"A pretty good half a game"

Beyond Good and Evil has received a lot of hype in a way that is rather unique to this generation of video games. Despite relatively good reviews when it was released, the game's sales were downright pathetic and it was quickly tossed into the bargain bin. There, it quickly found a cult audience who soon proclaimed it one of the most under-rated games around and now speak of it as one of the best games ever made. Well, if you're wondering if it's worth the $20 you can now find it for, the answer is an absolute “yes.” However, I'm afraid Beyond Good and Evil falls short of the massive amounts of praise that its enthusiastic fans have heaved upon it.

Let me go ahead and tell you the fatal flaw that stops this game from being as good as many say it is and as good as I had hoped: It's not a whole game. It pretends to be but it's not. After 10 hours of playtime, the game doesn't end, it simply stops and leaves the player feeling incredibly unsatisfied. Keep in mind, I'm not complaining that it is too short. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was just as brief as BG&E but managed to bring its story to a closure and develop its gameplay properly in those 10 hours. This is simply not the case here and it severely handicaps what could have been a great game.

One of the things that was most touted by both fans and the creators of BG&E was the game's story and frankly, it's one of the biggest sources of disappointment. The game involves a photographer named Jade. Her planet is under attack by a race of aliens known as the Dom Z and their only protection is a group of troops called the Alpha Sections that don't appear to really care about the people of Hilleys one way or the other. The problem with the story is that it's made VERY clear from the first five minutes of the game that there is something wrong with the Alpha Sections (the manual even implies it). The plot doesn't really evolve through the game but rather the player spends the entire time trying to get photos that prove that the Dom Z and Alpha Sections are in cahoots. I'd mark this with a spoiler warning except everyone is telling you this “spoiler” from the start of the game and thus the story is rather un-involving. Things only really start to get interesting in the last dungeon when the final boss raises several interesting questions (I won't spoil those for you as they're pretty much all there is to the plot of this game). Unfortunately, the game abruptly ends just as a the story starts to get interesting with only a brief, to-be-continue style ending to give fans some closure. Despite this frustration, the story isn't a total loss. The characters, while hardly deep, are rather amusing in their cartoony sort of way and the game has a style and atmosphere all it's own that don't make up for the lack of story development but at least make it bearable.

Gameplay wise, BG&E fairs better but still suffers from its incomplete nature. In many ways, Beyond Good and Evil is the game that Starfox Adventures should have been. Like that title, it attempts to take the standard Zelda exploration formula and use it to bridge a variety of gameplay styles. Thankfully, BG&E avoids the tedium of SFA and does a good job of combining Zelda style exploration and dungeons, with fun vehicular segments, and some interesting stealth sections. The game also takes a page from Pokemon Snap and has players on a mission to photograph various types of wildlife around the world. The world is composed of a series of islands that the players can travel to with their nifty hovercraft.

Unfortunately, while the gameplay is solid, it never becomes as deep as it could. The various gameplay aspects are fun but aren't really fused together to make an interesting new style of gameplay as in Ratchet and Clank or Pikmin nor are they as deep or extensive as their contemporaries. The dungeons and combat are entertaining but never approach the level of complexity found in recent Zelda games. The stealth sections are fun but never manage to be as intense as something in Metal Gear Solid much less Splinter Cell. The vehicle segments are cool but not nearly as good as those found in Starfox Adventures. Ultimately, I can't help but wonder if these would have gotten deeper if the game had gone on longer. For that matter, after finding everything there was to find in the overworld, it suddenly felt very small and incomplete like there were new sections of it that I should have been able to visit but that were still closed off. In Zelda: Wind Waker, the ocean actually felt like an ocean. Here, it feels like a lake and a small one at that.

Graphically, it's hard to fault the game. The polygon counts are relatively high, the textures are sharp, and the character and world design is colorful and quirky. The game is also presented in 16x9 view (no matter what type of TV you have) in order to give it a cinematic feel (which might have been more affective if the story had been stronger).

The sound is quite strong as well. While most of the music is merely competent, some of the combat tracks and boss music are very nicely composed and go a long way to giving the game a strong sense of atmosphere. The voice acting is pretty good as well with the actors clearly having fun with their characters and generally not slipping into campy melodrama.

Graphics-9
Sound-9
Story-7
Gameplay-8.5
Replay Value-6
Overall-8
Rent or Buy? You can beat it on a rental but for $20, you might as well buy it.

Recently, the creators of Beyond Good and Evil commented that it was originally the first chapter in a proposed trilogy. It's really a shame that, instead of making three 10-hour games to be bought separately (as appears to have been their plan), they didn't make one good 30-hour game. I don't know whether the decision was by the actual team members to split it up into two or three titles or by Ubisoft's executives in order to squeeze as much money as possible out of gamers. For whatever reason, this decision incredibly damages Beyond Good and Evil. It's got a huge amount of potential but is crippled by the fact that it's not a complete game. Length doesn't matter to me but closure and depth do and both were sacrificed here. It would have been much more honest for Ubisoft to at least do what Namco did with Xenosaga and make “Episode 1” part of the title. As it stands now, Beyond Good and Evil is only half (or one third) of a game and that is rather frustrating. On the other hand, if you're buying it now, you'll get it for half the price so perhaps its worth it. Just don't expect any sense of satisfaction when you finish it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/16/04