Why does Ratchet have five fingers?
Cartoon heroes usually get four fingers. Ratchet has five, and Insomniac president Ted Price explained why on the record, playing the original game beside Tim Schafer for Double Fine's Devs Play series: the studio worked from what Price called accepted conventional wisdom about Japanese organized crime.
In Price's own words: "We always heard it was a yakuza thing. This is not necessarily something we were ever told by our friends at Sony. It was that it was accepted as conventional wisdom that if you make characters that have a missing finger, then it implied that they were in trouble with the mob, or that they were bad because they were missing a finger." Schafer's reply was that every yakuza movie he had seen agreed. No Sony directive exists in the record; the studio policed itself, in advance, for a market it had not yet entered.
THE SECOND CHANGE
The day Sony Japan repainted RatchetFingers were the change Insomniac chose for itself. The other famous Japan driven change was chosen for it. Price tells this story in the same conversation: Ratchet's color was one of the biggest early debates at the studio, palettes covering a wall, purple, yellow, and blue among them, before the team settled on brown, the brown of his helmet, with no markings. Then came a meeting with Sony Japan, who said the character would not work for their audience as he was: he should probably be yellow, and he should probably have stripes on his ears. Price's answer, quoted verbatim: "Over my dead body are we going to change him."
The redesign was applied anyway by someone on the team, and Price, seeing it, conceded that it worked better. The yellow Lombax with striped ears on every box in this gallery, the Japanese one included, is the result: Sony Japan's notes, adopted over the studio head's stated objection, and kept for the whole series.
THE EYEBROWS, LABELED HONESTLY
A real trait, an undocumented reasonLater Japanese editions of the series gave Ratchet one more visible trait: large, bushy eyebrows that the American Ratchet does not wear, documented in side by side coverage of the Japanese releases as late as Ratchet and Clank: Into the Nexus in 2013. The first game's Japanese box in this gallery predates the trait in full bloom.
Why the eyebrows? The Library states the limit plainly: no reason is documented in the opened record. The import column that documented the difference itself, Digital Trends' Jetsetter, asked the question and answered it with "Who the hell knows?" A cuter, more expressive hero for the Japanese market is the usual fan explanation, and it remains an explanation, not a record. What is on the record, in the creator's own voice, is the fingers and the paint job, and those are the story this page stands on.