Like Frodo casting the Ring into the grim hellfire of Mt. Doom, bringing his long, perilous journey to a conclusion, I watched the end credits roll for Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal and echoed his iconic words - "It's done."
Truthfully, I enjoyed my time playing through this trilogy very much. It was an extremely nostalgic trip back through a series that was wildly popular in my youth, even though I had only ever played the first game and bits of the second game. It still felt like I was revisiting something that I was intimately familiar with as a child. Maybe that sense of familiarity was about playing games that feel inherent to that early 2000s, PlayStation 2 era, which I look back on so fondly. I think that my enjoyment of the series ramped significantly with each subsequent entry, culminating in a truly fantastic time with Up Your Arsenal.
Up Your Arsenal launched TWO years after the original game came out. The entire first trilogy of Ratchet & Clank titles came out between 2002 and 2004. That is staggering to me. In comparison, modern Ratchet titles are coming out with nearly a decade between them. This is such a confusing conundrum. How is there even supposed to be a target audience when the story takes longer than someone's childhood to receive its next chapter? On the topic of plot, I should say, even through this whole trilogy, a particularly coherent story was never formed, though by Up Your Arsenal, I believe they achieved more of the lighthearted, cartoonish, space opera-adjacent tone that the series was aiming to have. Gone are the days of Ratchet and Clank bickering, or thinly veiled critiques of capitalism, as this title collected our various characters that have been introduced thus far, re-contextualized everyone into a Green Lantern-esque galactic defense force, called the Galactic Rangers, and gave us a proper galaxy-spanning adventure against a new enemy. Up Your Arsenal heralds the return of the notorious Captain Qwark, this time actually serving as a hero, which he often pretends to be, as he leads Ratchet and the rest of their team against his arch-nemesis in Dr. Nefarious. The story introduces new characters, a new central enemy species and all new planets and mission structures for our story to unfold across.
I think the planets and settings in Up Your Arsenal are easily the best in the trilogy. We finally have a hub setting, in the Starship Phoenix, which is the flagship of the Galactic Rangers. You repeatedly return to the Phoenix for briefings, to buy new gear and talk to the myriad NPCs. In regards to design, it feels like because of the diverse and fresh locations, the art team was able to utilize a slightly different, decidedly more sci-fi color palette, adding neon purple, rich greens and deep blues that made me stop and stare more than a few times. It was noteworthy to me for a twenty-year old game to have eye-popping visuals. There are beautiful locales throughout this game, and distinct from the past two entries. For instance, the first planet that you visit, Florana, has a gorgeous, bright green forest that you navigate through. I was immediately stricken with the realization that across the trilogy so far, I had not seen a straight-up forest setting like this. It felt like Endor from Star Wars, complete with dangerous, native tribesmen to watch out for. There was another neat mission that reminded me of BioShock or Naboo, also from Star Wars, that took place in tunnels and tubes under the deep sea. Also, at one point Ratchet has to visit a pair of moons, and one of them, Obani Draco had some serious neon cyberpunk visuals that looked incredible. As a brand new mechanic to Up Your Arsenal, some of the planets were active warzones between the heroic Galactic Rangers and the villainous tyhrranoids (Dr. Nefarious' main infantry force), with large-scale, instanced skirmishes and battles taking place, where you utilize sky and land vehicles to attack and defend against Dr. Nefarious' organized forces. These types of missions added a clearer sense of the danger and severity of what our new villain was capable of, and were also fun diversions from the typical Ratchet & Clank mission and planet structure.
The three Ratchet & Clank games in this trilogy all share a core approach to gameplay. They are action-platformers, with a focus on combat over platforming. That was new and innovative with the original title, where most 3D platformers before Ratchet were centered around intricate platforming sequences and combat was almost an afterthought. Each game in this trilogy progressively moved further and further away from platforming and more toward different ways to include combat mechanics, and new systems to add depth to the combat. The most iconic feature of the overall series is the focus on amazing, unconventional weapons and guns. Up Your Arsenal is no different, on this front.
