Ratchet and Clank General Discussion

Nefarious didn't appear in Into the Nexus, outside of cameos referencing his existence and his Bio Bliterator. Nor did he appear in Full Frontal Assault/Q Force.

I said full-length games. I’m not sure I’d count any of those because of how much shorter they are than the “main” series’ installments.

Even so, I feel like some of the games that don’t involve Nefarious kind of stumble because they introduce villains who feel like they’re trying to replicate Nefarious’s popularity (particularly Zurgo, who is kind of a rehash of Nefarious in terms of being a goofy tech-genius supervillain with a shrieking voice motivated by a grudge against Qwark).

Edited by DrDougsh on Jun 12th 2020 at 7:27:31 AM

Yeah, I definitely won't have a problem with more Nefarious, practically everything he says in UYA and ACiT is music to my ears. I think it's a good idea to bring him back for Rift Apart since it's meant to be the first original Ratchet game in quite a while, along with it being one of the premiere games for the PS5.

And while I don't expect him to become a corporate executive, I agree that it would just add to the hilarity. On a side note, I do kinda want the satirical humor of the PS2 titles to come back in some form. In this day and age especially it could be unstoppable.

Oh, and Zurgo. Definitely was a good idea, but...yeah.

Also, I've been adding and updating the "Funny" sub-page for Ratchet lately (organization, adding more examples from the first two games), and I just recently added the explanation for the game's innuendo because of how many people didn't get it at first. It's a pun on "ripped a fart".

Edited by BlurryDawgo on Jun 13th 2020 at 3:32:49 AM

Honestly, even Nefarious's inclusion in A Crack in Time always felt kind of creatively desperate to me.

It's kind of obvious to me that while setting up the story of the Future saga in Tools of Destruction, Insomniac definitely didn't intend for Nefarious to play a part in it. His character felt really... disconnected from Ratchet and Clank's personal arcs in those games. Honestly, Nefarious's plot to create a reality where "heroes always lose" kind of felt like filler between the parts with Azimuth, the Great Clock and Orvus.

My guess is that they originally intended for Tachyon to be back in A Crack in Time. As the person who exiled the Lombaxes and personally killed Ratchet's father, he certainly seems more appropritate as Ratchet's long-term nemesis in this story, as well as being an antagonist who connects much more directly to Azimuth. That, and he got taken out if a fairly undecisive way, after dropping some hints about knowing Ratchet's "true purpose and true name", which never gets addressed again. That, and Tools ended with Tachyon bringing back the dreaded Cragmite race from their exile in another dimension, and that never gets mentioned again.

But Tachyon wasn't a particularly popular or memorable villain, so I'm guessing they didn't think he'd be well received as the Big Bad for another game and instead decided to bring back a fan favourite. And don't get me wrong, Nefarious in A Crack in Time was fun, but he definitely felt quite shoehorned into the story at hand.

And even then, I imagine A Crack in Time was meant at the time to be Nefarious's swan song, because following the game's release Insomniac said in no uncertain terms that he was dead. Which they then backpedaled on in tie-in comics before making him a playable character in All 4 One. I think that was the point where Nefarious started to become a writing crutch, a way to recycle old jokes and let Armin Shimerman go wild in lieu of actual good writing.

The culmination of that was Nefarious usurping Chairman Drek as the Big Bad of the 2016 reboot. If Nefarious was shoehorned into A Crack in Time, he was crowbared into Ratchet 2016. The story of ACiT didn't really benefit from Nefarious being there, but Ratchet 2016 is actively worse because of his very presence.

I guess I never felt Ratchet and Clank needed a long-term Arch-Enemy. Much like Spyro, part of the appeal of the series in its PS2 days was that every new game had a new and different threat for the heroes to deal with. Bringing back a popular villain for an encore or two is fine, but when we're at a point where Nefarious being the Big Bad is more the rule than the exception, it just feels like the series has run out of ideas.

