Game Anatomy: The Morph Gun

In between trying to “git gud” at Dark Souls (and generally failing miserably), I’ve been playing a few other games to keep my nerves from fraying.  Thanks to this past couple of weeks being really emotional because of my day job, positive, not negative, Dark Souls has been harder to play right now.  So, mostly, I was playing WoW, but on Friday, I picked up Uncharted 4, and I got a bit nostalgic for my childhood and I started to think about one of my favorite games of all time.

Copyright Sony and Naughty Dog. PAL version for cover because it’s cooler. Also, I’ve literally never seen it before.

Man, that’s a big picture.  Sorry 56k people.  Anyway, Jak II remains one of my favorite 3D platformers of all time, and that’s saying something because it came out during a golden age of these things in the early to mid 2000s on the Playstation 2.  Sly Coopers, Jaks and Ratchets and Clanks were all amazing games, but there was something about the Jak trilogy that stood out, particularly the last two, and a lot of that, I think, comes down to the power of the morph gun.

The morph gun itself isn’t the whole story.  See, Jak and Daxter: the Precursor Legacy is a pretty standard Rare inspired 3D platfomer.  It’s fun, responsive and has this great gimmick where all the levels are sort of actually connected to each other, making it into one expansive world.  It also wasn’t very unique.  Sly Cooper had its stealth and Ratchet and Clank had the crazy guns, but Jak and Daxter just had Daxter.  It was Banjo Kazooie, with slightly more charisma.  So, they switched things up with Jak II, taking cues from Grand Theft Auto III, then a huge deal, and making an actual open world map.  They also made Jak a more rough and tumble character.  They did this by taking away Jak’s Mario inspired Eco powers and giving him a gun, the Morph Gun.

What was cool about the Morph Gun is that it’s somewhat unique, even today, and it managed to stand out from Ratchet and Clank, the other gun based 3D platformer.  Where Ratchet and Clank had their insane guns that did all sorts of different things and filled so many mechanical niches (which, by the way, deserves its own article one day), the Morph Gun was just a regular gun with four modes: shotgun, carbine, machine gun and rocket launcher (sure, scattergun, blaster, vulcan barrel and peace maker).  It didn’t really do anything different, but it didn’t need to.

Image copyright Sony and Naughty Dog

See, what makes the Morph Gun so genius is that does two things, one being more important than the other.  The first is that it allows for Naughty Dog to take the Eco Powers from the last game, expand upon them, and create new encounters for Jak to deal with that are more complex.  That’s the one that’s not important, because this is a sequel, and that’s just good sequel making.  The other thing it did was make Jak unique, because it sure as hell wasn’t that stupid soulpatch.

Jak, in the first game, is agile and quick and a hell of a lot of fun to play.  Very few video game protagonists move as well as ones made by Naughty Dog, and in a lot of ways, Jak is the pinnacle.  Unfortunately, in the first game, he is super bland.  Like, take the blandness of Nathan Drake and crank that up to about three Nathan Drakes.  He looks almost like a skin you can buy from an open resource library.  It’s kind of sad.  However, sticking the morph gun in his hands gives him personality.

It’s not just the look of the gun, although making sure it looks roughly the same in every mode is pretty smart.  Nor is it that Jak can switch the weapon around at will, although that’s kind of why it works so well, and allowed Naughty Dog to better tailor their encounters than Insomniac were able to with Ratchet and Clank.  No, what it does is it completely alters Jak’s attitude.  Jak became a new character in Jak II, and the gun ins the main reason for this.  Each mode has a different animation for how it’s used, from the scattergun’s lever action spin after each shot, or Jak’s precision aim on the blaster, it shows how much Jak, as a person, has changed.  Getting Red eco doesn’t change how Jak moves, but he’s going to shoot his peace maker in a different way than any other weapon and that’s going to show more of his change in personality than the underused Dark Jak super mode.

Too often, character animations are overlooked, but Naughty Dog understands them.  More is said about Jak’s new character by how he holds and uses his gun, and showing how hard and tough Baron Praxis’s torture has made him.  This makes him the super soldier, and nothing else.