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Boutros on 09 September 2014
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BlowoverKing said:
Boutros said:
BlowoverKing said:
Good, the best series won. And for anyone who knocks on the series because of the second game here's a link to help you out.

http://m.wikihow.com/Get-Good-at-Video-Games-with-Training

Except Jak II is hard for all the wrong reasons which creates frustration. I shouldn't die because of poor level design or unresponsive controls. The lack of checkpoints makes it very frustrating to die because of a crappy camera angle or a very hard task at the end of the level. It's also a cheap way to further lengthen the game. And besides Jak II is also a step down from the first game on pretty much everything anyway. I'm super surprised this game got a pass at the time it came out. Most people who play the game today see the flaws that were overlooked at the time perhaps because the game had a great presentation and was open-world.

I can find countless threads on vgchartz and neogaf discussing the issues:

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=164221

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=60828

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=508178

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=748550

I'm pretty sure even the developers retrospectively admitted that they made it too hard. Doesn't change the fact that it's a good game. For me it felt really good beating it for the first time since it actually challenged me. Out of all the games Jak 2 is hands down my favorite not only because of the challenge but also because the gameplay was imo the best in the series.

Hell my little sister who usually only plays Zelda and Pokémon beat all 3 games with relative ease and considers Jak 2 to be the best. So while some people had problems when they played many others had a blast.

@bolded Can you give me some examples?  Because other than the Daxter spider chase sequence the level design was great and I've never encountered unresponsive controls.

Every chasing scenes and other moments had depth problems that made it super hard to know where you were when jumping. Grinding using the Jet-Board was hell. Aiming with the guns was super inaccurate. It should have had a lock-on mode. And some missions were overall terrible like this one.

I still somewhat liked the game because what it does right it really does it well but I rarely see such glaring flaws in a game. It's poor difficulty design probably makes it all too obvious.