Edited by DrDougsh on Jun 13th 2020 at 4:44:18 AM

I don't think that's entirely true. Nefarious wasn't killed off, redeemed or incapacitated (at least not by the heroes) at the end of Up Your Arsenal, and he re-appeared in Deadlocked's stinger despite having nothing to do with the rest of the game. I'm sure that Insomniac wanted to bring him back for future installments from the very beginning, even if he didn't actually have to do with the Lombax or Zoni lore.

It is funny that you should mention that, though. I actually read from the article shown here (Insomniac did a presentation on Ratchet and Clank's history at GDC 2018) that yes, he was indeed written to die in A Crack in Time. To quote:

Insomniac continued to learn the hard way after killing off series favourite Dr. Nefarious in A Crack in Time, which they thought was their last R&C game. Mindful of a spectacular send off, they smashed Dr Nefarious into his own space station, which duly exploded.

Typically, the desire for sequels led to Sony asking Insomniac to resurrect their arch villain a few years later. "We just flew that dude into a space station!" said Fixman. "Maybe it was a flesh wound?", replied the Sony exec.

Never ring a bell if there's a chance a publisher may want it un-rung, noted Fixman, who had to ret-con Dr. Nefarious' demise in a graphic novel. The arch villain had escaped just before impact, it turned out ("Not my most elegant solution", said Fixman).

Frankly, I'm not mad, a lot of us probably would've retconned it too. As much as I appreciate Ratchet having an entire rogues' gallery, I do believe that it was still the right choice to feature him in Rift Apart, both from a symbolic standpoint and a marketing one. I don't want the story to just be about him being a Tachyon with ham, though. Hope at least one other antagonistic force shows up to flesh things out.

As for Tachyon, I'm pretty sure that IG didn't like him, and it's obvious that most fans don't, either. Which is...actually a shame, really. As much as the comic revealed him to still be alive, there was a lot of potential from him that was wasted. Always Chaotic Evil is, when played straight, one of my least favorite tropes, period. Instead of that being the reason he set out on Lombax genocide, why not make the reason, say, isolation and prejudice for being a Cragmite? As a parallel to what Ratchet went through?

If done in a future installment, it could even shed light on what Lombax society was actually like. Given how separated they were from the rest of Polaris even before the purge, they could even have a xenophobic or authoritarian government.

Maybe Insomniac did have ideas that Nefarious might return at some point. But I don't think they envisioned him as having a role to play in the Future saga, is the thing. He's really shoehorned into that story arc, which is particularly noticeable in that the game's conflict isn't even resolved with his defeat. And I feel his return kind of shoves aside plot points from Tools of Destruction that just never get properly addressed (most obviously the question of what happened to Talwyn's father, which is only addressed in a cheeky optional line of dialogue that you might hear on the spaceship radio).

I wish the Sony execs had just kept their mouths shut, because everything that Nefarious has been involved with since ACiT has, quite frankly, been total crap. That Lance and Janice gag is only funny so many times, and in later games it just feels like the writers are spinning their wheels, relying on audience goodwill from past games to get an easy laugh. It reminds me of the way the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels endlessly repeat jokes from the first movie hoping to get a nostalgic chuckle.

Honestly, I feel one of the reasons why Tachyon fell short as a villain is that, like with Zurgo later on, Insomniac was trying too hard to make him Nefarious-lite. Much like Nefarious, Tachyon is given a lot of comical gaffes where he undermines his own menace, like failing to get an applause from his audience, failing to activate the Dimensionator or crashing his ship into rocks before making a dramatic escape. That kind of thing worked well with Nefarious (or even with Drek and Vox, where it emphasised their corporate phoniness), but with Tachyon it just came off as awkward, because Tachyon is set up as a really evil bastard who committed genocide on Ratchet's race and murdered his father. Giving him these dramatic connections to Ratchet while simultaneously making hima goofball who isn't taken that seriously by the narrative just doesn't work, and it led to Tachyon not leaving a very strong impression.

