PS2 / PS3 (HD remaster)
Developer: Ubisoft Montpellier / Ubisoft Shanghai (HD)
Publisher: Ubisoft
Release date: Nov 2003 (PS2) / Jun 2011 (PS3)
“What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”
– aphorism 153; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Writer: QuietlyWrong
First off, a confession: it’s difficult for me to look back on this cherished title with any objectivity. Every time I take off one pair of rose-tinted spectacles, I discover that there is another one lying underneath. Trust me, if there were much of a market for pink eye-wear, the share prices would be plummeting about now. When I first bought this game, I got the GameCube version AND the PS2 version, though they were all but identical.
When I first completed it and 100% completed it at that, I immediately went back to the beginning and played it through one more time for good measure, even though there’s nothing much inherently replayable about the game.
When the PS3 HD remaster came out, I bought that too (though I still have the PS2 version to hand) and I’ve completed that two more times. Or maybe three. And here’s the funny thing: it’s not that great a game. In terms of gameplay, it was good but never in the running for game of the year, even at the time. Its fighting and stealth mechanics were both simplistic, secondary to the main focus of exploration and plot advancement (though in truth, that probably suited me). Its set-pieces and the integration of its minigames, the graphical wows have long been surpassed by the PS3’s highlights, not to mention some of the masterpieces from the latter days of BG&E’s own generation. But it’s got an enormous heart and I love it. Let me explain.
French video game designer Michel Ancel will be forever associated with his limbless platform creation, Rayman, who first sprang on to the scene in 1995 on PSOne. When Beyond Good & Evil was released in 2003, after a troubled three-year development, it was so magnificently different from Ancel’s previous work and so much else on the shelves of Game and Electronics Boutique, HMV and Virgin Megastore that it stood apart.
Gone was the carefree whimsy, the multi-coloured wackiness; here was an attempt to create something closer to a political piece, albeit in a safer science fiction setting. Instead of an alien bouncy ball with disconnected hands and feet, we were given a conscientious young woman, Jade, with real character, and for once a female lead who was neither defined primarily by her sexuality nor anonymised.
She was strong but vulnerable; there were people she loved and places she wanted to protect. She was a real person, making real changes in her world by means of her camera and the pictures she would take rather than by cutting a swathe across a battlefield with an improbable collection of munitions. And although that troubleddevelopment might have diminishedsome of what Ancel had intended toachieve, enough of his vision shone through that the game achieved nearuniversal critical acclaim.
But this unusual new IP was released into a Christmas marketplace saturated with high profile sequels (Jak II, Ratchet & Clank 2, Final Fantasy X-2, Max Payne 2, Tony Hawk’s Underground), the news-baiting Manhunt and worst of all, Ubisoft’s own highly-publicised treasure, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which used BG&E’s own ‘JADE’ engine to fabulous effect and even better reviews.
BG&E was a commercial flop and soon found its way into the games stores’ bargain buckets, from where it filtered out and finally gained the cult following it holds today. Start the game up now and you’ll find, on the surface, that it’s very much a game of its era. But the last ten years have been kinder to its looks than they have been to many of its contemporaries, thanks to a distinctive, bold visual style that doesn’t strive too hard for realism, instead recollecting the bande dessinée style which more clearly influenced
Rayman.
Sound and music is consistently excellent, Christophe Héral’s wonderful score drawing from all manner of influences in world music to give a multicultural feel to the world of Hillys with its diverse population of many species. After a short introduction, you’re thrown into the thick of the action, controlling Jade with directions and a couple of buttons for dodging and hitting out - Jade is a martial artist skilled with a combat staff, her ‘Daï-jo’. A few presses of X (or square on the HD version) and she’s back-flipping and pirouetting in classic third-person blow on her assailants, the evil DomZ.
On the one hand, the elegant animation gives the player an immediate sense of the power and grace at the control of the heroine; on the other, it does somewhat undermine the idea of an ordinary, unremarkable protagonist. But hey, the DomZ were trying to steal those poor orphan children for some nefarious purpose... In later sections, direct confrontation is much more difficult than simply sneaking around, or just plain impossible, thanks to shields and security drones, but Jade will do her fair share of hitting things with a stick.
The fighting mechanic may frustrate anyone expecting a fight, though. It isn’t the game’s focus and so it offers little in the way of complexity or tactical options. Her point-andclick camera is meant to be Jade’s real weapon, and much of the main plot consists of creeping into army installations looking for clues that all is not what it seems in the war against the wicked DomZ.
Stealth naturally becomes the order of the day, and here Jade is blessed with the ability to tiptoe around, flatten herself against walls, crouch and crawl, forward-roll and hang from ledges and blessed also with the Alpha Section’s inexplicable unwillingness to install any security cameras of its own, or to pursue intruders beyond the first doorway. Alpha Section soldiers, with their limited fields of vision helpfully indicated by helmet lights, stand guard or patrol monotonously, presenting numerous puzzles for Jade of the type ‘how do I get from here to there?’
