Beyond Good & Evil was an industry darling that got amazing reviews from all the critics, but sold very poorly. It was one of the biggest flops for a game that many considered to be so good. I never played it on the original generations of consoles, but I do remember buying the HD version on the Xbox 360 many years later.
And so I dusted off my Xbox 360 and found that the game was still stored there and thus I wanted to archive this game once and for all. I never completed the game back in the day, so it was an absolute joy to return to this magnificent world and see the adventure through to the end.
The game tells the story of our protagonist Jade who goes on an epic adventure together with her pig friend Pey'j. Together they form an awesome duo and you witness their journey as they join a rebellion where they get assignments to collect evidence against a sinister secret involving an alien oppressor.
I think the biggest issue that the game has is that screenshots or even trailers do not portray how good the game actually is. You have games where it can peak your interest with just a handful of screenshots, but on first glance there is not that much special about Beyond Good & Evil. But that is until you play it, because the game is chockfull of content and packed with detail and love.
It plays like an action adventure and the true star in this game are its pacing and variety. Every ten minutes you will be doing something different. At one moment you are facing a giant beast during a boss battle, then afterwards you participate in an exciting race with hovercrafts, moments later you partake in a fun minigame and thereafter you need to sneak and use stealth to avoid patrolling robots.
Its absolutely fantastic and still holds up today. The world and its art design are great with so much attention to detail in the enviroments. Just walking around the city and seeing all the different anthropomorphic creatures is great and don't get me started about the music. The music in this game is some of the best that the game's industry has to offer. Songs would often get stuck in my head hours later after having played the game.
The characters themselves are all so memorable and there really aren't any boring parts in this game. There's a few side objectives and activities, but nothing that drags on for too long or becomes repetitive. The side activity to make photos of all the wildlife is awesome and for completionists there is plenty to enjoy.
Probably my only complaint is that a lot of enviroments you find yourself in are industrial and I would have loved to have a bit more variety in the enviroments. Though its cliche to have a fire world or ice world, it does always feel a bit more varied than what we get here. Luckily the gameplay is awesome enough to compensate with that and overall Beyond Good & Evil is just an absolute gem of a game that deserves to be experienced.
Unfortunately the game has faced hardship after hardship and it just never became a success and I also don't think we will ever get a sequel to it. Many core members have left and also the original voice actress for Jade has since passed. It was as if the universe itself is telling us not to hope for a sequel, but instead cherish what we had gotten with the release of the original Beyond Good & Evil.

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