Ratchet & Clank has been going for more than 20 years, so it's unsurprising that some things took a bit to get settled in stone.
- Several of these are exclusive to the first game:
- The art direction is somewhat different; the lighting is brighter and the design and general aesthetic are more cartoony and mechanical, unlike the sleeker, more futuristic look the series quickly adapted to. Case in point: all the ships in the first game have landing gear, while in all other games they hover over the ground.
- While blowing stuff up is emphasized, the first Ratchet game lacks the fiery, adrenaline-fueled impact and flair present in the second, third and fourth entries. The game instead requires a more strategic and careful approach, frequently encouraging the player to use different combinations of weapons on each planet to progress.
- Ratchet is more of a Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal who only really wears pants. Later games have him fully dressed and in more sci-fi gear.
- The gameplay is slower paced, with less emphasis on combat and more on platforming and puzzles. Due to the lack of strafing and the inability to upgrade weapons (barring buying the golden versions) and only having four hit points (which can be upgraded to eight), the game can be a bit harder to some. The game also puts some emphasis put on Backtracking to make use of a gadget you picked up later in the game, something that was heavily downplayed in the sequels. Many weapons are also slower in nature: the Devastator has slower rockets with superior enemy tracking, while every rocket launcher after it use rockets that fly far faster but have incredibly poor tracking.
- The weapons are more simplistic and nowhere near as plentiful as they are in the sequels, and the enemies are likewise much less numerous and threatening. Yet at the same time, the weapons are far more experimental in nature. Weapons like the Defensive Drone Device and Decoy Glove are unique to this game, and any equivalents in later titles heavily rework them into things like the Shield Barrier and Mr. Zurkon.
- The RPG Elements, that is, the XP systems for health and weapons, don't exist. Ratchet can spend bolts to double his health and obtain Gold Weapons, but they don't fully substitute the RPG growth from all the sequels. This leads into the next two points...
- Combat as a whole is more "puzzle-like", with enemies having simple attack patterns and weapons seemingly being designed with certain enemies or environments in mind, to the point that some weapons act as hard-counters to certain enemies, and others are near-useless unless the level design accommodates them. This is partially because, as mentioned above, none of the weapons upgrade, meaning they're all viable until the end of the game. Later games have weapons fall into disuse as enemies become too strong even for their upgraded forms, while in the first Ratchet game each weapon is simply a different method to solving the same combat problem. The Blaster is just as useful on Kalebo III as it was on Kerwan, and even the OmniWrench can take out endgame mooks in just a few hits.
- The Thruster Pack has a distinct moveset from the Heli-Pack, including a hover strafe and slam move—whereas the sequels just treated it as cosmetically different.
- You have to earn your Heli-Pack, Thruster-Pack, Hydropack and O2 Mask, whereas those are available by default in the later games (the first three are justified since Clank was fresh out of the factory in the first game).
- The Magneboots force Ratchet to walk at half his normal pace, limit the weapons he can use to his wrench and won't allow him to jump, in sharp contrast to the Gravity Boots that every other game uses.
- Ratchet's voice actor in this game is not James Arnold Taylor, it's Mikey Kelly.
- While the game has a fairly large cast of characters, several of whom would becoming recurring extras, many of them only appear briefly, and outside of Ratchet, Clank, Qwark and Drek, there are no other major characters you interact with, making it feel more in line with the Spyro games.
- Clank's voice is more monotone and he acts like more of a naive know-it-all. He also doesn't have his aversion to contractions, as he says "He hasn't got enough bolts" when meeting the Plumber on Novalis, and "That's not fair" to Helga withholding the Swingshot for money; the "Making Of" video in Going Commando would establish he doesn't use contractions, as there's a scene
where David Kaye says one during a voice recording session and promptly is reminded of this by sound designer Jackie Evanochick, before rerecording the line without it. - Qwark is a mildly competent, if airheaded, villain that is Faux Affably Evil, unlike his later characterization as a Dirty Coward and Flanderization into a cowardly buffoon. He's also explicitly described as washed-up, something that isn't a topic of concern after this point.
- There's no arena minigame here; Going Commando had the first two in the series.
- The Goodies/Extras menu doesn't show up until you beat the game, unlike the followups where it's there from the start.
- The Challenge Mode multiplier works a bit differently; rather than it starting at none and increasing as you kill enemies, there are simply double the bolt drops.
- The game doesn't pause when you enter the Quick Select menu; while some of the other games allow you to toggle this on or off, the pause defaults to "on" in every other game.
- Buying ammo is different; when you first buy a new weapon, it only comes half-loaded, and when you go to buy ammo, it starts at 1 and you have to scroll to the right to get to the highest amount you can purchase. Going Commando would do this differently, starting the counter at whatever you need to fill your gun's ammo to the max, and Up Your Arsenal would introduce the "buy max ammo for all weapons that don't have it" choice.
- This game is the only one to have a video screen with someone talking to you when you're in the shop. Later games starting with the Future titles do have someone talk to you, but there's no picture.
