Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal
by Insomniac Games
Finished: ✓This game is a classic from my childhood. This was one of the only PS2 games that we had, so I played it a lot. In my original PS2 Save (I still have the memory card!), I maxed out the play timer with 99 hours and 99 minutes recorded. I wonder how many hours I've put into the game in total...
In the game, you go around to different planets armed with your huge guns to fight enemies and save the galaxy. Each new planet you visit has new weapons to purchase and every weapons is weird and unique.
It was really interesting going back and playing this game. Even though it has been quite a bit since I've played it (2016, maybe?), I already knew how to play the game immediately. Everything felt right and in the right place. I automatically navigated through the menus with ease. The pacing and feeling of the game was so familiar. I couldn't recite the dialogue from memory, but I could feel the rhythm of the cutscenes.
Playing it recently made me have the experience of realizing that the game is so much smaller than I thought. It was like having memories of a place as a kid and coming back as an adult and realizing the place was way smaller than you remember (because you were smaller back then). Everything in this game was smaller and took way less time than I remember. I used to hate the Marcadia mission where you are locked to a stationary turret, but I just did that no problem (I must have gotten stuck on it as a kid). The huge fights in Blackwater city were, like, 5-10 minute encounters at most. Tyhrranosis felt like a huge sprawling desert, but it's actually quite small. Quark's hideout felt like a massive labyrinth, but it's linear and quite short. In Annihilation Nation (the mission challenge area of the game) there is the "Quarktastic Battle", a final challenge with 100 rounds of combat. As a kid, this used to be a formidable task. It felt like seemingly endless rounds of careful ammo management, where every hit that you took might spell disaster in the later rounds. In reality, it's maybe a 25 minute mission (still fun though!). The announcer's voice lines are burned into my memory.
There's something so exciting about getting to a new area and seeing what new weapons you can get (of course, I already knew what was around the corner). Each weapon gains EXP when you use it, and you can level it up a maximum of 5 times (in the base game). At its final level, each weapon gets a new name and extra features and it's just so fun to slowly see your arsenal grow stronger and stronger as you progress. Over time, you figure out what you like using and can personalize your weapon wheel to suit your needs.
In this playthrough, I took the time to really take in all of the environments of the planets you go to. All of the scenery in this game is absolutely beautiful. Each planet is a new splash of color and it's just lovely. I love seeing all of the spaceships fly around in the sky. It captured my imagination as a kid and that remains true today.
Years ago, I went and played all of the other games in the original trilogy, but this game remains my favorite out of the three.