“Where would you be without me, eh, Dax?”
“Well, Jak, I probably wouldn’t be two feet tall, fuzzy, and running around in a sewer without a pair of pants. God, I miss pants.”

Jak II is one of the stranger little stories in video game history. Jak And Daxter: The Precursor Legacy was released in 2001, and was a fun but otherwise unremarkable platformer, set in a world not too dissimilar to Naughty Dogs’ previous claim to fame, Crash Bandicoot, mixing together a vague tribal aesthetic with some science-fictiony-but-really-magic elements. You play Jak, a mute and perpetually smiling teenage boy; when exploring the forbidden Misty Island, his wisecracking best friend Daxter (Max Casella!) falls in a vat of eco – a magical fuel – and is transformed into an ottsel, so Jak goes on a quest to find a cure and in the process uncovers the plan of a pair ofsupervillains to take over the world. It’s the kind of setting where you have both a mystical shaman who lives in a wooden hut, and his daughter, the spunky mechanic who builds hoverbikes. It was a fun game filled with great platforming puzzles and beautiful settings, but it was about as exciting and novel as a straight-to-video Disney sequel.

Two months beforehand, one of the most groundbreaking games of all time, Grand Theft Auto III, had been released. It showed us all that a video game could be everything – that you could beat the crap out of a bunch of guys, steal their guns, shoot even more people up, then get in a car and get into a car chase, then explore a city looking for things to collect, all fluidly and without a single loading screen. A year later, the sequel, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was released, and introduced even more ridiculous gameplay and tonal elements. The message was received: a video game can and should do everything. Like all profoundly impactful works, this meant a massive wave of inferior copies that at the time were derisively called “Grand Theft Auto ripoffs”.

A year after Vice City, Jak II was released, and from the outside it looked like a conceptual nightmare. Jak and friends are flung five hundred years into the future, where their home has become a fascistic city in the middle of an apocalyptic hellhole, run by a villain named Baron Praxis (Clancy Brown!). Praxis captures and tortures Jak for two years, pumping him full of eco and giving him the Hulk-like ability to turn into Dark Jak (as well as the ability to speak in a gruff voice). Jak breaks out of prison and joins the resistance specifically and only to get revenge on Praxis. Even then, Darker and Edgier was a cliche, and even at the age of thirteen I had to ask if this was a property that really needed guns and carjacking and swear words (one of Daxter’s first lines after the two year jump is “Remind me never to piss you off!” which to my naive sensibility was like hearing Iago the parrot tell the Aristocrats joke).

Somehow, Jak II is one of the greatest PS2 games of all time, both a blockbuster critical and commercial success upon release and holding up every time I’ve come back to it a lot longer than most of my other games from that era, and so much of it really comes down to polish and discipline. Jak II was the company’s fifth platform game in eight years, and the GTA elements weren’t so much replacing those ideas as they were being grafted onto them. The guns, the car chases, the superpowers; these are all reduced to their simplest expression and polished to a mirror sheen, and they break up the more traditional platforming puzzles to create a more diverse set of experiences and tones.

Interestingly, this also extends to the aesthetic and story. Visually speaking, this is one of the most beautiful PS2 games ever released – conventional wisdom has always been the more ‘realistic’ the graphics the better, but I’ve always found that games that shoot for style and caricature tend to age better, and this game shoots for a CG equivalent to the Disney cartoons of the Nineties – something simpler, cartoonier, and full of personality and expression. The tribal aesthetics of the first game become another element to play in – often you’re simply exploring the city, sometimes you’re exploring ancient ruined temples again, and sometimes you’re exploring parts of the city that have been built over ancient ruined temples. One of the most breathtaking visual moments I’ve ever experienced in a game is in a mission set at the top of the palace, high above the city; even knowing that it’s probably a static image projected onto the  does nothing to break the sense of vertigo I get looking down and seeing the city.

And I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a great story – none of the emotional arcs or characters have really stuck with me over the years the way others did – but it is a functional one where I’m delighted to see what happens next. One of the things that lightens the need for good storytelling in video games is that cutscenes can simply be another reward for completing the game – you get past this section, and you’ll be able to see Daxter tell more jokes. The appeal is less in great storytelling and more in the exploration of cool ideas, and the ideas are diverse enough to carry us through; there’s a few Dramatic Twists, one of which is exactly like Obidiah Stane’s character shift, but they’re all rooted in the invented world we’re playing in and the specific rules it runs on – which means several of them are based on time travel, which makes them objectively awesome. For a video game, the gameplay can serve the same purpose as a plot in a novel – a single idea around which other ideas can accrue without having to find closure.