beyond good & evil

PLATFORM: NGC

RELEASE DATE: LATE 2003

PUBLISHER: UBISOFT
ESRB RATING: T
Progress: 60% at time of posting

This action-adventure game focuses on the antics of Jade, a female investigative reporter/part time ninja. Jade, the protagonist, is an attractive female of Latin decent and one of a handful of human characters. Page, the pig/guy, is your loyal side kick in the beginning of the game. They live in a island city called Hillys that is under alien attack from the DomZ. The loyal citizen's of Hillys only defense is the militant Alpha Sections who have been acting very suspicious as of late. Working with a band of resistance fighters, the "Iris Network", Jade finds herself wrapped up in uncovering an alien conspiracy. Beyond Good & Evil ("BG&E") was originally envisioned as the first part of a trilogy, it received stellar reviews from critics at the time and was even nominated for Game of the Year by the GDC. Alas, it didn’t make enough money or convert enough gamers to become a great commercial success.

Commercial success or not this is one game not to be missed.

BG&E has incredible graphics with great, original character designs that were just sick at the time. The outer world and inner "dungeons" have great lighting and shadows. While BG&E does not quite provide the open world environment that many modern games offer it is a large enough world to have fun exploring. The style of the game is reminiscent to a Zelda game mashed with the Rachet & Clank world; cute characters in a oppressed world. Some of my favorite characters are the Rasta Walruses who sell you items and, of course, the evil alien designs. Double H, another human member of the Iris Network, reminds me a lot like Quark from the Rachet & Clank series. There are some fixed camera angles which show the game's limit and age. Overall, the developers of the game make really good use of depth and the environments. The detail and polish of the graphics makes BG&E one of the best looking games in the Nintendo Game Cube library.

 

Incredible graphics, original story and intuitive game play as well. The cool things you get to do in this game are the fighting, stealth levels, hovercraft racing and of course photo journalism. Pretty sure this is the only video game where you play as a photo journalist with picture taking game play that you might find in a Pokemon game. Collecting photos of all the animals just in case Hillys is destroyed is your "job" within the game. You get paid in Pearls which are used as currency in Hillys. M-Disk consoles are both save stations and readers for the information discs that Jade finds. BG&E is not a very difficult game, but it will take some endurance to beat some of the inter spliced hovercraft racing mini games and ultimately the game. Here's a tip: score yourself the pearl finder and animal locator right away.

My NGC needed a couple of restarts, but hey, it’s over ten years old.  I originally bought this game just as long ago and never finished it. I got stuck what ev. I've had my Nintendo Game Cube wrapped in plastic wrap too long and decided it was time to change that. I'm well over half way through this game with no slowing down in sight. Eat a Starkos and enjoy some throwback gaming! As always, I keep multiple game saves, I found that to be key, especially when I needed to back track or made a mistake. Beware of certain points that will have you back tracking forever, if you miss something. And pay attention to the cut scenes they are over way to quick and it is easy to miss your next mission brief. The game features some old internet codes, early examples of connectivity to the web, that I assume no longer work. The game runs in letterbox format, adding to the already cinematic presentation when running on my 42" flatscreen TV.

BG&E has a lot of internet chatter about a sequel, and it would be welcomed and appreciated by fans of the original, and potentially newcomers. I think this game could benefit to fitting the original game and the sequel on the same disk, fingers crossed.

A
Classic game with vibrant characters and great pacing that is hard not to love.