My Thoughts On Major Themes, Story Telling, And Gameplay After Replaying Ratchet & Clank (2002)
For context first, I collect PlayStation 2 games. This is half because of their incredible cover art and weighty packaging; and half because I have a soft spot specifically for that moment in gaming from my childhood. To prove that I was actually collecting things that have value years later instead of letting a pile of 20 year old toys collect dust I am playing through my continuously growing stack of polycarbonate plastic disks. I started with one that I knew that I could finish in a reasonable amount of time and that was Insomniac Games breakout success, 2002’s Ratchet & Clank. This game forever changed my perception of level design and video game story telling by adding an integral twist to the already established mascot platformer. To warn you, I will be spoiling the game so you can’t say that I never told you.
Playing this game again as an adult has led me to understanding its themes much greater than I had as a kid (As with all animated media). The most glaring is the central theme to the game being that once again your worst enemy is corporate greed and what the game likes to call “socio-economic disparity”. At every turn you are greeted with a wild cast of characters that have fun one-off jokes and almost all have you help with some form of issue that revolves in the same orbit. This being that they don’t have enough money. This is made abundantly clear in every interaction, you can be saving someone’s life and they will still charge you to pick up a gadget that they’re carrying. From one of the very first interaction with the plumber it is made abundantly clear that no one needs saving, their wallets do. You even come across cities under a bombing raid that still has its civilians trying to make a buck in a sale. The only shame is that you never feel the same way. In a lot of ways you feel like the only rich guy in a cast of characters struggling to make ends meet. A good example of this is when you reach Blackwater City and Quark’s bouncer says that he only makes 5 bolts an hour even though it took you 2 seconds to make like 200 bolts by breaking a crate that was in the same room as him.
Another piece of this is in the main villain and the games environmental storytelling. Ultimate Supreme Executive Chairman Drek acts as a dictator for his race the Blarg and runs a mega corporation named “Drek Industries”. Drek and his army go from world to world taking resources needed to create a new home for his people even if it means by extreme force. When you play as our heroes you try to stop him by chasing him through his wake of destruction. As you travel, you see Drek’s forces chopping down entire forests, dumping toxic waste into ocean worlds, waging wars over resources, polluting worlds using large factories, and running ethically immoral experiments among only a few of the awful stuff you see coated over by a thick layer of comedic writing and colorful cartoon aesthetic. And as all great science fiction goes, Ratchet & Clank details the destructive force that our current consumption and lifestyle as a society has on the environment and on each other. It’s something that’s slammed in your face every few levels once you have learned to look for it and has become a main component to this game in particular for me. What is also really cool to me is that our main villain is not something fantastical like a similar game would and there is most certainly no shame in having a video game boss be a huge powerful being but it is really cool to see a businessman with a tight motive and nothing but a lot of money and hired guns at his disposal be the villain in a fantastical game world with cartoon aesthetics.
There is something in this game that also changed story telling for me and I’ve always appreciated this even as a kid. Insomniac was not afraid to make Ratchet an asshole in the beginning of this game. Ratchet starts as this guy that really just wants to see worlds other than where he grew up and get a lot of cool shit like hover boards and stuff. When confronted with the larger plot at hand he just says “sucks for those guys” then has a relaxed attitude and acts as if he is powerless to stop any of these large events from happening. And him and Clank spend a large chunk of the game actually torn up by Quarks betrayal, they take these petty snaps at each other that add this tension to their relationship which is not something you would expect from a mascot game. Not until Ratchet settles his vendetta with Quark does he realize that he can’t just sit and watch Drek destroy entire worlds. Even at the end of the game you see Clank walking away after they’ve dispatched evil and after all that they’ve been through the relationship seems rocky enough to cause him to believe that Ratchet doesn’t consider him a friend. This is until the audience is given final reassurance of the main protagonists bond. This character development is so well depicted through the medium by adding parts of the game where you can only play as one of the characters or the other and constantly having them go back and forth in cutscenes and play off of each other, it’s one of the best parts of getting to experience this game is seeing this friendship grow.