For my money, I don't really see Nefarious's return in Rift Apart as a smart creative move, or even a good marketing move for that matter. The series hasn't really had a proper, full-length title that didn't majorly involve Nefarious in 13 years, and given that the writing in the 2016 reboot was critically savaged and highly divisive among fans, I feel that what the series needs to do is prove that Insomniac can still tell a decent Ratchet and Clank story that isn't just a brainless kiddie parody of sci-fi and superhero tropes.

All 4 One can pretty much unanimously be considered a mis-step for the series, right?

And then the PS 4 game was an adaptation (of an adaptation), it was the movie writers that decided to reduce Drek to a bumbling imbecile and have Nefarious be the traitorous mole the entire time. Even though it completely robs the narrative of any weight, since outside of the villain scenes it's always about what Drek's goals and plans are. It's to the point that when Nefarious takes over it doesn't FEEL like it's Nefarious's plans going through, because it is literally just Drek's plan going off the rails.

Now it certainly doesn't help that besides that game, it's only been a two game gap since Nefarious had appeared outside of a cameo.

Honestly, I think it's fair to designate everything post-ACiT as the series' Dork Age. All the games since then have variously been experimental titles poking at different gameplay styles, or cut-price games barely one-quarter the length of a proper Ratchet title. All the while, the writing has become increasingly brain-dead, lacking both the wit of the PS2 titles and the heart of the Future titles.

The 2016 reboot, unlike its past few predecessors, was at least a full-length game that seemed like it had some ambition. But in terms of writing, it kind of brought everything that was wrong with the writing of the post-Crack games Up To Eleven and rubbed salt in the wound by implying that this is what the series has always been like.

On a semi-related note, can I say that Qwark, a self-absorbed, dimwitted celebrity showman whose fame is based on media manipulation, becoming Galactic President feels a bit Harsher in Hindsight after Trump's election?

I'm gonna be honest with you guys. Sans the 2016 game, I don't outright hate the writing for 2010's Ratchet. It holds no candles to the games before, but I think a couple of the things it tried can still be salvaged. I'm pretty sure that if the plot of Into the Nexus wasn't anywhere near as rushed it would be given more respect, given how Vendra and Neftin are fairly popular characters. While I still want several of the trends this era established to be broken, I'm still not really that anxious regarding Rift Apart's story failing should it be as grand in scale as the plots in the Future games.

First off, I'm absolutely sure that, prior to it being greenlit, Insomniac was experiencing burnout with Ratchet. They had already made games for the series almost yearly, and admitted that spin-offs like All 4 One were a step backwards in the article I shared above (and that A4O specifically lacks the "buddy story with heart" element of the earlier games, an issue shared with the entirety of the 2010's era), and the 2016 game has reused weapons, half-baked newer ideas and flat humor out the wazoo, even if on a technical level it was still another success for Insomniac.

(Note: the even worse writing for 2016 Ratchet can probably be tied to it being a tie-in to a movie that, thanks to Hollywood, was sanitized to be so family-friendly that the worst they could get away with was "kick some asteroid". And yes, even if Insomniac created the series I do think they might have been mandated to not make it as obscene for that game specifically.) As such, given how many Ratchet games they made already and the zig-zagged results of the last game, they took a break from it to regain those creative juices and see if they can muster any new good ideas.

How well do I think this worked? Well, as of Spider-Man they seem to have a dedicated writers' room and much better writing ideas, which most people would probably agree paid off. The game has great characters, well-written humor and drama without learning too much into either, and has one of the most believable, fleshed-out and faithful showcases of the titular hero I have ever seen.

Now, the writers for Rift Apart may not be the exact same as Spider-Man (and to reiterate, TJ Fixman has no input on this one), but it's still worth nothing that their standards for quality might be greater in this day and age, which is always a plus.

