Beyond Good & Evil Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 12/22/2024)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Beyond Good & Evil

Developer: Ubisoft

Publisher: Ubisoft

Genre(s): Action-Adventure

Platforms: PS2, Xbox, GCN

Release Date: November 11, 2003

Remember when Ubisoft still had an inkling of integrity? Several gamers just guffawed with a confident, sneering "No!" to my rhetorical question, but I'm being serious. Perhaps those who would hypothetically treat my question with a sense of derision just aren't old enough to recall when Ubisoft wasn't synonymous with bloating the open-world genre and crafting some of the most trite and forgettable sandboxes in gaming. Ubisoft has lost all of its humanity to the point where they've forgotten the definition of "fun" altogether. Before the company became as depressingly sterile as EA, they used to churn out quality interactive experiences. 2003 was evidently such a strong year for the developer that one particular game fell under the radar behind the third mainline Rayman game and the acclaimed Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Some might express skepticism that a title from one of the biggest gaming conglomerates in the Western Hemisphere could have slipped into relative obscurity. Alas, Beyond Good and Evil is a textbook example of a video game cult classic. As per the definition, it bombed from a commercial and financial standpoint, but it highly resonated with a devoted, niche audience that still echoes its greatness from the mountaintops. Admittedly, the game eluded me during the year of its release, so perhaps I’ve inadvertently contributed to its commercial failure–and I will start harboring feelings of guilt that I transformed Ubisoft into the microtransaction machine they are today due to a lack of interest in their artistically driven titles from yesteryears. However, I subscribe to the adage that it’s better late than never, and it was finally time to rectify my aloofness and treat myself to a certified gem. After playing it, I’ve hiked up to the peaks with my gaming brethren to scream Beyond Good and Evil’s name in doing my part to pronounce its existence.

Despite what the title may allude to, Beyond Good and Evil has no connections with the collection of philosophies published by Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil is staunchly in the science-fiction genre in terms of its thematic makeup. The elevated depiction of our future or the lofty and hypothetical, yet likely feasible concept driving the science fiction plot is a homeland war against alien invaders. The once-tranquil world of Hillys [Hill-iss] is trying its best to blockade the constant stream of attacks perpetrated by the parasitic DomZ, blanketing their population in a protective forcefield for safe measures to ward off the interplanetary pests. In wartime, one group of victims whose struggles are often overlooked are the helpless and clueless children caught in the middle of violent strife. In what is either off the coast of Hillys’ oceanside or a district entirely below sea level, a lighthouse is refurbished as an orphanage to shelter those who are the most vulnerable to the grizzly horrors of war. Jade, the game’s protagonist, is the co-proprietor of the orphanage along with her anthropomorphic boar “uncle” Pey’j. However, maintaining the livelihood of the lighthouse along with its junior tenants isn’t her only claim to fame as she has more occupations than a card-carrying con artist. Jade’s real passion is photojournalism, and she wishes to put her freelance lark to practical use by taking photographs that will win her the Hillys equivalent of the Pulitzer prize. The opportunity for journalistic glory comes knocking at her door when the Iris Network assigns her espionage work looking into the shady activities of the Alpha Section, the mercenary group with a stronghold control over Hillys and their efforts to combat the DomZ who have labeled Iris as a terrorist group. With the aid of the Iris Network’s intel and resources, Jade will scour the frontlines of every area with congested Alpha activity to blow the lid off of their clandestine corruption and cause an uprising on the streets of Hillys. As intriguing as the prospect of exposing the powers that be is, I wish the game kept the mystery of the Isis Network’s claims suspended a bit longer. Plus, that wish extends to depicting the Alpha Section a little less obviously as fascist evildoers. What kind of organization represents itself with a menacing skull as its emblem and expects to maintain a mirage of benevolence? Perhaps the developers should have implemented a few of the grey moral area philosophies from the book that share the same name in the story, and then maybe the events of the game would remain unanticipated.

