At this point, I’m pretty jaded as a gamer. I can’t even get excited about a new Final Fantasy release, and the fourth of that series is still my favorite game of all time. And yet, at E3 2002, a Gamecube game that was, by UbiSoft’s admission, only 40% completed captured my eye. The graphics were crisp polygons, smooth and not bothering with the cel shaded nonsense that everyone else was dabbling in. The design was quirky and solid, and the controls were surprisingly good for that early stage. I made sure to remember what they had on the game – titled only “BG&E.”
One year later, it was at E3 again, with much more finish and the beginnings of a storyline, and a full title: “Beyond Good & Evil.” At first, I cringed when I saw the ostentatious title. Ubi was just asking for it, right? And they also had PS2 and Xbox versions. Could they have just spread themselves too thin? And if the Gamecube version was the first they started on, why were they going to release that version last?
Not that I can answer the last question, but I can say this, with authority. Ubi worked for around 2 years on this game. They tried to do much in this game, and give every system owner a shot at it. My initial reaction was the bromide, “A man’s reach must always exceed his grasp. Else what is a heaven for?” But dare I say it, Ubi has touched the stars on this one.
The game starts with an overview of the planet Hillys, shown to be in the midst of a war between alien invaders, the DomZ, and the Alpha Sections. The Alpha sections, mysterious masked warriors, are the would-be saviors of Hillys and several other worlds, but one group, the IRIS Network, isn’t so sure. But in the meantime, you see our heroine, Jade, as she meditates with one of the orphans she takes care of. But soon, as the DomZ attack, she and her guardian, the sentient pig Pey’J, take up arms to find out the cause of the DomZ invasion, and hidden truths reveal themselves to Jade as she gets closer to not only the truth about the invasion, but her own past.
In some ways, you could easily point out how this game’s story is a hackneyed recapsulation of so many other games and movies. What sets this apart, though, are the characters that make this crew up. While Jade, Pey’J, and the other characters you run across certainly do fit into archetypes, they’re made “human” (which I suppose is a bad phrase to use in a world where anthropomorphics abound) by their flaws, from Pey’J hidden fears about a buried past to Jade’s flirtation with the hidden inner darkness. Even when Jade is at her most heroic, working as a rogue photographer for the IRIS Network, she chooses Shauni, the name the inner darkness uses to whisper to her, as her pen name.
Even with the basic story, I began to become enraptured with the characters because they weren’t simply the shining stars, the only hope (or the largest threat) to the galaxy. I felt like I was dealing with regular people caught up in something beyond the norm. And I got a kick out of seeing them rise to the occasion. Sure, it got silly sometimes, but at the heart of it, you could even see that was an attempt to cut the tension that rises throughout the game. This game’s story illustrates that the set-up can’t compare to an excellent execution.
As for the game play… well, this game brings about some of the most varied play I’ve ever dealt with. The game can really be divided into four major parts. When I first tried this, I was certain that a game that tried to do so much was going to bite off more than it could chew. I mean, the short answer to “what kind of game is it” is that it’s a cross between a standard 3D action game, Metal Gear Solid, racing game, and Pokemon Snap. Seriously, all of that is in this game. Sounds like too much, doesn’t it? How could they make all of that work at once?
Well, for the scenes with Jade and a friend or two, the game is a classic 3D third-person fighter, in which you take Jade’s staff (called a Dai-Bo for whatever reason) and lay into your enemies. In terms of what attacks you have, it’s all done by figuring out which moves you’ve just done, and what direction you press while pressing the attack button. At first, you just have a standard swipe. But by just altering the direction you hold, you can do sweeps, back flips, and pinwheels. Even though your options in battle are not incredibly large, it feels right because the control is smooth and the action flows perfectly. More buttons for use in battle and more complex moves would have eaten away and the flawless controls and made this game much more clunky to play. Even the AI on your friends is solid, and it generally takes the computer to gang up on them in order to do some serious damage to them.
However, there are quite a few times in which Jade has to go it alone, and the enemies around are much too powerful to regularly take on. I’ve tried at least a dozen times, and have prevailed a grand total of one time. So you’ll have to sneak past, relying on crouching and walking to get through the enemy installations. Granted, it helps that the control scheme is pretty much the same as during the regular action sequences – if you were so inclined, you could walk and crouch during the fight scenes. But still, you have to rely on precise movements and careful camera work. I have seen points where you can put yourself in danger by moving about, if you scaled it, three inches in the wrong direction. The sneaking in the game, because of the smooth controls, is not difficult. However, it requires a lot of skill in order to succeed at it.
Of course, there will be times in which you need to get around Hillys, covered mostly in water, so you’ll need to get into Jade and Pey’J’s hovercraft to get around. In making the hovercraft controls, Ubi managed to avoid the pitfall that ensnare many games that feature vehicle and humanoid action sequences. Namely, they make the control schemes for them almost identical. You don’t have to hold one button in order to move, just like you don’t have to hold a button to walk. The only major switches are two things – you can get the ability to make the hovercraft jump (the lack of a jump button is the only puzzling thing about the controls, although it eliminates jumping puzzles, which Ubi should be awarded for), and you make the hovercraft speed up, not slow down. There are some tweaks to the hovercraft’s controls; a human can pivot much faster and smoothly than any vehicle. But you’ll never feel any serious shift in controls, allowing you to simply fall right into place in the vehicle parts.
