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Amazing

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: December 18, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Without question, this is one of the best, most captivating games I've played in a long time. Everything from the graphics, to the story, gameplay and sound is extremely polished and fits together perfectly. My only complaint about the game is that at times the camera wouldn't behave, but this wasn't enough of an issue to hurt the experience. Highly recommended.

Why am I first to review this game?

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: December 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

There is no question about this game... it's addictive and fun. I really don't understand why I'm the first to post a review here. This game has everything you want: a GREAT story, action, adventure, stealth, interaction, racing, item collection... A lot of people are hesitant to buy this game simply because they have read it's too short. That is true, but I found myself savoring every moment of it. Seriously. I'd put the game down and anticipate playing it at a later time. What would you rather... a long game that gets boring and repetitive, or a somewhat short game that is beautiful and engaging throughout? The cutscenes sometimes were so emotional that it actually almost made me cry. I can't say that about any other video game I've played..... EVER. This is by far the best game I've ever had the pleasure of owning for the X-Box console, and I'm already waiting for the sequel to come out!

Great game.. easy to learn!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: December 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Beyond Good & Evil puts you in the role of Jade, a young woman who, along with her humanoid pig uncle, Pey'j, runs a lighthouse on the planet Hillys. Hillys is at war with an alien force known as the DomZ and an elite squadron known as the Alpha Sections protects Hillys from the alien threat. An underground rebel organization known as the IRIS Network charges that the Alphas control both sides of the equation. You quickly hook up with IRIS and spend the bulk of the game infiltrating Alpha strongholds in search of the truth. The game gives you a companion most of the time and many puzzles will require you to get your associate to do things.
Most of the game's sections have you out and in search of photographic evidence. You're looking for specific pictures and the areas of interest are marked on your map. The game does have combat but it's a fairly straightforward system. The strength comes from the game's puzzle solving. Sometimes it's as easy as using your projectile attack to push a button on the other side of a force field. Sometimes you'll have to find fuses in other parts of an installation to power elevators or other equipment. Sometimes you'll have to learn a password to proceed into a locked area. And there's a whole lot of sneaking around. Beyond Good & Evil is a fantastic-looking game that tells its story well. It may be short enough to rent and complete in a day or two, but fans of action adventure games will find enough to love in the game's overall design to make it worth purchasing.

Beyond Wonderful & Awsome

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: January 02, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game is the best game I recieved this christmas by far. The combos that you can use when figting are really cool and fighting enemies is very fun. Taking pictures is also a really fun part of the game, too. The animals are usually all easy to take pictures of and make this game even more intresting than it regularly would. This is also a beutiful world that you can do as you please in with your hovercraft. Everyone should own this game! Buy it now!

Jeunet + Miyazaki + Rayman = ?

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: January 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Beyond Good & Evil, from Ubisoft, is an adventure game in the vein of Zelda: The Wind Waker. You play as Jade, an "action reporter" who becomes embroiled in a plot to expose a government conspiracy. The "Alpha Sections" are nominally your planet Hyllis' defense force, but you find that they seem to show up conveniently just after the invaders, the DomZ, attack. You're not the only one who finds this fishy, and in the process of trying to figure out what's going on.

The plot is relatively straightfoward - you find a secretive group who's working to uncover the government conspiracy, and you face some obstacles and hurdles along the way. There's some stealth, there's some puzzle solving, some item fetching, and some combat. All the standard adventure ingredients are there. But that's not all there is. You drive around in your hovercraft, which you can also enter in races, and you can take photos of the local flora and fauna. You'll also use your camera to photograph the evidence of the conspiracy at hand.

All that adventure-y goodness is wrapped up in a beautiful, and interesting package. Though the "Jade Engine" which BG&E is built upon isn't going to change the world, it is powerful enough to make BG&E a graphically stunning game. The environments are an interesting blend of Jeunet and Miyazaki, and the fact that Michel Ancel also created Rayman isn't lost on the design aesthetic. On top of the beautiful and imaginitive environments, the supporting cast is one of the most interesting aspects of the game.

Your uncle, an anthromorphic pig named Pey'j, is a cantankerous old mechanic, whose affection for Jade really shows through his cranky exterior. Jade has some really novel casual interactions with the patrons of the local bar, from a humanoid shark man who plays a variant of air hockey, to the bartender, who's an eight foot tall cow-man. The casual way she talks to these otherworldly creatures (the shark-man is named "Francis") gives the game a sort of supernatural familiarity that is unlike most games.