In terms of its video game genre, Beyond Good and Evil is resolutely an action-adventure game in the vein of the 3D Zelda titles. As par for the 3D Zelda course, Beyond Good and Evil’s world of Hillys facilitates a free-flowing progression, yet with a relatively restricted design with defined parameters. Traveling through deep waters via Pey’j’s hovercraft may conjure up comparisons to The Wind Waker, but Hillys hardly enables the magnitude of a high seas romp. Really, the vacuous nature of the dense oceanic body surrounding Hillys is more similar to how Ocarina of Time used empty space as an uninterrupted medium between all of the notable destinations. Only in the case of Hillys, the seemingly endless waters are a more naturalistic way to render the vacant area that comprises the foreground rather than Hyrule Field’s sprawling barrenness on land. Hillys is essentially divided into three separate sections–northern and southern areas with a canal as the manmade transit connection between them. In the midst of the canal lies the Pedestrian District, the downtown epicenter of Hillys with enough hustle and bustle that it’s reminiscent of how the area around Hyrule Castle existed as its own sector separated from the outside hub. Given that this slice of metropolis life is situated in the center of the map, Beyond Good and Evil understands the nucleus model of a Zelda-esque world map splendidly. In addition to its astuteness, Beyond Good and Evil understands through hindsight that the outer region of the nucleus shouldn’t have a radius surrounding it that stretches for what seems like miles. The greatest point to the sensibility of Hillys’ design is that its entirety is succinctly compact, with any possible landmark being conveniently conspicuous from anywhere on the map. One destination to another in Hillys is approximately one minute away (in-game time), even without using the inexhaustible jet propellers of the hovercraft. Posturing the capabilities of 3D graphics had become unnecessary since the release of Ocarina of Time a generation prior, so the developers thought it was wise to highlight a restrained convenience that Hyrule Field was too busy trying to prove itself worthy of inducing awe to consider. Even though Hillys is as condensed as a made-for-TV edit of Pulp Fiction, I never grew tired of seeing the same setpieces as I quickly spanned the angled dumbbell shape of the map. The concentrated cut of Hillys that is available is still stunning, with whimsical fantasy elements juxtaposed with the electric atmosphere of futurism consistently generating curiosity.

Perhaps pacing to and fro from one end of the dense overworld to the other never became grating because the game diverts to cloistered subsections of Hillys often enough to progress the story. If you understand the tropes of Zelda and have been following the connections I’ve been making, one could already surmise that the pivotal progress points located in the various architectures around Hillys are Beyond Good and Evil’s “dungeons.” They’re one of my favorite staples of the Zelda series, and playing a game that emulates Zelda’s basic gameplay components made me salivate at the prospect of experiencing a crop of dungeons under a fresh IP. However, the reason why I put quotation marks around “dungeons” is because Beyond Good and Evil has its unique interpretation of Zelda’s labyrinths. In Zelda, the objective of a dungeon section in the most general of terms is unraveling the layers of the interior area via key collecting, puzzle solving, and natural exploration to uncover the boss battle core that serves as the dungeon’s climax. There is plenty of peeling to be done with Beyond Good and Evil’s dungeon sections, but the goal of excavating the premise is not to vanquish a mighty foe who either possesses a vital MacGuffin item or is a scourge affecting the morale of the dungeon and its outside vicinity. Enemies such as the booger monster and the gangly, sentient elevator unit serve as bosses with their sturdier health bars and considerable strategy needed to defeat them. Still, their encounters seem incidental just to check off the box of this video game trope.

