12.29.05
Beyond Good & Evil: Check
So, I just finished Beyond Good & Evil. Hell of a game, I must say. Rather linear, but the compelling story made up for it. It’s a strangely light-weight game, in terms of gameplay, compared to what I usually play, which can be attributed to its console-port origins. The controls were very simple (and a bit oddly mapped at times), and the character interaction was eh… limited. So its only real strengths were the gameplay and the story, and I’d give it max scores on both counts.
The story appeared to be a very simple fairytale set in an extremely odd fantasy world, but turned out to be a bit of an analogy for the role of the media during war time. Although I’d rather not start analysing the pants off of the game (please excuse the stupid metaphor), it really added a great layer of satire to the game, making it that much more enjoyable to play. The theme song of the game, “Propaganda”, really just says it all I think. In terms of plot progression, the game was very reasonably structured and with a few emotional sequences thrown in for a bit of flavour. The characters were very enjoyable, most notably it featured one of the coolest heroines I’ve ever encountered. I would pick Jade over Lara Croft any day of the week.
The setting was equally interesting, being some sort of fantasy/steampunk/sci-fi combination with a very unique (I dare say, very French) visual style and lots of weird friends and enemies.
The gameplay had a lot of funny features, such as the eager use of vehicular elements. Mainly, the world had to be navigated in a hovercraft (with jet engines O_o), same craft could be used to participate in races for fun and profit - and, impressively, to find a way into one of the mission locations; it’s always great when devs find a way to integrate side-quests and game-within-a-games with the actual plot. There was also some very well-designed and fun space ship sequences towards the end. One thing that might’ve ruined the game for me was the inclusion of boss fights. I invariably grind my teeth at the recollection of the innumerable boss fights in the games of my youth. But luckily the boss fights in BG&E were quite well designed, often requiring a bit of cooperation between you and your companion, and none of them took me more than 3 tries to defeat. The last one was particularly cruel, but luckily I’d brought a royal tonne of healing, which granted me success in my second attempt (the first being a sort of recon-attempt to figure out what was necessary to bring the beast down).
Another nice gameplay feature was the use of Jade’s camera. Seeing as Jade is a reporter and thus periodically required to report things throughout the game, the camera is used to obtain sufficient documentation to support your revolutionary articles. Additionally, it is a permanent side-mission to photograph every species of creature you come across for the local science center, for which they will reward you with money and the occasional mission-critical pearl. I cannot stress how awesome the various creatures you meet are. They range from insects and floating balls of light over strange living plants that grow on cave walls to giant snails, blobs of jelly, or whales floating in space! If the game had consisted entirely of finding and taking pictures of all these animals (I read somewhere that there are 56 unique species), I would still have enjoyed it.
Anyway, I should stop before this becomes the worst structured review of 2005 instead of a random bit of opinion. I would have said that BG&E is not for people who like complex PC RPG’s or rich simulations, but since I’m one of those people and I really enjoyed this game, I will instead say this: If you don’t mind to play a nice simple adventure game ported from the XBox every now and then, give this one a try. It’s a lot of fun.
Beyond Good & Evil
