Ratchet and Clank FINALE

Rachet and Clank is one of the three big boomer franchises for PS2, just like Sly Cooper and Jax and Daxter. Being the first in the series the is overall great and out of all developers, it was made by Naughty Dog (famous for Uncharted/Last of Us), so going in, I expected a lot of great things. Does it mean a lot of great things? Well yes and no. Story and control are overall pretty good. Being a PS2 game, the camera can be a tug at war a times but overall not a struggle. The game is a partial collect-o-thon but not required to make actual progress. The bread and butter of the game is game play and then the mini games, yes mini games. The mini games, although forced, are all pretty decent. Some mini games were rough and all they needed was some polishing, and some are just right. Sadly, near the end of the game of the game this falls short as you're are forced, yes forced, to compete in two racing games in which you MUST come in first place in order to progress the story. The mini racing game is half-ass done to begin with (like no map which what is a staple in racing games) - so you cannot see who is in first place. The second part that makes this mini-game rough, is that you need to be nearly perfect to win. The CPU does the "Mario Kart" thing, where they will auto catch up to you, no matter how good you are. You counter this by hitting the short cut each and every time. As well as timing your rocket shots (similar to shooting red shells in Mario Kart) to knock out the bike in front of you. Failure is not an option in either of these, if you miss either one, there's little chance of recovery to come back to hit first place. As said, most of the mini games are okay, some could use some polishing, but throwing not one but two races, especially the second race RIGHT before the finale, really hurt the game. I have played games that have done this mechanic near the end and all those hours you've poured into the game...down the drain. As if that wasn't the only bad thing, the finale itself is a long tedious boss fight. Tedious as it takes an hour to complete almost. It's not that the boss extremely hard, he is just takes forever to kill. You'll find yourself running out of ammo and eventually reverting to the game's weapon, which is called the Suck Cannon - which is basically a vaccum that sucks up enemies and you can eject them back at the enemy. Neat weapon, never used it until the end. If you find yourself running out of ammo, the boss does spit out ammo refills but only in the 2nd phase of the fight. The first and 3rd phases do not. WHY did they program this way? If you happen to get killed, mind as well reset your console and try again. I say this simply because A: The game remembers what you consumed, there is no check point of resetting what your ammo count was before. B: You'll have to grind more bolts - the games currency (which does take awhile to get) to buy the ammo. C: There are no check points for this boss, you have to do the entire fight over again. At least there is no tedious long run back to the boss, you can start right there unlike Silk Song...again not that it matters, your attacks barely dent the boss. It'll become so tedious your hands may begin to hurt as you're repeating the same similar patterns over and over and over until the boss is finally defeated. Again I stress, the boss wasn't hard, it was just long and tedious. Unlike all the bosses in the game, this boss was just a grind and there's no challenge to it, other than your own stamnia once you understand the fight. This could be a deal breaker for some. Last but not least, as I mentioned Mini games, one of the recurring mini games is lining up the lasers to unlock the doors to progress further. Neat mini game overall, but it occurs way more often than it should. I didn't keep count myself, but there are at least 10 or more to deal with throughtout the journey. Oddly enough, some laser mini games were simple, some where just time consuming and their difficulty didn't increase as you progressed, it was some were tough some were easy, so it was poorly organzied. This combined with the awful forced racing mini games and the tedious long boss battle fight; this dropped Ratchet and Clank from A tier game to a C- tier game..almost a D+ just because they threw things that really hurt the games fun factor. I overall enjoyed this game until these factors. Since this is the first in the series, hopefully the remaining games improves on this formula. Everything else was great, voicing, the story, the goofyness, the graphics, and control. Just a shame they lock in awful forced mini games and long boring final boss fight to drag the game way down. 4/10.   / ultimacj