I mentioned before that Jade’s assignment is to use her journalistic acumen to dig up dirt on the Alpha Sections, and infiltrating their various strongholds that assumedly house all of their shameful secrets is an integral step in tearing down their influence over Hillys. Iris intelligence will give Jade the coordinates to where they suspect the Alpha activity is at its most egregious, and snapshotting a photo of this scandalous deed with Jade’s camera is the dungeon’s primary objective. As simple as zooming in a camera lens and pressing a button sounds, it’s the circuitous route that leads to the Kodak moment that comprises the meat of the dungeon crawling. The towering Nutripils factory that used to produce Hillys’ favorite synthetic caloric supplement (and most plentiful health item), the “K-Bups,” has been abandoned since production significantly halted once the war began. Due to its lack of upkeep, Jade must reconfigure its array of electrical circuits so the transportation contraptions can lift her to the higher floors of the soaring establishment where the Alpha Section’s human trafficking operations are conducted. The radiantly red and spacious slaughterhouse is divided into three separate sections, all leading to the cavernous center of the building that all expose the Alpha’s allegiances to the Domz from three different angles. Excavating through the sublime, luminous interior of the Black Isle volcano’s lower base is performed before Jade gets her espionage assignment, but it still features the roundabout, puzzle-based progression of the other dungeons nonetheless. One might think that only offering three main dungeons would leave me unsatisfied since I tend to rag on Zelda titles that present a conservative number of them compared to games like OoT which featured almost a dozen. However, the few dungeons that Beyond Good and Evil display are an indication that the developers had a quality-over-quantity initiative at work because each of them is equally spectacular. Loads of engaging puzzles and route diversions matched with the sheer length of traversing through them make each dungeon equivalent to an artisan dessert–rich enough to satiate anyone’s appetite.

Combat in the realm of a Zelda dungeon mostly serves as a supplemental component to traversal. This is especially the case for Beyond Good and Evil, where combat is so tangential that the player cannot even unsheath Jade’s skinny, lightsaber-esque Dai-jo baton unless in the presence of an enemy. At times when enemies spontaneously swarm Jade, slicing and dicing them with the Dai-jo is usually a quick and simple process, even if the player doesn’t blow them away with a charged blast. Pey’j can even perform a hefty percentage of the legwork if the player triggers his partner function, causing the ground to quake with the boosted impact of his nifty jet shoes which momentarily catches enemies in a vulnerable airborne position. Many enemies are dispatched not through aggression, but rather through calculated puzzle-like methods–such as pushing the weeble wobble robots into the electrical fence impediments to kill two birds with one stone. As opposed to combat, the aspect of gameplay that tends to take center stage in Beyond Good and Evil is the element of stealth. Given that Jade is sleuthing in enemy territory, the connotations of covert spy work imply that she must remain a fly on the wall–lest she suffer the consequences of trespassing. Sizeable swathes of each dungeon are dedicated to silently stepping around the Alpha Section stormtroopers who stand guard over their operations. They’ll unwittingly give Jade her window of opportunity to dart around them by pacing through the corridors of the facility or changing their idle position by rotating in place, and the trajectory of their movement serves as pronounced cues for the player to discern and act accordingly. If the player is feeling confident enough or the armored dope is being a tad unyielding with his line of sight, stealthily walking up to them and kicking the green oxygen tank on their backsides will incapacitate them due to the sickly-looking gas that spurts out of it. Kicking it again while they’re running around in a blinded frenzy will cause their entire suit to malfunction and explode, which is always a comically macabre affair. Even if the player doesn’t take the risk to execute this act of killing, it’s unlikely that remaining stealthy as intended will cause the player much aggravation. As stated before, the patterns of the guards pacing routes and marching in place should be easily perceptible. If the player makes a mistake acting too eager, the penalty for compromising Jade’s position is rather tame. Scurrying away to a darkened corner of the map causes the guards to send a drone to hunt Jade down. If she isn’t caught in its laughably limited scanning zone, the guards assume that the intruder has been dealt with and return to their posts unphased. I’m almost so appalled at their laziness to the point where I feel obligated to report it to the bald big cheese who commands the Alpha Sections. Despite the lenient penalty for exposing Jade to the enemy, the elongated stealth sections are smooth and agreeable enough that the player ideally shouldn’t have to experience the guard’s lackadaisical defensive measures anyway. However, what confuses me is that in some areas, a floating turret will shoot Jade dead in her tracks immediately if she is detected. Shouldn't this apparatus ideally be everywhere as a part of their overall security system?

