Beyond Good and Evil
Ubisoft
PS/2, XBox, GameCube

"God is dead."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Nietzsche is dead."
- God

"Halo3 is out!"
- everybody else

Okay, Halo3 is out. I get it. You've long put aside your copy of Oblivion and you death-marched your way through BioShock in less than a week so you could be good and ready.

Hey, I'm no different. Ever eager am I to soak up the next-gen goodness that awaits.

The thing is, development times are getting looooonger and looooonger as the consoles are getting more and more capable. So, what do we do while we island hop between overproduced shooters and Objectivist remakes of System Shock II?

We play the back catalog of PS/2 games.

Beyond Good and Evil

In Beyond Good and Evil, you play Jade, intrepid girl reporter living in the maritime community of Hillys. The Hillians are under attack by a vicious alien race known as the Domz. The Hillians are defended from Domz aggression by their increasingly fascistic and creepy military, known as the Alpha Section.

At the start of the game, Jade's home is attacked by the Domz and the children in her care are kidnapped. To rescue them, Jade must go to work for the shadowy Iris Network, a rebel group dedicated to exposing the relationship between the Domz and the Alpha Section.

Joining Jade on her quest is her anthropomorphic porcine uncle Pey'j and Double-H, square-jawed Dudley Doright soldier who speaks of his military training manual ("Carlson and Peters!") with the same persistent urgency that Allison Hannigan's character in American Pie brought to discussions of band camp.

Gameplay consists of dungeon-crawling combat, stealth, vehicle races and collecting photographic evidence.

Beyond Good

Beyond Good and Evil is remarkably well done. It's not particularly innovative: everything in the game is familiar. But it is exceedingly well executed.

The soundtrack, for example, is richly orchestrated but not overwhelming, preferring pianos and strings to the horns and percussions more common to game tracks.

The voice acting is solid and convincing and the writing is a strong mix of humor, drama and quiet moments, threading the needle nicely between the overwrought tone of games like Shadow of the Colossus and the glib wink-at-the-camera attitude of games like Ratchet and Clank.

The stealth game is fun and engaging with cinematic camera angles that make the game both easy to play and fun to watch (a hard combo to hit much of the time.)

The game flow is nice and un-frustrating. Failure and fallback points are usually less than 30 seconds away from death points. Only once or twice did I find myself saying "Are you KIDDING? I've got to slog through all that shit AGAIN?"

Even though it's not a sprawling, open-ended world like Oblivion or GTA, there are a good number of optional paths through the game. To upgrade your vehicle, you must collect pearls, which are used as currency at the Mammago's, the mechanic's shop. Pearls are acquired by completing side quests.

And again, the side quests were chosen not just to make the game bigger, but to give players many different options for completing the game.

You may, for example, collect pearls by competing in vehicle races...or by taking pictures of the different animal species...or by gambling on a bar game.

In this way, the side quests serve not to make the game's world seem bigger, but to make the game itself seem bigger.


Beyond Evil

The only quibble I have, and it's minor, is the final boss battle.

The combat system is not the best feature of Beyond Good and Evil. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a bit button-mashy.

Thing is, there's no improvement arc for combat throughout the game. You don't learn new moves or get tougher weapons, nor do you face increasingly difficult and challenging opponents who demand greater and greater player skill to defeat.

Most fights are relatively easy, until the end. And then you face a big evil bad guy who can summon minions, blast you with lightning bolts, invert your controls, blur the screen and otherwise go all Capcom on your ass, thus sending combat from zero to sixty on the last level of the game.

Conversely, the stealth and photo-taking games DO have a skill ramp. There are no stats to improve, but throughout the course of the game, you must become increasingly clever in the ways you hide from guards and acquire photographs.

It would have been nice to be able to put those skills to better use.

Beyond Beyond Good and Evil

Owing to some bad timing, Beyond Good and Evil was largely overlooked when it came out. Disappointing sales have put plans for a second and third chapter on hold.

With the PS/2 still dominating the console market and the slow drip-drip-drip of praiseworthy titles for the next gen systems, there's an opportunity here to revive what could be a great franchise.

Hit the bargain bins, kids...it's worth it.


Graphics: **1/2
Sound: ***
Gameplay: ****
Overall: ***1/2

Double Jason says "check it out!" (Carlson and Peters, page 101)