Beyond Good and Evil was never worth 20 years of angst
Overview & Key Takeaways
How did a game so sweet and fleeting become a two-decade sticking point for Ubisoft?
Joshua Wolens
Would like to know what the hell we're even doing here.
It was a whirlwind dalliance. I picked up Beyond Good and Evil's 20th anniversary edition on Friday and finished it—all pearls collected, all animals snapped—by Sunday. I can't escape the lure of nostalgia: BG&E Cool Original was an important game for me as a kid. I bought it on a whim for my 11th birthday and it's been lodged in my brain ever since.
Jade, forever
(Image credit: Ubisoft)
But it was an odd revisit. BG&E is still fun enough; it's a colourful and unique world that gives you a novel way to interact with it—down the barrel of your camera lens. But that's it. This game is sparse. There simply isn't that much to it.
Once you've drilled down past the questionably Rastafarian rhinoceroses and the exciting wildlife photography, what you have is a remarkably brief game with shonky combat, paper-thin characters, and stealth that manages to both be very easy and pretty tedious.
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Do I still like it? Absolutely. Beyond Good and Evil was a colourful sweet-treat that hit me at just the right age—ephemeral by design, such that its flaws and soggy pockets never linger long enough to bother you. It's a videogame summer romance, but that's all it is.
So it's inexplicable that it has become the foundation of the most legendary 20-year development struggle in gaming. There's just not enough game here, not enough quality material to sink your teeth into, to ever warrant more than spending about two-three years on an equally pleasant-but-transient sequel. That's no insult to the original game, which does what it sets out to do and does it memorably and well. No, it's a baffled, guttural yawp: What are we doing here?
Perhaps one day we'll know. Maybe one day Beyond Good and Evil 2 will release, and we will look upon it, and we'll all just get it. "Oh," we'll say, collectively, "so that's what you were doing all this time."
But somehow I doubt it.
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