Heck, I'll give Rift's story one point already: it definitively portrayed Clank as something other than Ratchet's talking backpack and/or perfect-smarty-answer-for-everything for the first time since A Crack in Time. You can hear in his voice that he's just as utterly panicked as Ratchet about reality crashing in on itself, he has no idea if it can even be stopped, and he's the first one to ask where they are when they fly into the Haven-like city. It's small, but it feels more like his more nuanced and even feisty 2000's persona, so I appreciate it. The fact that he might be separated from Ratchet for a while could give him even more character exploration.

Also, Insomniac's become a more public company as of the last couple years, and this has given them a bigger opportunity to listen to fan complaints, and as we know, sanitization of the series is one of the biggest. As such, I genuinely think they're at least aiming to put things back in order for the series, beyond just a full-length story that continues the main timeline.

...And yes, someone like Qwark winning the election might either be funny or tragic in hindsight depending on who you ask. Probably also how deep they've read into American history.

Question: since I'm going to play the Future games, I have Tools of Destruction and A Crack In Time; is it essential that I play Quest For Booty, as well? I know it's the second game in the Future 'trilogy' but, as I understand it it's more of a brief interlude to provide context for the beginning of ACiT, but it's not necessary to have played it in order to understand what's going on. Right?

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Jun 13th 2020 at 8:29:25 PM

You can skip it.

It has its own plot about space pirates, but beyond a brief mention in A Crack in Time's recap cutscene it's not essential.

Erm, I don't suppose a remastering of the Future trilogy and Into the Nexus for PS4 could be feasible, could it?

...Or I can still just find them on PSN?

I admit I've never played these games past Deadlocked, and what comes after...varies in how much they interest me. I uh, think I had more to say but for now I guess I'll wait and see.

A Crack in Time is definitely worth it, at least. I'm disappointed they never built from it, but hearing that it was intended to be the Grand Finale and All 4 One was not initially part of the plan, it makes sense.

The series DID try to introduce villains that weren't just Nefarious with the Prog Twins and Artemis Zogg. The Progs had the sibling dynamic and some mysticism attached to them. Zogg was a relatively serious, straight-laced villain that was somewhat sympathetic. The problem is that they were relegated to spin-off stuff and were decommissioned fast. The former were redeemed (we didn't even get a boss battle with Vendra) and the latter was only in the comics.

Kinda surprised nobody here brought up the possibility of her being trans.

That'd be nice, but I think it's more likely they just forget the dimorphism between male and female Lombaxes.

Females not having a tail doesn't make a ton of sense for sexual dimorphism, to be honest. Angela was probably designed without a tail because she's disguised as the Thief for the first half of Going Commando, and her being a Lombax is supposed to be a surprise. Literally having a tail sticking out would lessen the impact of the reveal.

For the longest time, Insomniac wasn't even willing to confirm that Angela was a Lombax and made a bunch of contradictory statements about the subject. I'm guessing that in A Crack in Time, on the assumption that it would be the last game in the series anyway, somebody at Insomniac decided to throw in that optional dialogue about Angela and Max Apogee to hastily patch up a few inconsistencies as a treat for longtime fans.

Anyway, it's not at all surprising that they're not sticking with what was always kind of a questionable design choice to stay consistent with a character who's been semi-retconned from the series.

×3

A lot of people on Twitter did suggest that though.

Funnily enough, her modeler had this to say about it:

Xavier: "To all the people asking, speculating, and believing that the Other Lombax is trans in the new Ratchet & Clank game, I can confirm: Trans rights are human rights and TERFs should fuck off."

So...maybe?

Some of the responses deduce that he can't really say too much due to non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Maybe his response is basically a blunt way of saying "please don't bully me about this."

However, an ex-member of Insomniac refers to the Other Lombax as "my girl," so there it is?

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Jun 15th 2020 at 12:55:13 PM

He didn't really answer the question.

The unnamed female Lombax is playable.

Ehh, can't say I didn't see that one coming. I wonder if she'll have any fun new tricks?

Let's hope so!

I hope this game is good, 2016 hurt me inside, especially since I love the original.