- The Charge Boots don't exist; the only boots are the Grindboots and Magneboots. The closest equivalent is chaining Stretch Jumps together with the Heli-Pack and Thruster Pack.
- In the original game, getting Skill Points doesn't actually unlock cheats. You need to beat the game and perform some of Ratchet's moves in a certain order in Replay Mode in order to gain the ability to turn the cheat on and off.
- In the first game, when you throw the wrench, you're stuck in place until it returns.
- The original game doesn't feature strafing like every other game in the series, which can make it very tricky to hit enemies: adjusting your aim inevitably means moving a bit closer to the target. The Thruster Pack would allow strafing while using the hover mode, but it's a manual toggle and takes a while to change direction, making it almost unviable to use.
- In the first game and Going Commando, you need to manually equip the Swingshot to use it. Up Your Arsenal was the first game that would allow you to jump off a ledge and swing from a target without having to do the extra step of equipping the Swingshot first (cue Damn You, Muscle Memory! for players going back to the first two).
- Similarly, you have to equip certain context-sensitive gadgets like the Trespasser and Hydrodisplacer to use them, while later games would allow you to simply use them when the context arises.
- The first two games only have one ring in the Quick Select, forcing you to pick and choose your favourite weapons and gadgets. Up Your Arsenal would give you another ring to put your stuff in, and starting with Deadlocked, you can fit everything you need in the Quick Select, rendering the Weapons menu somewhat redundant.
- In the first game and Going Commando, you can't cancel a long jump or high jump by doing a Hyper-Strike. Up Your Arsenal is the first game that lets you do that.
- The first two games have a lot more Cash Gates than later games do, and the plot is very consistently driven by watching a video on an Infobot or screen (very often some type of satirical commercial). Starting with Up Your Arsenal, the next destination is given more organically, such as Ratchet playing a Vid-Comic and figuring out Dr. Nefarious' next target, or chasing up a lead mentioned earlier in the game.
- Going Commando introduced the mechanic of your health increasing constantly over the course of the game, and thus had to experiment with how to restore that health. The result is that there are two different types of healing Nanotech: there's the returning blue Nanotech in a blue crate which heals 1, but starting on Tabora you begin encountering pink Nanotech in a unique green crate which heals 4. This would be scrapped in Up Your Arsenal in favor of having just one type of Nanotech that scales its restoration based on your current maximum health, while pink Nanotech or anything like it would never appear again.
- In Going Commando, the increased amount of weapon and health upgrades led to Insomniac making some tweaks in Challenge Mode. Once you get there, ammo drops give double the ammo (e.g. the Lancer gets 50 ammo instead of 25), and health crates give quadruple (blue Nanotech gives 4 health instead of 1, while pink Nanotech gives 16 health instead of 4). Neither of these mechanics lasted past this game.
- In addition to being able to increase your health by killing enemies, Going Commando has collectibles that permanently increase your health as well. Starting with UYA, the games would only use the former mechanic.
- In Going Commando, the returning weapons from the first game retain the weapon leveling system from their debut game; that is, you can't upgrade them by using them, but after beating the game you can buy their Mega form (analogous to their gold form). Starting with Up Your Arsenal, any weapons brought back from a previous game instead use the same upgrade system that everything introduced in the current game does — for example, the GC weapons in UYA have eight levels instead of four, and the returning PS3 weapons in Into the Nexus have six levels instead of ten (in the case of Tools of Destruction and A Crack in Time weapons) or store-exclusive upgrades (in the case of All 4 One weapons).
- In general, the humor of the PS2 entries is far more satirical and anti-capitalistic, with a big emphasis on predatory marketing, appealing to unchecked consumerism, awful labor conditions and Big Bads that are outright Corrupt Corporate Executives, and whose subordinates tend to be media personalities that are often just as amoral. From Tools of Destruction onwards, this is downplayed in order to focus on more conventional space stories and jokes, galaxy-destroying villains, and focusing on the protagonists' story.
- Similar to the above, the PS2 games have very intense and explosive combat visuals and a tendency for crude, witty and slight cringe-based humor (with Up Your Arsenal having far more sexual humor). Starting with Size Matters and solidified by Tools of Destruction, this intensity and edge is toned down to something more approachable for all audiences as opposed to teens into [adult swim].
- Both Ratchet and Clank had a tendency in the PS2 days of picking up some sort of female romantic interest who would then unceremoniously not appear in the next game (in 2005 it was notable that Sasha even appeared in Deadlocked). After Deadlocked this facet was removed: Clank hasn't met anyone of the sort since, and Ratchet has been associated with Talwyn and the comics showed his past interest Sasha in a prominent role as emotional support despite them no longer being together.
- Ratchet being the last Lombax wasn't brought up until Tools of Destruction, where before that it was assumed that there were other Lombaxes that simply hadn't been met yet. This has become a point of fan contention regarding Angela, the Lombax from Going Commando, regarding where she was during the later games and whether she even is a Lombax in the first place. Said questions have been addressed since then, but it didn't help.