The game offers a solid variety of challenges but rarely are they taxing (beyond a few times when you accidentally bump into the hulk you’re trying to follow unnoticed) and it’s fair to say that by the latter stages of the game’s twelve-hour story, you’ll be running out of patience with all the crouching down behind stupid guards and resenting the later game’s security measures that prevent you from cheating and just taking them down in a moment of swift physicality.
So where do the game’s accolades come from? Why so beloved? It is, in short, a masterpiece of storytelling and characterisation. The story itself is hackneyed and fairly predictable, a world away from the grand pretensions of the title (though early development screenshots name the game as ‘Between Good & Evil’, which may have been the better title).
Perhaps lost somewhere in the game’s development, any subtlety in the question of whether the occupying army or the resistance forces are on the side of right is quickly swept away as the plot unfolds. The world in which the game is set is a weird mishmash of familiar, science-fiction and fantasy with vending machines and email, hover-vehicles and energy barriers, plus all manner of sapient species of pigs, sharks, rhinos and many others rubbing shoulders in Hillys’ marketplace.
But the magic is all in the telling. To its credit, the game never tries to explain any of this weird concoction of elements, nor does it ever sit you down and try to force you through any lengthy tutorials or explanatory sections to outline the current crisis on the planet. Instead it just drops Jade into the thick of the action and lets the story unfold around her, dripfeeding information in context and allowing you to piece together the truth in your own time.
And it’s still a rare enough game that has the guts to trust in the player’s own intelligence. As the plot proceeds, through your photographs, you become, in a sense, the one uncovering and telling the story, and then the game really hooks you in by using your own efforts – however badly taken (how many times did I wish I could have taken another shot?) – to illustrate the news reports being sent out to the citizens of the planet, and what an effective interactive storytelling technique that is!
Most recognition must go to the characterisation, though – both in the protagonist and her companions and in the world of Hillys itself – for it is this that plays the biggest role in drawing the player in and making an emotional connection to the story. So much of a story can be told through the details in the way the characters interact, or in a child’s drawing on a bedroom wall, in a way that is unique to the interactive medium of videogames as you explore an environment through the eyes and ears of the exploring heroine. BG&E, most notably in the introductory sections at the Lighthouse Shelter, pulls this off with exemplary skill, first endangering Jade’s home and adopted family and giving you the opportunity and means to protect them.
Before you know it, you’re almost as engaged in the plight of her friends as Jade is. This brings us back to Jade herself: an acrobatic elfin figure with an all-green wardrobe that at once evokes both the natural world and also the camouflage gear appropriate to her role as a war reporter. When it comes to the crunch, she’s smart, strong, confident and efficient, but she also possesses a powerful empathy for those around her – she acts as a mother figure for the orphan children at the Lighthouse Shelter though she is only about 20 years old herself – and this informs all of her relationships. Jade’s personality is filled out perfectly by Jacques Exertier’s wonderfully warm and witty dialogue, her banter with her colourful porcine guardian ‘Uncle’ Pey’j and the strait-laced, by-the-book field-agent ‘Double-H’ adding greatly to the experience, and beautifully pitched by the vocal talent of Jodie Forrest and an excellent cast (for the English language version). It is little wonder that in every list of top female videogame characters that I’ve been able to lay my hands on, Jade is a prominent inclusion, despite the relative lack of renown for this game.
By the revelatory climax of the game, Jade has run and jumped and fought through a variety of platform sections, dodged through set-piece chases, entered races, played games of skill and indulged in plenty of photography; she’s sneaked through enemy bases, taken on huge monsters in vehicular shoot-’em-up sequences and finally taken the fight to the enemy HQ. Unless you’re purely in it for the trophy counting, it’s hard not to feel some emotional involvement in Jade’s journey.
A confession: the first time I ever played, when Jade’s story took its hardest, darkest turns, after terrible revelations, I found myself deliberately slowing Jade’s pace from a run to a dazed walk, so involved had I become with the narrative; when things seemed worst for our heroine, instead of proceeding to the next challenge, I stopped Jade and crouched down for a while to give her and me time to shed a tear.
This game actually brought out the method actor in me! Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking with it. Now, if you’ll just give me a moment to pull myself together again... All-in-all, Beyond Good & Evil is an experience most to be recommended for the polish of its world and characters, for the way it presents its tale and allows it to unfold as you progress.
Games can still learn a lot from the way it achieves its background exposition and the trust it has in the player to piece things together. The gameplay is, though not of the same excellent standard, still good enough to hold the whole together and often gives you options in how to approach tasks and what to do next. If you’re willing to open your heart to Jade and her ragtag crew of companions, they will repay you with pearls.
