'stopping here or else I'm going to rant'
but I want to see the rant
I will preface this by saying that I still love Jak 2 (and 3 but that's another potential ramble), but coming back to it years later made me painfully aware of just how awkward the pacing of Jak 2 was, and how the entire game's themes, story, and overall vision could have been made stronger due to a spontaneous switch into a genre that wasn't native to it, while also still wanting to tell the story that it did.
Jak 2's plot revolves around a few key story elements:
His re-connection with the past (finding Keira and Samos, as well as the time machine to get back home)
His navigating the future and eventually finding a home in it (working with Torn, Krew, and all other NPCs, making and breaking relations with specific people)
His contending with new, unstable eco powers, and getting revenge for the pain of having them forced upon him (the aforementioned dark eco experimentation from the post this references)
Everything else that comes into play somehow ties into one of these three plot elements, but one of them -namely the third- isn't actually... played with. Yes, in the opening, you have a forced transformation into Dark Jak in the middle of a fight with the Krimzon Guard to show you how it plays, and narratively, it sells that your dark powers are unstable, especially with Jak mentioning that he can't control it. Yet it's not until the very END of the game that you see a transformation in him that you don't cause to happen, and even then, as soon as the cutscene ends, it disappears. Maybe they don't want you to take a chunk of the final boss' health for free, but they could also have had a shield phase to mitigate that.
If they wanted to show that his powers are dangerous and unstable -and thereby justify all the shit-talking he gets even a little bit, with everyone calling him a scary monster despite the fact you can literally go the ENTIRE game without using the dark eco powers- they need to have done one of two things:
More story points where they crop up against his will (they seem tied to strong emotions, so maybe he could have gotten a bit unstable around Erol or even in the ambush in the sewers, for example)
Have him randomly transform on rare occasion in the gameplay, making players hesitant to completely fill up their dark eco meter.
Could eco meter mitigation be difficult? Yes, and that has the capacity to be annoying besides; Maybe you're having a perfectly good run of a mission, and suddenly you can't use your gun to keep some metalheads at bay anymore that are deadly in melee- but that's a little bit of the point. Your powers are unstable, they're risky, they're dangerous to those around you and a risk to yourself. But how do you balance a mechanic ultimately designed to inconvenience you if you go this route instead of only going off of story elements?
I'd propose one of two methods- perhaps both:
Make your powers more stable the more you use them (thereby getting practice with the powers, and so with familiarity of how they work and how to keep it from triggering- and incentivizing use of the powers when you can so YOU choose when it happens)
Have the percentage chance of forced changes go up or down during certain parts of the story. The happier/more supported/more 'stable' Jak is, the less likely he is to change.
Put modifiers for moments where it cannot happen (driving, certain zones/story beats, etc) to minimize disruption and possibly gently nudge players toward intended gameplay, while giving some tells that said shift is more or less likely to happen; maybe the idle animations change, like Jak being fidgety, or Daxter petting his hair in an effort to calm him down.
In fact: bring Daxter into the mix! Let his animations in the overworld be an indicator for when a transformation is more likely to happen! It'd be subtle without being disruptive too: the closer you are to a shift, the more he hunches over, his ears go back, his eyes get a bit wide and shifty, and the more he does those soothing idle animations, and the less he does 'annoying' ones such as crawling all over Jak, or playing with his ears, or he just stops sitting up to look around. He tunes his attention fully on Jak, and players can use that as a quiet tell that they need to prepare for a change in tactics. This would mean that, in scenarios where the transformation is disabled (such as driving), you can't get a good read on him to know if you're close since he's doing something else, but that's the fun of the trade-off of safety from it happening.
Also having the precursor shrine change you to give you powers was cool, it was just prohibitively expensive as you got further through the game, but it worked. Gimme more moments like that.
Anyway that's my rant, thanks for listening.