Beyond Good and Evil is really the game that's made me really consider Ubisoft both a powerhouse of game development, and a studio that's willing to take some pretty risky moves in order to move the medium forward. Just as Sega did, when they were publishing games for the Dreamcast, Ubisoft seems to be making a wide variety of really interesting, and unfortunately overlooked games. BG&E, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and XIII all tried new, and interesting things. Couple that with bestsellers like Rainbow Six 3, and the Ghost Recon series, and it's hard to argue that Ubisoft doesn't possess a stellar lineup for the discerning gamer. Though not all of their games are excellent (the multiplayer in R6-3 is broken, and XIII, though visually interesting, plays to its weaknesses by including far too much stealth), they're trying new things, and have been hitting quite a few completely out of the park. Prince of Persia is hands down my favorite game of last year, and BG&E looks to be of similar quality.

A storyline so immersive it will hold you to the end

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Beyond Good & Evil is Michel Ancel's (the creator of Rayman) newest title for both the consoles and the PC. You play the game as Jade, a reporter on the world of Hillys, where the DomZ have been engaged in war will the governments Alpha Forces.

As the game begins you are immediatly thrown into a simple (and yet addictive) combat system. Easy to pull off combos and dispatch the DomZ in a whirl of spins and slashes will a long pole that Jade carries around with her.

As the game progresses a government conspiracy begins to surface, and you soon find yourself joining a radical group called Iris to expose the conspracy behind the Alpha Forces and the DomZ. To do this Jade will have to photograph evidence of the DomZ and other things, many twisting and reshaping your idea of the war on Hillys.

Being an Adventure game there is plenty to do in the open world, collecting pearls (your curancy to purchase upgrades for your ship) participate in races, and just explore the world similar to Wind Waker, but in a smaller and much more manigible size.

The puzzles and dungeons in the game are challanging, fun, and always a little different, making this a very enjoyable game. The only downside to this game is that it is very short, and the is no more to do after you finish the game except play it again (which is supprisingly fun to do), but with the two HUGE plot twists at the end (make sure to watch the entire credit sequence), it will keep you thinking for hours later, for the storyline and cut-scenes blend so well into the gameplay that this game sets new standereds for storyline design and developement.

This game is definately a hidden gem in the overcrowed gaming market, and it would be a sin to pass this one up!

Beyond Good

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 16 / 19
Date: January 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Remember the first time you saw the movie "The Fifth Element"? Remember how cool it was to see what looked like a really entertaining dream you might have had, only it was a film? It's not that there's any one particular part that sticks out and makes it great, but just this almost implacable warmth and giddy sense of fun that flickered across every frame. It seemed like creator Luc Besson was just having fun with it, and it showed up in a way that you simply can't fake.

I use that as an example because it's the only way I can really describe the feeling that comes from Beyond Good and Evil: It's the exact same sense of warmth, and it makes you smile just watching this game unfold, even as you're at a loss for words to really describe it. Probably the closest you can come without resorting to obscure comparisons is to say "This game is really, really cool" while grinning ear to ear.

We just don't have a word for it in English, but maybe the French do. Just like the aforementioned filmmaker, the creator of BG&E (and also the first two "Rayman" games) is a Frenchie, Michael Ancel. Whatever cultural viewpoint his place of origin may have lent him, I wish they could bottle it and ship it to U.S. and Japanese game designers, because you just don't see this kind of stuff in other games.

This aspect comes through in almost every part of the game. The graphics are excellent and have such a vibrant use of color that it makes almost everything else on the market look bland. Amusingly, the entire game is also letterboxed. Not sure why, but it works.

The music is instantly affecting and suits the game perfectly, though the title score does sound an awful lot like the music to "Princess Mononoke". No matter, it fits like a glove.

Far and away the best aspect to this game, however, is the characters. The characters in BG&E are funny, memorable, and at just the right level of realism to allow you to get attached to them without thinking about it, and this goes from the lead character Jade all the way down the line to the smallest of bit characters. This is so rare in a videogame that I can't stress it enough. The characters don't resort to artificial means of forcing the player to care about them via troubled pasts or secret phobias or the tendency to slip into a blinding rage or anything like that. They just come across as likeably human...Which is sort of remarkable when you factor in that one of them is a talking pig.

Yep, in BG&E, there are as many animal people as human people, and you know what? It doesn't detract from the believability of the game in the slightest, in the same way that the fish in "Finding Nemo" were able to nab just as much, if not more, emotional attachment than if had they been human. When a created world takes itself seriously, the fact that it doesn't synch up to the real world becomes a benefit; you're even more able to immerse yourself in it, and it becomes that much more entertaining.

