet and clank games by what ive seen in past threds so what do you like?
Um… The only game in the series he really complains about is ACiT and he brought up many times that he loves UYA.
darkstar so you dont like jak 1 ? you also dont seem to like any ratchet and clank games by what ive seen in past threds so what do you like?Um… The only game in the series he really complains about is ACiT and he brought up many times that he loves UYA.
opps thats another guy nevermind
I've been playing TLF recently and… it's surprisingly fun once you get invested in it…
Every other time I had played this game I always just went after the story stuff and nothing else, but raiding ships, racing and hunting down scrap and dark eco for upgrades is really fun.
If you ignore the story and focus more on the gameplay, it's probably the best Ratchet & Clank game out there.
I agree, Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier is the best R&C game.
No but seriously, TLF is a good and fun game that I really enjoyed, but I do prefer the original trilogy… oh and pretty much every R&C game.
Now that I'm past the halfway point (when you get to the second flight area) the game is REALLY boring.
I remember why I don't like it now. New Eco Powers stopped being interesting and I don't really want to upgrade my ship because I can't get anything good from raiding.
And other than that there's only the story left… which kind of speaks for itself.
TLF started off really strong but it's nose diving into mediocrity now.
I feel that the ending was pretty alright. Then again my copy glitched out in ero Mode and all the levels were re-ordered, so I had a lot more fun when the game was all nonsense 
Since I've been playing TLF an awful lot recently, I decided to some research about it and I think that I found some very interesting stuff (in case anyone cares and/or doesn't already know about it.
So first off, before the game was even released, two interesting videos were leaked online, both of which are cutscenes from the beginning of the game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsbQHkXfd-I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbzNHW9r_Ls
These cutscenes were supposedly from Naughty Dog's version of the game, of which we learned more in an article on IGN.
Here's the part about TLF:
“The PSP game was interesting,” Thompson recalls. “[Naughty Dog] had this other idea for a Jak game. At the time, they were really excited about PSP. The real issue with PSP, and in general with the studio, is that Naughty Dog is a group of industry professionals that craves cutting-edge technology, bleeding-edge technology. At the time, the PSP, even though it was really popular and successful, it just wasn’t enough to keep the people here satisfied and focused. They needed a bigger challenge.”
With that said, the handheld Jak game the studio was developing for a while looked, by all accounts, very promising. “They’d come up with this really cool tech demo,” Thompson continued, “[and] we had a couple of levels working on the PSP. The game was going to be awesome. We were super excited about it, because it was basically taking concepts from Jak X, but actually fulfilling what we wanted to do, with parts that were meaningful.”
“You could create your own airships and cobble together all these things with these different stat bonuses and actually have meaningful engagements in the air,” Thompson explained. “You could jump from plane to plane. It was going to be really cool. But we couldn’t get anybody here to work on it, so we put it on the cooler for a while.”
Creative Director Neil Druckmann, who today is famous for his work on The Last of Us, toiled away on the aborted PSP project for quite some time. After interning at Naughty Dog during the development of Jak 3 and working hard to prove himself with menial tasks during Jak X’s brief dev cycle, Druckmann finally got to jump into design with Jak & Daxter on PSP.
“When that project was starting up, I went and asked Evan Wells, I told him I wanted to switch over to design. He’s like, ‘no, we hired you as a programmer.’” To prove himself, Druckmann would spend his off hours doing level design and bouncing his ideas off of Wells, pestering him for his advice as his work got undeniably stronger and stronger. I had somebody coming to my office to resign almost weekly, if not daily. Lots of the e-mails going out saying, ‘this is farewell.’
“Then we started to move to [Adobe] Illustrator,” Druckmann said. “[Wells] said, ‘okay, this looks good on paper. Let’s see how you can do it in Illustrator.’ So I learned Illustrator, did all that, kept bugging him over and over again until he just got tired of me and said, ‘okay, fine.’ When we started Jak PSP, I became a designer on that. Than we worked on that for a while.”
But this PSP title – which would ultimately be fleshed-out and finished at High Impact Games under the moniker Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier – had to be abandoned, not because it was bad, but because Naughty Dog simply wasn’t capable of developing two games at the same time at this point, especially when splitting focus between two entirely different platforms.
“First off, the PSP team was awesome,” McIntosh said. “It was so much fun. That was the most fun I ever had making games. We got that game up and running in like three months, straight port, and it was a full vertical slice. That was a lot of fun… [But] the reason the PSP team was killed was not because of the PSP project. It was because of Uncharted. It was because we needed those people on Uncharted. It just wasn’t working.”
Josh Scherr went more in-depth about the reasons for Jak PSP’s cancellation. “What happened with the PSP game is that we realized Uncharted would never happen if we still had people working on the PSP game. I’m sure there were some other decisions too, like questioning whether the effort of making the PSP game would be financially worth it to the company and all that sort of thing. I wasn’t privy to those decisions.”
“But it just became very evident that Uncharted needed more people and the fastest way to get more people was to shelve the PSP game and bring all those people back to Uncharted. That was the primary motivation behind that.”
“We had done a lot of work, a lot of cinematics on the PSP game,” Kurosaki said. “I was really proud of it… That whole opening cinematic [in the final game] was basically shot-for-shot what we did.”
At the end of the day, the rampant uncertainty pervading the studio, the low morale in every corner of the building from chipping away slowly at two new, difficult projects, and the need for Uncharted to be the major focus of everyone at Naughty Dog forced management to put Jak away for good. “We thought bad things were going to happen” during this time, McIntosh admitted. “A lot of people were worried about the studio surviving.”
“We have passionate people here that love doing their jobs,” Wells said. “They want to be able to create. They want to make awesome art. They want to design cool levels. It was a period of probably 12 months where the productivity was so low, and everything [for both projects] was still conceptual. There was nothing concrete where you could say, ‘this is what the game’s going to be, this is how the game’s going to look.’ People started to get restless and concerned with all the changes that were going on. They were losing faith. They were saying, ‘okay, I’m out.’”
“I had somebody coming to my office to resign almost weekly, if not daily. Lots of the e-mails going out saying, ‘this is farewell.’ It was tough to watch it happen. This could be it, you know? They could hand us the keys and we could let it all just die.”
“Fortunately,” Wells continued, “we made the decision to cancel the PSP project, because we were like, ‘all right, we just have too much. Our focus is spread too thin. We need to lay the focus on the most important thing, which is going to be the PS3. We have to get this first game right. We have to get our technology right.’ So we shelved that project.”
But as for the Jak & Daxter project that Naughty Dog never got to see through, there’s some regret. “At the time, it looked like [High Impact Games was] going to be able to do a pretty good job with it,” Thompson said. “I don’t want to say anything disparaging. I like the guys at High Impact. [But] if we had had to do it all over again, we would have done some things differently in the execution of The Lost Frontier. I’m not happy with that being Jak’s swan song. I think we could have done a lot better.”
And that's everything I could dig up on TLF, although I guess everybody already knew about this.
Also, here's some artwork from what I assume is Naughty Dog's version of the game, due to Jak's outfit.
That is interesting stuff. I never dove quite that deep into the story behind TLF's development. Thank's for enlightening me 
Those cutscenes did seem to have the Jak we all knew from the PS2 games thanks to his design, voice actor and general attitude towards everything. Although I was never actually too bothered by his new voice actor. I just didn't like how the game was set out and how the story was handled. I like to think the game could have been so much better.