One thing that I did notice as an adult is the difficulty was a lot easier than as a kid which makes a lot of sense, but I now realize that it was at a detriment to the games main mechanic. The wide range of weapons and gadgets allow you take on most of the game in really creative ways, however it never forces you to. Most of the game can be tackled with only the wrench, Pyrocitor, and the Devastator. During a few specific harder encounters or when I felt a spark of imagination I would pull out something interesting which were my most memorable moments but I was bummed to see that as an adult with plenty of action gaming under my belt I could tackle any situation without all the toys at my disposal. I would love a version of this game as a new game plus that halves my ammo, making me mix up my strategies for constant fear of being low on bullets, or creating an economic situation that did force me to make decisions on which gadgets I wanted to take with me and made the weapons that I hardly touched at a reasonable price while ammo for the weapons I use obsessively go up. I even found that I loathed the quick select menu more and more as time went on, creating a false feeling of inventory limitation by allowing easy access to about 8 weapons when in reality I was only a moments pause away from any gadget in the game. Of course all of these gripes are personal to my experience, having been a fan of this series for my whole life it’s natural that I’d want a higher challenge and a variation in playstyle.
All that being said, the actual gameplay loop of Ratchet & Clank is phenomenal. Ratchet has an insane amount of platforming variation and soaring higher or shooting ahead faster with each Clank upgrade feels incredible. The few sections like Orxon and Oltanis give challenges that have you not using Clank or have you play as Clank that mix up traversal to remind you what it would be like without Ratchet and Clank working together. Each level is stylized for individuality and plays into sci-fi versions of the biome video game tropes like swamps, deserts, cities, and frozen tundra. They are all layered over with an excellent electronic soundtrack that adds another layer to the atmosphere and mood of each locale. The enemies can all be grouped into types but are all individual and unique to each world, even visual differences if they were already shown on a different planet. However the gameplay owes itself to how each weapon aims and how that pairs with the games traversal systems that allow you to dodge enemy attacks by shooting yourself into the air and best even enormous tanks and armed helicopters with some bombs and fancy footwork. The combat is revolutionary by engaging you in every mechanic that the game offers to allow impossible dodges using rocket boosts and impressive trick shots right out of side flips.
One last part of Ratchet & Clank that impressed me on return is the last level and its staging. Playing through Veldin at the end of the game is an awesome ending to the heroes adventure. You play through this level in the beginning but its shorter and less populated with enemies. On return, at the end of the game you are given a short nostalgia trip before being onset by legion of Blarg mercenaries and warships. It doesn’t challenge you with any puzzles compared to previous worlds but instead parades you through each type of puzzle to remind you of the journey you’ve had. I think that it builds on the players experiences really well and succeeds in accenting its already incredible level design. The fact that you are now fighting for Ratchets home world is also now very apparent as there hordes of enemies invading that surpass any amount of enemies you’ve faced until now (maybe not counting that one room on Gemlik Moon Base). An impressive moment during this level is a pan upwards at the Blarg home world looming just above Veldin when you use the magneboots, this gives me the same feeling as when you are seeing the moon in Majora’s Mask come ever closer. This all of course ending in your final showdown with Drek where he reveals that after exhausting every natural resource in this system he is going to get paid to do it all again somewhere else which destroys his one redeeming factor being that he might just want a home for his people. This engages a great boss fight that manages to combine both the games platforming with crowd control and a hard to decipher damage phase which I think makes it one of the most engaging fights on the PlayStation 2.
Ratchet & Clank on the PlayStation 2 is still an active space in content creation and to me that speaks volumes about what a retro game can still be to a large amount of gamers today. With good reason too, not only is this game still just plain fun in a way that not a lot of games have been able to replicate, but acts on themes that we are still hard pressed to find in this space. There is something special about a game like this that does not just get remade or translated to another system. Ratchet & Clank is an instant classic and yeah, it still plays like a Pixar film.
