Good and Evil 20th Anniversary Edition
I was really looking forward to reviewing it Beyond good and evil via recently released 20th Anniversary Edition. And why not? It’s still one of my favorite games from the sixth generation of consoles, and given that I first experienced it on the PS2, it’s only fitting that I played the replay on the PlayStation 5. My, how time and technology fly.
Ubisoft’s all-original, cinematic space fantasy adventure, where you take pictures of extraterrestrial wildlife while secretly aiding a growing political insurgency (as one does), set my imagination on fire when it hit store shelves—and my hard drive. PS2 DVD – late 2003. Looking back over twenty years later, I can honestly say that everything about Beyond good and evil it still feels extremely charming to me.
The oceanic world of Hillys, with its reflective yet impressive waterscapes, feels lived-in, populated and surprisingly comfortable. Sure, the overall map is weird and limited by today’s gaming standards, and the level design can feel stilted and counterintuitive at times, but the underlying vision remains impressive, especially by 2003 standards. Ambitious is an apt description. It’s not a surprising quality, given that Michel Ancel envisioned this first title to be part of a larger trilogy. However, the wait for Beyond Good & Evil 2 continues.
You have to remember that open world games were just taking off in 2003. Grand Theft Auto III released in 2001, and Sign upthe controversial granddaddy of the genre, launched in 1999. Developers were just beginning to understand what made an open-world game functional and fun, and Beyond good and evil incorporated many of those new elements into a largely workable—if not ultimately linear—product.
Then there’s the art style and visuals: bright, elegant, compelling. There’s a cartoonish 3D quality to the graphics that I still love to this day, and the PS5 version runs in glorious 4K at 60fps, which makes the game feel a lot less dated. It’s just beautiful, even if the voice acting and melodrama can be downright atrocious, like a low-budget sci-fi horror movie. I’m still fascinated by all the creatures Jade has to photograph, especially that hideous creature that lives in a nautilus shell.
By means of a dark magic, the checks on Beyond good and evil manage to still feel fantastic (maybe they’ve updated them?), though admittedly the limitations of the simplistic combat system really shine through these days. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it looks tame, predictably, when compared to what we have available in the industry today.
Good and Evil 20th Anniversary Edition
While my soft spot for Beyond good and evil will live forever, that doesn’t mean this is a flawless game. There’s a lot of sixth-gen jank here, and it’s a good reminder of how far video games have come in the past two decades, especially in terms of design. The secret sections are just as dumb and infuriating as they were back then, while most of the menu, inventory systems, and objectives aren’t clearly explained (I had to ORDER too long to figure out how to equip new character outfits, for example).
On top of all that, you have the modern annoyance of things like Ubisoft Connect’s intrusive achievements, which materialize in lagging pop-ups that, if opened, take forever to clear. Why do we need an additional level of achievements compared to platform-centric ones? Funny. Plus, there’s only one manual save slot in this 2024 re-release, something I have a hard time forgiving because it brings me up against what I consider to be a crushing blow to this remaster: An unfixed bug that it breaks the game.
About 10 hours later, I realized that my companion character Double H was gone, and because I only had a small autosave left and a terribly timed manual save, I couldn’t reload him to a point in time where he was materialized and present. I was completely unlucky. Poof. Above. Despite still being able to hear Double H’s dialogue, I couldn’t progress any further because you need Double H in digital flesh to solve the special environmental puzzles on the way to the moon section. Beyond good and evil. And to complete the newly added treasure hunt quest, by the way.
The glitch occurred somewhere in, or right after, the slaughterhouse section of the game. And apparently, this is a bug that can be traced back to the original version. As evidenced by forum posts dating back to at least 2005, Double H has made a habit of going up and down on certain occasions, and through several software re-releases – this year 20th Anniversary Edition and 2011 Beyond Good and Evil HD included—Ubisoft just never fixed the problem. Big.
Do I have to start over so I can finish the game? Alas, probably not, at least not at the moment. The truth of the matter is that there are a lot of other interesting things to play with right now, and I would risk running into the same bug again, since no one can really pinpoint how or why it happens. I don’t think I ever encountered it in 2003, which makes it all the more devastating in 2024.
Beyond good and evil, I will always love you, but not enough to get those ten hours back any time soon. And Ubisoft, please release a patch that finally addresses this. We are busy. We have a family. Now we have children. We have indigestion. Make us a hard one and find Double H. He might be hanging out at the Akuda Bar.