YMMV / Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy

• Best Boss Ever: The final boss fight against Gol and Maia in their giant Precursor robot is a great battle that has multiple phases with a lot of variety of tricks, good use of the game mechanics, and some solid atmosphere for a climax.
• Demonic Spiders: Literally with the spiders in the Spider Caves, thanks to their fast movement and large numbers.
• Evil Is Cool: Gol and Maia are both very cool and impressive looking villains. The former's dark eco sorcerer aesthetic paired with the latter's armored dominatrix fully visualize their particular traits.
• First Installment Wins: The Precursor Legacy sold the best in the series, and there are a large amount of fans who dislike the direction the sequels took the franchise in and prefer the more traditional Collect-a-Thon Platformer gameplay and lighter and more humorous tone of it over its sequels, also feeling like it was the most focused and had the most unique identity.
• Fridge Brilliance: White light is the origin of all other colors, and black is the absence or complete absorption of light, so it seems reasonable that combining the four non-Dark types of Eco would create the Light version.
• Fridge Horror: The Lurkers may not really be evil, but just slaves. Confirmed in Jak II: Renegade.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The theme that plays when collecting a Power Cell. Daxter even reacts with a variety of dances.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • The Precursor Legacy was a very advanced game at the time it had come out, but now all of its advancements are taken for granted.
  • The game having no load times at all was something unheard of at the time. Nowadays, newer consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S have built in technology to allow their games to have little to no load times.
  • The use of fluidly animated cinematic style real-time cutscenes to get story across was rather groundbreaking when most other games of this or any other genre were still using text when they weren't resorting to pre-rendered FMV's. That's not even mentioning the impressive lip sync on Daxter and other weird looking characters.
• Spiritual Successor: Surprisingly, more of one to Spyro than Crash, given the open-world exploration.
• That One Level:
  • Fire Canyon is an early game Difficulty Spike where you're in a Zoomer vehicle trying to speed through the area before your temperature gauge maxes out and you explode with it. Suddenly the player has to hit Lurkers to get air time over hotter areas that accelerate the gauge, grab balloons to lower your temperature that are often behind explosive Dark Eco boxes, hit Blue Eco vents (if you opened them) to get through faster, and hit the Scout Fly boxes obscured by smoke and fire along the way if you want the extra Power Cell. It's known to be a stopping point for many younger gamers.
  • The Boggy Swamp is a wretched place, full of muck that hurts you, thorns everywhere and infinitely spawning rat-lurkers. Even the introduction of yellow eco can't make this level better.
  • The Precursor City. Hard to navigate, with rooms full of electrified water (if you're lucky. Because if you're not it will be Dark Eco), timed challenges, devious enemies and with rather difficult Rise to the Challenge at the end.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Forbidden Jungle's minigame of catching 200 pounds of fish. What sounds easy at first rapidly ramps up into having to be incredibly precise and risk pulling your net from one side to the other in one movement and back. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the poison eels that instantly fail you if you catch a single one, and not being allowed to miss five fish altogether.
  • Precursor Basin's sub-objective of using Green Eco to cure the Dark Eco-infested plants can be extraordinarily finicky, as you have to pass by and cure all the plants in a batch. But you're doing this on a Zoomer, which isn't exactly the tightest to control, and if you miss so much as a single plant, the rest in a group will re-infect, forcing you to keep passing by over and over until you hit them just right.
  • Precursor Basin's Pass Through The Blue Rings challenge. While the version with purple rings was only moderately difficult, the variant with blue rings that unlocks afterwards is true hell. You have to get to next ring in time or you fail the challenge, and these rings are placed on those narrow archways and jumps (and the problem with Zoomer controls still applies here) and at one point, you have to bounce off a tiny rock to hit ring high in the air. Good luck, you'll surely need it.
  • The Boggy Swamp minigame where you have to defend some muffins from a horde of rat-lurkers is absolute hell. For one thing, you're not allowed to lose a single treat and for another there are about 5 or 6 that you need to keep the lurkers away from. Many a controller were likely broken in response to the stress.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: While the sages do get to participate in the endgame of the story, it would've been interesting to have seen more of them. Particularly the Yellow Sage since it's not even clear where his lab is, compared to the others who set up shop in whole villages or settlements.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The game still looks good to this day, with great atmosphere and environments with Jak himself being well animated for a 3D model. Pretty impressive for an early PS2 game.
• Wangst: The warrior in Rock Village. Daxter even snarks about it:
  Daxter: Have you tried attacking him with your melodrama? Cos it's killing me!

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