Lombax to the Future

a Ratchet & Clank Collection review

This article is part of a series called “Reviews You Can’t Use”, in which the author reviews games that are old. Too old. With one foot in the $5 bin at Walmart and the other on a banana peel. It’s like that thing that guy did where he made his son play through each generation of video games before I could play modern video games, except that I’m not my own son. Unfortunate, really. I never know what my father wants for Christmas, and this would solve that problem beautifully.

In recent years, dozens of old-but-not-too-old games have been re-released on modern consoles, revamped into “HD” versions that take advantage of the new TVs everyone bought because they accidentally broke their old ones by throwing Wii remotes into them. I personally have no problem with this, since the games that get this treatment were usually very good, and getting a fresh coat of paint rarely makes them worse. Ratchet & Clank Collection is a part of this trend, and is a repackaging and refreshing of the three Ratchet & Clank games from the PS2 era: Ratchet & Clank, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, and Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal. I knew that I would like Ratchet & Clank Collection because I owned and played all of these games when I was younger. I never finished any of them, however, so I thought it would be fun to go back, play them again, and finish them out.

The three games play very similarly. You control what is essentially an anthropomorphic meerkat (a creature called a “lombax” in game) named Ratchet and his robot buddy Clank. Each level is a planet (or some planet-like thing like a space station) that you fight your way through, platformer-style, using the variety of weapons and gadgets that you find and purchase over the course of the game. Some of these are predictable weapons like a blaster, a rocket launcher, or a sniper rifle, but most try to be some combination of creative and futuristic. The Tesla Claw shoots lightning. The Chopper shoots ninja stars that bounce in elegant arcs between nearby enemies. The R.Y.N.O. (“Rip You a New One”) just shoots a bunch of homing rockets at once. Most planets have multiple objectives, but advancing the storyline usually comes down to this: blast your way through the level until you either find the gadget/weapon at the end or you trigger the next plot point that tells you about a new planet. Then, go to the new planet, or go back to the place you couldn’t get through because you didn’t have the weapon or gadget that you just got. Lest this sound like biting criticism, the system actually works pretty well. It gives one latitude to explore, but it’s always pretty clear where the next destination is. Sometimes dogfighting/racing/giant-robot-based minigames are thrown in for some extra variety. These mini-games aren’t about to win any awards, but they’re not horribly broken, either, and they provide a refreshing distraction. Up Your Arsenal features a retro-styled side-scrolling platformer mini-game that is actually quite polished and could be a game of its own (a small, cheap, downloadable game, but a game nonetheless).

The bulk of Ratchet & Clank Collection is spent reveling in the joys of destruction. That’s how these games were marketed, after all. Toy with the elaborate weapons, blow away your enemies, and watch as money (in the form of bolts) spills out. Much of the environment (including basically every light fixture) can be destroyed for more bolts. These games exist to let you have that guns-blazing action hero fantasy, and if you don’t enjoy that even a little bit, you probably won’t like them. Still, one gets tired of that feeling eventually (at least I do), and the trilogy thankfully throws in a healthy number of puzzles. They’re not going to challenge you the way a kenken board does, but they at least make the gears turn, so-to-speak. Like the minigames, they’re a refreshing change of pace.