This entry into the series introduced some new weapons like the Plasma Whip, which let's you live out a sci-fi version of your Castlevania fantasy, whipping enemies to shreds with a hot laser-whip, and is actually one of the very few melee weapons in the series. Another of the new weapons ended up being probably my favorite, the Rift Inducer. It's just the perfect, brutal, wacky weapon for a game like this. The Rift Inducer fires a miniature black hole that sucks all small to medium sized enemies into the rift, instantly killing them. This became critical in later stages when you would encounter large groups of enemies descending on you at once. The Infector is another new, ingenious weapon that brainwashes an enemy into attacking its allies, giving you a temporary ally in your battle. The weapon leveling system returns from Going Commando, but considerable depth has been added in Up Your Arsenal. Each weapon has five levels to increase, with each level adding small upgrades to the overall effectiveness of the item. For instance, my beloved Rift Inducer when it has reached its second level, can fire black holes near each other that fuse into a larger, more powerful area of effect. On its third level, the gun now allows you to lock-on to enemies. And upon its fifth level-up, it essentially evolves into a new gun (similarly to how the system functioned in Going Commando as well). The Rift Inducer upgrades into the Rift Ripper, which also fires electrical damage into enemies that might be too big to be sucked into the black hole. Each weapon evolves over the course of its leveling process, gaining new functions and abilities before becoming a new, typically greatly improved version of itself. This RPG-esque system was incredibly addicting and led to me experimenting with all sorts of different guns to see what they would do upon reaching higher levels.
Another feature of the Ratchet & Clank series is the inclusion of gadgets, that are used to solve puzzles. I am pleasantly surprised to say that Up Your Arsenal had the best approach to gadgets of the trilogy; and by best, I mean that the entire idea has been almost entirely scrapped. There are no more water puzzles, involving neither the Hydrodisplacer nor the Thermanator. The hacking puzzles, which were some of the very worst segments of the first two games, have been wonderfully consolidated and simplified into a still challenging, but considerably less frustrating minigame. There was a hacking puzzle that they repeatedly used in Going Commando that made me feel like I was going to have an aneurysm almost every time I was subjected to it, so I was thrilled to see that they had made this much less of an annoyance. There is a new gadget, called the Tyhrra-Guise, that makes you appear as a tyhrranoid, and makes it so that you can speak to real tyhrranoids to get into Dr. Nefarious' otherwise closed facilities. It throws you into a short, relatively simple minigame where you speak to another tyhrranoid and a Guitar Hero-esque button timing sequence appears on screen. The Dynamo gadget, also from Going Commando, returns in a new form - it has been brilliantly merged with the old Swingshot grappling hook gadget, into one single new tool deemed the Hypershot. Why not just merge two different traversal tools into a singular gadget? That kind of approach that Up Your Arsenal took elevated the gameplay for me. I appreciated the consolidation and simplification of a few different systems that had gotten a bit out of hand over the previous two entries. Where it felt like the original title, and Going Commando, were still figuring out what exactly a Ratchet & Clank game was, Up Your Arsenal felt more confident in cutting some of that fat out and refining what we had come to expect from the series thus far.
This trilogy had explored several different minigames of sorts where it would introduce entirely new and fresh gameplay mechanics for certain sequences of the games, and Up Your Arsenal had a few alterations to the formula. In the original game and Going Commando, they repeatedly utilized the Giant Clank activity, where Clank would become a towering, Iron Giant-like mech and be used in kaiju-style fights. Giant Clank only appears once in Up Your Arsenal, more or less in another kaiju battle, but this time in the context of being on a film set, which was a fun concept. The iconic space dogfighting missions from the first two games have been thrown out entirely in this game, which was disappointing to me, but they were obviously replaced by the Galactic Ranger war missions that I mentioned earlier, and personally I think if it came down to the two options, I would pick the new war missions. One of the most interesting minigames added to this game was the inclusion of a 2D action-platformer game based around Captain Qwark and Dr. Nefarious. You can find new entries of the series throughout your adventure and bring them back to the Phoenix, your hub setting, to play through the next section. In these missions, you control Captain Qwark himself, and navigate fairly straightforward platforming-focused levels and learn the backstory of Qwark and Nefarious. This was a fun concept, and felt appropriate given the sci-fi superhero tone of this game, and the Qwark missions never felt punishing or so long that they were frustrating.
Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal was an excellent conclusion to the original trilogy of Ratchet games. While you can't say that this game served as the perfect finale to a trilogy of epic stories, like its peer Jak and Daxter, what Up Your Arsenal did achieve is refining the already fun formula of Ratchet & Clank into a truly well-oiled machine. This game served to shape-up some of the bloat that had been forming in the first two games, by trimming down some of the annoying and redundant gadgets, puzzles and minigames, adding depth to the weapon leveling system and introducing our series' true villain, it feels like Up Your Arsenal is a nice culmination of what its predecessors were aiming for. I highly enjoyed my time with this game and very much hope to see Sony get the Ratchet & Clank Collection ported to modern platforms, as is currently stranded on Vita and PlayStation 3. If you happen to have either of those platforms, I recommend hunting down a copy of the collection, there's a lot of fun and value to be had with these PlayStation classics.
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