Spyro's successor (Ratchet and Clank)

     I've spoken before here about the Spyro the Dragon series, but I'm here to talk about the little brother, Insomniac's next series after Spyro, Ratchet and Clank. This series began in 2002 on the PS2 and there have been nearly 20 games since then. Though only one came out for the PS4, there are definitely still plans for Insomniac's beloved Lombax and robot team! With the upcoming release of Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, I thought it would be nice to talk about this long running series. As much as I would love to talk about them all individually, there are just so many of them (many of which I have never played) that I feel like it would be better if I discussed the different periods of this series.. There are roughly 5 different time periods as far as I can tell, but we'll get into those in some of the body of this post. Grab the Omniwrench and your favorite robotic companion and let's skydive into this awesome series!

A Tale of Unlikely Friends!

   The Ratchet and Clank series began with the first game, simply called Ratchet and Clank, which showed how the titular heroes met, and eventually overcame their own egos to work together and save the galaxy from the Evil Chairman Drek. Ratchet in this first game is truly just interested in being a mechanic and is extremely self centered and mean spirited, but grows more caring as the game goes along and Clank fills him in on the chairman's plan to destroy planets to make new ones so his people can keep living as wastefully as they had been. Ratchet's main plan in this first game is to find Captain Qwark, an intergalactic superhero and savior of the universe, and dump Clank as his responsibility to save everyone, but it turns out that Qwark is working for Drek, so Ratchet swallows his pride to become the reluctant hero that no one expected. In the second game, Ratchet and Clank Going Commando, Ratchet is a much more kind and caring figure, mostly because I assume Insomniac realized that people wouldn't want to play more games as the selfish jerk that he was in the first one. Along with getting a new voice actor, his character is much more likable, and he actually cares about Clank's well being this time around. The galaxy knows Ratchet and Clank after their first game and they are something of celebrities at this point. A company called MegaCorp from across the universe contacts them to retrieve a stolen product. It turns out to be a trap when it's revealed to be Captain Qwark in disguise as the CEO of MegaCorp, wanting revenge on the duo for ruining his reputation by revealing that he was working for Drek in the first game. The third game in the series, Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal, requires Ratchet and Clank to learn to work with Captain Qwark as well as well as other miscellaneous characters from the series to defeat Dr. Nefarious, Qwark's arch nemesis, who is slightly more competent than Qwark and threatening to take over the universe with a robot army. These first three games are considered the best I think, though I can't speak for any of the others, as I haven't played most of them.

Spin-Off City, Here we come!

    At the end of the PS2 era, and along with the Playstation Portable (PSP), various other studios made some more Ratchet and Clank games that seemed to be completely different from the ones that came before. Ratchet: Deadlocked came out for the PS2 in 2005 as the last entry to be only on this console, and honestly I can't tell you much about it. I know he is forced to compete in an arena, which has certainly been a staple for a long time in the series, as the first three games all had various battle arena challenges, but this is the entirety of the game, and Clank doesn't make the title this time around because he's not incredibly involved, but don't feel bad for him, he'll get his spotlight soon. The next game was Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters for PSP, later to be ported to PS2. Although this is technically a Ratchet and Clank game in title, it's created by a different developer, High Impact Games, and feels really different from the previous games in the series. The big thing is the ability to grow and shrink in different sections, hence "Size Matters." Clank got his moment in the sun in Secret Agent Clank for the PSP, which I assume is based on the TV show of the same name that Clank starred in during Up Your Arsenal. This game was also created by High Impact Studios instead of Insomniac, but I can't say how the game played because I haven't played it. I would assume you play as Clank for at least the majority of the game. There were definitely levels in the other games where you would have to play as Clank, but it certainly wasn't the star role that he has here. After these games, Sony must have decided that High Impact wasn't cutting it because they gave their golden boys back to Insomniac where they were hard at work on games for the PS3.

Make way for the Future!