These things are only enough to make a good game, however. What makes Ratchet & Clank Collection worthwhile is that it combines this gameplay with a surprisingly entertaining universe. Perhaps thanks to the Hollywood-adjacency of the series’s developer (Insomniac Games is based in Burbank), the writing, animation, and voice acting is very good for a platformer, and it feels more than a little like you’re playing through a Pixar movie. I looked forward to the cutscenes, which is remarkable considering how some cutscenes of the period were almost physically painful to watch. Graphics are classic, cartoony science fiction, straight out of a space-age World’s Fair pavilion. Spaceships have fins and joysticks, and many items hover in midair for no apparent practical reason. Everything looks sharp in HD, although it bears mentioning that the UI of the first game has not aged well. Part of the blame for this lies with the fact that it is mostly based on blocks that look like CRT displays, which look quaint and antiquated instead of futuristic today. However, it still must be said that Insomniac seems to have figured out UI design somewhere in between the first and second games, because the latter two games have much better HUDs. The music is good, if not memorable in the way a Uematsu-composed Final Fantasy soundtrack might be. It takes inspiration from both the science fiction setting of the games and the cinematic feel of them, and the result is a combination of futuristic synthesizer and cinematic orchestra. When I heard a performance of Mason Bates’s “Mothership” a few months ago, I was strongly reminded of it. Finally, the writing is simply much better than the typical game of this genre. The games have an irreverent sense of humor that shines through whenever possible. You might suspect as much from a game with “going commando” or “up your arsenal” in its name. Even the serious moments in the plot are frequently punctuated with gags like characters forgetting that a camera is rolling or dealing with personal problems as they announce their plans to destroy you. Every once in a while, there are jokes that weren’t exactly meant to be gotten by the 14-year-old me that played these games the first time. (“My daughter tells me you’re good with your hands.” “Mr. President, I swear I didn’t…” “Can you fix our shields?”) All in all, it’s entertaining for reasons other than the explosions.

So, what’s bad, then? Honestly, the worst problem could be economics. In the first two games, there are many levels that end with a character wanting to charge you several thousand bolts for whatever MacGuffin you need to progress in the plot. I try to play somewhat thriftily, so I always had the bolts needed to go on, but what happens when you don’t? You just have to walk around shooting things until you have enough? Part of what I liked about the series was that it flowed pretty smoothly from planet to planet, and having to stop and destroy the scenery for 15 minutes to get a plot coupon jeopardizes that pretty intensely. There’s also a bit of an inflation problem. You probably won’t get all of the coolest weapons in the game, because they’re really expensive. The R.Y.N.O. costs significantly more than anything else in the first game, and there’s no way to buy it without serious grinding or, in my case, looking up an infinite money glitch on the Internet and wrapping a rubber band around my controller so that the glitch can run while I’m asleep and at work. Even then, it took almost 12 hours of continuously collecting money to get enough. Certainly cool things in games need to be costly to give the player goals, but there’s a line, and Insomniac crossed it. This is made somewhat better in the later two by the addition of mini-games as an alternative revenue stream, but even then, you have to really, really want to see the best weapons to have the patience to get them. In the third game, I finished all the mini-games, I did all of the optional missions, and I even collected all of the sewer crystals, and that still wasn’t nearly enough to buy all of the weapons and armor.

This is kind of funny when taken with the fact that the Ratchet and Clank universe appears to have runaway inflation problems. In the first game, you collect bolts from things you destroy and sometimes stumble across rare gold bolts that are either cleverly hidden or require you to finish a special challenge. In the next game, all of the bolts are gold, and platinum bolts become the super-rare variety of bolt. (Let’s ignore for a moment the uselessness of making a bolt out of gold or platinum.) Then, in the third game, the hidden bolts become titanium. I’m usually not a Paul Volcker devotee, but perhaps his input could be of use in the Bogon Galaxy.

The plot is also somewhat lackluster, though I feel as if this is more forgivable. It has a level of intrigue somewhere around the level of a Saturday morning cartoon. But then, that’s sort of what these games are. Well, it’s not bad, but don’t expect for deep feelings to well up inside of you or for any tearful epiphanies to occur.