Here's an example: About 1/6 of the way into the game, the main character, Jade, and her porcine "uncle" Pey'j (pronounce it "page") come across a boss character and fight it. When Jade wins, the first thing she does is run over to Pey'j and give him a hug, and we're talking a running-leap-into-her-uncle's-arms-cheering hug. It might sound corny, but when you see it, it seems perfectly natural and honestly heartwarming. Most of the time, when something like this is tried in a videogame, it comes across as horribly forced. Not here.

However, with all this Good comes a little bit of Evil, and that happens when we address the game itself. Now, don't get me wrong: There's absolutely nothing wrong with the game mechanics. In fact, it plays exactly like a modern-day Zelda game. Where it stumbles is in that there's simply not enough of it to elevate the game from "excellent" to "truly great".

As superb as everything is, the entire game can be finished in under a week, and it's very easy to do everything your first time through. There are 56 animals to take pictures of and 88 pearls (read: item tokens) to get, and I got them all without too much effort my first time through the game. 88 sounds like a lot, and indeed, at first you're only getting one or two at a time, but near the end of the game they start to come in clumps of ten or more, and several of them are awarded as part of the main plot. Likewise with the animals, who have a few parts in the game where they're tricky to find, but nowhere near as involved as similar optional quests from the Zelda games, or even other similar entries in the game genre. Also, beyond the pearl gathering and animal photography, the only other thing to do besides the main plot is a fairly simple (and sort of boring) racing game, which gives you no real rewards beyond the pearls you get as a prize. It doesn't help that the reward you get for getting all the pearls and finding all the animals is pretty lame - a small, tricky mini-game and a very basic catalogue of all the animals you've taken photos of.

This, combined with the single, disappointingly vague ending hold the game back from a perfect score - there's next to no replay value, even though the game leaves you wanting so much more.

Still, the merits far, far outweigh the problems, which aren't even really problems so much as a lack of more merits that you wish were there. Grab this while you can.

Short steps from perfection

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: February 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

It is hard to add to the reviews below, but I do feel I have something worth saying about this offering from UBI Soft.

The gameplay is amazingly varied: racing, exploring, non-shooter action (think Starfox Adventures), stealth, and photography. The amazing part of the varying isn't how many different styles there are, but how unbelievably smoothly they are put together. It is all very natural, you never get the feeling that "Ok, now I'm in the racing part of the game," even though there are, in fact, racing parts of the game.

The story is deep for an adventure game, but not so incredibly complicated that you are really left wondering. Very early in the game the player should be roughly aware of the path the plot is going to take. The story actually suffers a little at the end, but not especially so; more foreshadowing would have helped.

In line with the foreshadowing would be extending actual game-play time. I completed the game in under ten hours recorded play, 14 hours total. For a gamer like me, that is one sitting. The story has so much room for development that it is really a shame the developers didn't use that room. The existence of pointless sidequests and a game is nice for perfectionists, but they fail to focus on the different aspects of gameplay. A battle arena would have been a fantastic addition to the game.

The final complaint is that the difficulty is downright easy with one exception, even casual gamers shouldn't have much problem with this. A difficulty setting would help a lot.

Given those complaints, the game is easily four star quality. It was, without a doubt, one of the funnest games I've played in a long time. The dialogue is so well-played that you actually care about other characters. The graphics are very smooth and colorful without seeming too cute. The controls are easy and comfortable. The battle system isn't overly simplistic, but not so deep as to discourage. The replayability is moderate.

At $20, it is worth the price without question.

why so little $

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 01, 2004
Author: Amazon User

beyond good and evil is such a good, entertaining game i wonder why and how it got overlooked and had its price bombed. though not entirely, ridiculusly, ludicrusly difficult, it is just a little hard. but the gameplay is so varied and story so entertaining u dont really mind and want to continue playin to get to the end. plz dont over look this game, ubisoft is on a rooollll with games like beyond good and evil, splinter cell, prince of persia, and now that beyond good and evil is twenty bucks, u got no reason not to pick up some good fun.

A fun adventure game.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: April 25, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game has a beautiful world to offer. In my opinion, it bests the Final Fantasy series's last dozen installments in terms of sheer originality. The combat is enjoyable, if a little too simple (Ninja Gaiden this ain't), and the storyline is also very engaging. This is also one of the few games that succeeds at constantly divvying up the quest between action, puzzle, and exploration elements of gameplay. You could play this seriously as an adult or with younger kids.

It's a shame that a lot of people ignored it when it first came out, but now that the price dropped, maybe you will pick it up like I did. It may not be HALO or GTA, but it is definitely worth the $25. A neat little title to spend some quality time with.

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