As full-flavored as Beyond Good and Evil’s dungeon sections are, locating the photo ops without culminating in a final boss to cap them off is rather anticlimactic. After finding the evidence needed in the slaughterhouse, Jade had to retread her steps to exit the premises, which had the bothersome feeling of incompleteness even though I knew I had done the task thoroughly. For Beyond Good and Evil, the fulfillment of a job well done does not occur until Jade returns to the hidden headquarters of the Iris Network behind a secret passage in the Akuda Bar and they provide her with the tangible reward of pearls. Between hoarding the breaded Starkos health items and increasing Jade’s maximum health with the “PA-1s,” the primary collectible in Beyond Good and Evil are the glimmering, blue-hued white pearls. The RPG mechanic of increasing Jade’s health may be another aspect reminiscent of Zelda, but a shiny collectible that blocks progression with an arbitrary number is a condition pioneered by 3D Mario. Once Jade collects enough for the game’s satisfaction in multiples of five or ten, Jade must take the hovercraft across the street from the lighthouse to the Mammago Garage. Here, the rasta rhino mechanics will augment Pey’j’s piggy hovercraft with features that will allow Jade to reach the further stretches of the overworld, provided that Jade offers them their asking price of pearls for their services. Ideally, each addition to the hovercraft should be implanted between infiltrating the Alpha Section strongholds, for they are the keys to unlocking access to the next base of their operations. The targeted missiles will snipe down the security sentry barring access to the Nutripils Factory, and the manual hop ability is needed to bypass the red lasers surrounding the border to arrive at the slaughterhouse. You know me, I adore a game whose progression incrementally unravels a la the Metroidvania genre, and facilitating this from a collectible model like a 3D platformer in the way that Beyond Good and Evil does showcase a naturalistic evolution for this gaming trope. Yet, the satisfaction usually felt by increasing a character’s travel capabilities is somewhat diminished because the Iris Network rewards Jade with an exorbitant number of pearls to earn the next hovercraft part after she completes a dungeon. Are each of these still shit tests to prove Jade’s worth like the first dungeon was? Don’t they know that Jade having as many of these as possible is vital to their cause?

It’s also a shame that the Iris Network simply keeps progression flowing so starkly like this because it deletes the player’s incentive to earn pearls through other sources. They might be banned by the Alpha Sections, but the enforcement of their new decree seems to be as successful as prohibition because several residents still possess these illicit gemstones in spades. There are a total of 88 pearls to collect in the game, and plenty of them have to be obtained outside of the standard story trajectory. In the Akuda Bar, Peepers will host three rounds of thimblerig for one, and Francis the Shark will forfeit his pearl if Jade beats him in a high-stakes game of futuristic air hockey. Driving up to sandy dunes in the overworld will cause Jade to get mugged by a looter, and chasing him down to the dead end of the river rapids cave tunnel will retrieve their pearl along with every cent they stole. Other opportunities to earn the main collectible that tests the ripping acceleration of the hovercraft are the races, and one pearl is naturally the prize for finishing in first place. Jade is evidently still on retainer for a National Geographic type of publication, for they’ll reward her with a pearl if she fills a roll of camera film with newly photographed creatures found across the ecosystem of Hillys. Located in the back alleys of the Pedestrian District are the Alpha Section’s subordinate areas of operation where there is bound to be a pearl or two lying around. Hmmph, hypocrites! These are my favorite optional ways of increasing my pearl counter, for they act as truncated versions of the main dungeons. Still, even for the sections of gameplay that stray away from the main course, I found every secondary mode to be both appealing and agreeable on their individual merits.