I have to say that part of what made this trilogy especially enjoyable was seeing how the series changed over time, how our world had changed, and even how I had changed since the first time I bought the series. The large number of CRT displays in the first game stood out to me, and I realized that at the time it was released, it wasn’t such a crazy vision of the future. Today, the CRT is extinct. As I worked my way through the series, I saw that, while flat-panel displays did become more common, one still saw the occasional CRT. At that point, it becomes a stylistic choice, and it makes sense in the world that the Ratchet & Clank series takes place in. It’s not the future we think about now. It’s the future we envisioned back in the 50’s, before we had any idea that flat-panel displays were possible and before environmental preservation became a goal of society. We believed so fervently that science and industrialization would eventually lead us to a techno-utopia where we transcend the planet on which we began. How could nature be desirable? It’s what was already here. Surely whatever we humans built was better. Otherwise, why would we build it? The idea clicked with me when I was listening to an episode of Planet Money where they discuss what a World’s Fair would look like today. Back in 1964, the future we envisioned included a machine that cut down rainforest with a huge laser and paved over it. That seems just insane now. We’ve become horrifyingly aware of how much power humankind has over the earth and how wrong things can go when we exercise it irresponsibly. 14-year-old me wanted to live in the future of Ratchet & Clank, where the engineers had taken over and engineered for engineering’s sake. There were towers of metal, nanobots, and robots, oh so many robots. Modern me sees the problems with this. The gigantic corporations running the galaxy in each game are simultaneously funnier and sadder as I realize how much of a social commentary they actually are.

The ending of the first game had a similar effect. If you don’t want for me to spoil it, skip this paragraph. All throughout the game, you’ve been trying to stop a plot by Chairman Drek, the ruler of a species called the Blarg, who have polluted their home planet to the point of uninhabitability. Drek’s corporation has built a new planet for them to live on. Unfortunately, they’ve done so by stealing parts of everyone else’s planets. So yes, there’s your villain, profiting by stealing everyone else’s homes. And of course Drek plans to pollute the new planet to smithereens so that he can just sell the Blarg another one after that. He gets the classic Disney villain death where you drop a giant laser on his giant robot, leaving it unclear what happened to him and preserving the game’s T rating. Then, Ratchet gets the chance to use the giant laser that was going to destroy his home planet to destroy Drek’s new planet instead. He takes this chance. 14-year-old me would probably have been very happy with this ending. Karma and all that. 24-year-old me is not as at peace with the decision. It’s certainly an ill-gotten planet, but Drek is dead, and the damage was already done to the various homeworlds pillaged for its benefit. Where will the Blarg go now? They can’t go back to their old planet. Are we just going to scatter them across the other planets? You know the native populations aren’t going to be happy about that. How on earth (or off of earth, I suppose) will they get jobs? All we need on Earth to cause a refugee crisis is a revolution in a small Eastern European nation. This is a planet. One that was specifically stated to be overpopulated. Ratchet is hailed as a great hero in the aftermath, but what he really did at the end of the first game was turn a crime of war into an economic and diplomatic crisis.

It happens again in the third game. Again, skip this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers. The evil robot Dr. Nefarious builds a huge weapon called the Biobliterator, which he unleashes upon a huge, dense city. Our heroes are shocked to find that it has turned everyone in the city into a robot. They recoil in horror. They declare with more intensity than ever that Nefarious is truly evil and must be stopped. But wait a second. He didn’t kill anyone. This isn’t genocide. I mean, it’s certainly not okay, and he does need to be stopped, but the level of outrage seemed inappropriate. Honestly, when you consider the plan that he had before to amass a giant robot army and kill off all organic life planet-by-planet, the Biobliterator might be an improvement.

This story dissonance made me wonder more than once if I was just romanticizing something that was made for 14-year-old me and was chiefly enjoyed by 14-year-old me. But then I noticed something. I noticed that the map of the area around Dr. Nefarious’s giant weapon of mass destruction was labeled “Nefarious B.F.G.” I laughed. 14-year-old me wouldn’t have known what that was supposed to mean.

Bottom line: The only other platformers out there that are more fun or more polished than this are Mario games. And those don’t really have guns or humor to speak of.

Final Score: 8,370,122/10,000,000

Originally published at chrimifi.tumblr.com on December 15, 2014.