    With the PS3 came the Ratchet and Clank Future games, and I can't speak on them either because I haven't played them, but I have heard great things, and I know that Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction was the only game that really interested me on PS3 when it first came out. Well, that and LittleBigPlanet, but you understand. It looked beautiful and it used the Gyroscopic controls in the Sixaxis controller that they showed off at E3, and it would have been a selling point for me to get PS3, but unfortunately it was $600, so I didn't pick up a PS3 until the PS4 was about to come out and there was a sizable price drop. The future games were full of cool ideas, including A Crack in Time, which had Ratchet and Clank separated for the vast majority of the game in different points in time (which seems to be somewhat similar to the upcoming Rift Apart). The other games in this "Future" timeline were Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty and Into the Nexus, which again, I know nothing about since I didn't play them.

Skip a few and here we are today!

    There were a few games that I was just told to avoid all together because they were just bizarre and bad, namely Full Frontal Assault, which was essentially a Tower Defense game set in the R&C universe, and All 4 One, which was fine, but was a kind of uninspired 4-player Co-op action game. I can't speak for them because I didn't play them, that's just the impression I got from friends who had played them. The only game for PS4 was simply called Ratchet and Clank and was basically a remake of the original game in the series and served as a tie in for the movie that came out in 2016. This was a great game, and a nice remake of the original, though did try to fit the plot of the movie which wasn't exactly the same as the original game, though did hit the same general points. After that remake, we get Rift Apart on June 11, which I'm very excited about and will be my first real PS5 game to purchase, as long as you don't count Astro's Playroom.

Thanks for the History lesson, but how does it play?

    Ratchet and Clank is a great series of 3D platformers, and though people have said for a long time that they're going away, they certainly seem to be holding on well. Of course, I've been talking about the gameplay and storyline of these games, but I have to pay some due respects to the humor and character that these games have. Captain Qwark is a constant standout as he's just a big doofus, and even though you're not supposed to like him, he has so many goofy lines that you have to laugh. The guns are also hilarious and fantastical, to the point where you can turn enemies into sheep, you can make them dance, you can make little exploding robots that blow up your enemies, the list goes on and on. Even the titles of many of these games elicit a chuckle. The characters and humor of even the villainous characters really make this a stand out series, and one that is certainly very different from its more child friendly big brother, Spyro the Dragon.

    Even though this series is certainly different from Spyro, you can definitely see some inspirations drawn from the older series. In Spyro, Square is Charge, Circle button is fire breath (or projectiles in some cases, such as Agent 9's laser gun), X button is to jump, and Triangle is used for different things. In R&C, Square button is to swing Ratchet's trusty Omniwrench, circle button is to fire your guns/use whatever weapon you have equipped in that slot, X button is to jump, and Triangle is to equip different weapons to your loadout. Both work really well, though it makes sense to not have the extreme forward movement of the charge attack in Ratchet and Clank, as it would make less sense to rely on the guns. Spyro, on the other hand, was more puzzle oriented in how to deal with enemies. Some would be wearing metal armor which meant that you couldn't use your fire breath, but would have to charge though them instead, where as in Ratchet and Clank, they were more just concerned with throwing more and more enemies at you and hopefully giving you the tools necessary to deal with them. There were no expressed weaknesses, other than just having rocket launchers do more damage than a normal blaster, as you'd expect.

    I know this post is fairly disjointed, but I wanted to walk you through many different elements of this series, especially calling attention to just how many of them there are.  It's amazing to me that Insomniac has consistently made so many incredible things in the past almost 20 years, and in addition to this, they made Sunset Overdrive for Xbox One (one of the very few games I would like to play on Xbox One), and Spider-Man for PS4 in 2018, which was followed up at the end of last year with Spider-Man Miles Morales. I love Insomniac a lot as a studio, but I especially love Ratchet and Clank, and I hope they'll continue to do things with them as the years go on. 

    Thank you so much for reading this post, friends! I always appreciate your support and I really hope you're all doing well! I've been your Self-Proclaimed Intergalactic Hero, and I'll talk to you all next week.