Those in disagreement with me on Beyond Good and Evil’s gameplay variety tend to state that the game should’ve stuck to one gameplay mode because everything they attempt is undercooked. Still, even among the harshest of critics, they tend to accede to the fact that what keeps Beyond Good and Evil from devolving into an unfocused mess is the impeccable characterization holding it together. Jade is an exemplary protagonist, and I’m not going to undermine her with the “for a female” disclaimer. She kicks major ass like Lara Croft, but there is something more substantial about Jade that supersedes putting a woman in the typically-male heroic role instead of a damsel in distress. Her photography is a vessel for her search for the truth, illustrating traits of integrity and honesty. Her orphanage showcases her compassion towards others, and the fact that she knows the name of seemingly everyone roaming around the Pedestrian District displays gregariousness. Her credentials for a humanitarian award are lovely and all, but what elevates Jade as a character is how all of the objectively admirable characteristics are mixed with tasteful moments of levity–like when she chases Woof around the lighthouse for the K-Bops in his mouth and calling Pey’j an “old fart” as playful banter. It also helps that Jade isn’t supporting the game alone with her charisma, as the salt-of-the-earth tech wiz Pey’j is almost equally as charming in his own right. The presence of their character dynamic while on the field together never ceases due to constant interactions between them, and it exceedingly aids their likability factor as characters. When Pey’j is captured by the Alphas, the secondary role is fulfilled by Iris informant Double H. He may not have the storied history with Jade as Pey’j does, but I find the man who attributes his chivalrous attitude to the teachings of the fictional Carlson and Peeters philosophy book to match Jade and Pey’j’s geniality. In the raging debate of how women are depicted in video games, we often forget that exemplary characters are not defined by their intrepid feats, but by how nuanced they are akin to people in real life as Beyond Good and Evil shows us.

Unfortunately, the commendable character writing is almost compromised by Beyond Good and Evil’s climax. In the search for Pey’j and all of the orphans that the Alphas unceremoniously abduct from the lighthouse, Jade travels to the DomZ base on the moon via Pey’j’s hidden spaceship called The Beluga. It’s here in this alien hive stripped from the same set as a level in Perfect Dark where it’s revealed that the Alphas have been abducting the citizens of Hillys so the DomZ can feast on their life force. It’s also on the dark side of this celestial body that Jade finds a lifeless Pey’j, and freeing him from a cocoon casing doesn’t make a difference. However, the devastating scene of seeing our porky friend flatlined is negated entirely when he soon recuperates totally unscathed because of a special ability Jade has to resurrect dead people. Huh? During what is one of the steepest difficulty curves I’ve faced in a while, the DomZ High Priest final boss keeps referring to Jade as “Shauni” which further implies that she’s not a regular human being. Jade stops the succubi menace, frees the orphans, and overthrows the Alphas as the prominent governing force of Hillys with the photographic evidence she’s been collecting, but I couldn’t help but focus on what was revealed about Jade during this climax instead of the happy ending. Giving Jade these extraordinary, supernatural abilities is unnecessary overkill to highlight positive traits relating to her. The enormity of her capabilities now verges her into Mary Sue territory, and that’s never a tasteful solution to compensate for a lack of nuanced female characters in any medium.

Beyond Good and Evil is a game that throws everything and the kitchen sink at the wall and sees what sticks. In my time with this underrepresented gem, I found that everything the game attempted was acceptable because they proved to be competently controlled and executed. Still, I wonder if the ease of each of the modes that the game tackled was due to the developers refining them to perfection, or because they didn’t enable the same robust skill ceiling as other games that feature the same types of gameplay. Even if the games that Beyond Good and Evil borrows from already do what it does better, namely Nintendo’s franchises, even those who feel underwhelmed admit that it’s all packaged in something with considerably more character and story substance than any of its influences. I’ve discovered that Beyond Good and Evil is an example of a cinematic game, injecting the strengths of film that video games up until this era were deficient in and rounding out the medium as a result--even if the game has noticeable holes in these departments. If the game garnered enough attention at its release, maybe it would've served as the example for the next generation that laser-focused on implementing cinematics in gaming. We’re on the wrong timeline, folks.