Even if the series wasn’t stuck in development hell I would still say this: if any game is its own sequel, it’s Beyond Good & Evil. With the news last week that we’re getting a remaster with a bit of extra stuff in it, I went back to the original – almost the original, the Xbox 360 port that still runs on my Series X – to play the game once more and remind myself of why I love it so much. It was an odd experience – the game had changed a bit, in that I was drawn to different things in it, and I feel like I played through it in a slightly different way. But every time I’ve replayed Beyond Good & Evil it’s been a different game, I think. Let’s explore that.
My early memories of Beyond Good & Evil are all about waiting. Ubisoft’s sci-fi action adventure was originally only on PS2, and over in GameCube land a port was promised, but the timing was always hazy. I remember reading about this weird game in Edge, though, in a preview which had rather dark, under-exposed screenshots. Here was a game in which you weren’t a soldier but rather a journalist. Your planet, Hyllis, was under attack all but secretly, and you were effectively fighting an information war to expose the truth. How different, I thought. How French! And the game’s sci-fi world was European too, by turns classical, with all those canals on Hyllis, all that honeyed stone in the buildings, and silly, like a French comic strip filled with talking animals: pig mechanics, space whales. Moebius meets The Fifth Element.
So the first time I actually played it, I think it was just relief. Here was this game I had been after for ages, and what it seemed like, more than anything, was a Zelda game. The health system was similar, with the player collecting heart containers to give them more life. The combat gave you a melee attack and, eventually, a sort of ranged option. And you moved across an intricate, soulful overworld before diving into what amounted to dungeons. That first playthrough I think I was just marvelling at how the rules and rituals of Zelda had been carried across, re-examined, how the experience had been shifted from fantasy to science fiction, and how the narrative had shifted to a different kind of quest.
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