Finally, there is a side quest which, though not vital, is useful in progressing in the game. Since Jade is a reporter, and carries a camera with her everywhere, the Science Center of Hillys has asked her to take pictures of all the animal life on the planet. And they pay you immediately for those pictures. So Jade gets to essentially play a variant of Pokemon Snap, and you get cold, hard cash, plus some extra items. Again, this is totally optional. But given how easy it is to get many of these pictures, it’s almost stupid to not bother with it. Seriously, on the island you start on, you can easily earn over 2000 credits and a zoom lens for the camera simply snapping at the children and wildlife found on the island. And you should see what the Science Center pays for a good photo of a boss. The picture taking feels right, because it compliments the game without ever detracting from it.
That, and I must admit that anyone who has dealt with scientific species notation will appreciate some of the names given to the species of Hillys. Like Sus sapiens for Pey’J, the anthropomorphic hog. Or Sarcophagus domzii, for the capture bio-machines for the DomZ. Or my personal favorite, Bufo erectus, for the knuckle-walking toads found in various places. One too many biology classes had me primed to laugh at stuff like Rhinoceros sapiens, I guess.
Of course, it helps that you can always tell what, exactly, you’re dealing with. I mean, you don’t want your sentient, bipedal rhinoceri to look like your sentient, bipedal cattle, right? Beyond Good & Evil is pretty solid on this point, although for the races that don’t show up in very active roles, you can tell that they didn’t put in as much work. For example, the bull who runs the tavern in town seems a bit stiff, like he was an early model that they didn’t bother cleaning up. However, very active models, like the knuckle-walking toads which are purely background filler, are animated quite well. Ubi, it seems, felt a bit of a crunch to make sure that this game was finished before it hit a third E3, so some models did feel neglected. In the end, though, the main models work quite well and you’ll only have to look at the background characters to notice any serious problem.
The game actually gets quite interesting with its music. For the most part, the game is silent beyond whatever sound comes from your running or driving. Other than some obviously musical areas, like in shops and bars, you don’t hear music. You don’t hear it, that is, until the action begins to pick up. The game has different tunes depending on the type of danger, from the panicked tunes for having to stave off a DomZ attack while in the hovercraft to the ominous tones accompanying being spotted by a guard during the sneak phases. The minimalist approach to music works quite well, much like it does in movies. The music, when it appears, calls you to attention, and builds on the mood of the current situation to intensify the moment. It’s something few games manage to do.
The sound effects are pretty solid, though you really don’t notice them much either way. What is striking, though, is the voice actors. Since I’m able to, I gave this game a whirl in both English and French. There’s also Spanish for those who need it, but I can’t really judge how well that version went. Here’s the tricky part. The English voice actors were much better and more varied in their tones and accents. You always get the sense that each character in the English version is distinct, and the voice acting overall is quite strong. However, should you activate the subtitles, for the parts where the voices are faint, you’ll notice that quite often the subtitles are timed wrong. There will be parts when you will barely have time to read the subtitles, and others when the subtitles will just hang on the screen too long.
This is probably because the subtitles are timed for the French version, with a simple substitution algorithm to switch in the English text. Francophone players will notice that the subtitles will match up perfectly in the French version, and that you’ll never have to speed read of deal with subtitles that shouldn’t still be on the screen. The flip side is that, apparently, the budget for the French voice actors was much smaller than the one for the English voice actors. Other than the voice for Pey’J, which is a hilarious take on a Parisian taxi driver’s argot, it sounds like nearly everyone is talking in the same muddled middle class Parisian accent, just varying by pitch. I guess it’s perfectly understandable, when you consider Ubi’s origins. Since they’re French, they know the cadence and timing of French much better than that of English, allowing them to time the subtitles better. But since they’re close to the heart of France, they don’t get to hear the lilt of Normandy, the thickness of an Alsatian accent, or the “garlic,” as some would call it, of the Provencal accent.
It’s funny, in the end, that Ubi did such a solid job on making this for all three systems when the Gamecube version was the first that development started on. In fact, Gamecube owners will ultimately be the ones to suffer, since they had to wait for this game when the other systems got it as soon as it was ready. Beyond Good & Evil tried to basically create an immersive world to play in, and tried to give you so many was to play in that world, that failure seemed inevitable. But UbiSoft pulled it off, and they made this game into one of the best action games of the current generation of consoles. Well, when it isn’t busy being one of the best sneak games of the current generation. Or when it isn’t being the easiest and most comfortable vehicle racer to grace a video game system. Or when it isn’t simply the best photo-shooter ever. Simply put, Beyond Good & Evil takes so many facets of game play, and does them all so well, that this game is one of the must-own games of the year. I’d be satisfied with half a game this good. To have a whole one is more than I could have asked for.
