davidcarlton
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Registered: 07/14/08
Posts: 354
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Reply with quote | #1 |
If you have thoughts about the game after finishing your playthrough, please post them here! |
| | Greg
Registered: 02/02/09
Posts: 8
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Reply with quote | #2 |
I just finished my fifth playthrough of the game. After 5 times, parts are getting a bit old, and the flaws are more apparent than ever. But I still love the game, and hope that the sequel gives me more of the same.
One thing that always leaves me a bit confused is Jade's relationship to the DomZ. I know it's supposed to be a bit vague, but consider this. Right at the beginning of the game, after the initial fight, Secundo tells Jade that "something got in her psycho-karma" during the fight. Granted, that's mumbo jumbo, but what is Ancel trying to tell us here? Is this the first point at which she was infected with something, or is the ending of the game correct when it insinuates that Jade has been a DomZ agent all along?
"He's looking for you. He' s been on your trail for centuries." - Is Jade some ancient being?
"You are not who you think you are. The pig has hidden your origins from you. You are the source of my powers, the instrument of my strength. They took you away in hopes of destroying me. They made you human, but you are not like them."
I'm just trying to get a grip on what this is supposed to mean. It feels like the end of the first Matrix movie, where we're left with the feel of Neo's powers, but don't really understand the implications.
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| | baf
Registered: 02/01/09
Posts: 19
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Reply with quote | #3 |
Obviously the details are left open as sequel-fodder, but I thought it was clear by the end that Jade is something other than human, and has been all along, without knowing it. (Sure, villains lie, but we overhear the head Domz talking the the Alpha chief about Shauni's importance, and he has no reason to lie then.) There's just the barest hint of a "you are what you choose to be" theme going on. Jade has the opportunity to fulfill her destiny and become whatever it is she really is behind the human facade, but instead she keeps on being Jade. There's probably has a name for this plot pattern at tvtropes; it's a plot pattern at least . The emphasis on relationships pays off here -- Jade is a person who we know to have friends and care about people, and as such has known motivations for not letting her humanity be stripped away.
It all raises the possibility that the Domz attacked Hillys specifically to find Jade -- maybe even that the whole scenario would have been avoided if P'eyj and his buddies had left proto-Jade alone. Probably not, but we don't know enough about the history to know for sure, and wouldn't it be horrible?
One positive effect of these final revelations: it provides P'eyj with some motivation for keeping his secrets. Sure, he trusts Jade, but he knows what Jade used to be, and doesn't trust that. So two of the game's big out-of-nowhere twists have this point where they cancel out and make sense.
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| | sharc
Registered: 10/24/08
Posts: 81
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Reply with quote | #4 |
i think i learned more unpleasant things about myself than about the game, this session.
but anyway: i came out of this with a whole new respect for ancel's design. previously i brushed him off as oh yeah that rayman guy, who cares, but coming back to beyond good and evil i find some spectacular concepts (even if the overall execution feels meddled with). the music and art direction are simply gorgeous, and the writing for jade, pey'j and double h is top-shelf stuff. the game supports multiple playstyles for getting through its dungeons and manages to make them all equally satisfying without forcing too much on the player. the game hides its big challenges in optional areas, and the pearls they provide are not necessary because there's enough extras that you can always get the required ones somewhere else. i still don't like the laser turrets very much, although they do come along right about where fighting the alphas gets a little routine if you've been doing it at every opportunity.
one thing i mentioned before that's especially great is how you can transfer heart containers over to your partner at any time. allowing the player to change their mind and take on an optional difficulty increase at any time is a damn shade better than the alternative of forcing you to just not pick up items if you want to make it hard on yourself (which also requires some foresight to know when the game will start being too easy).
despite all that, i still feel that the level design is so linear and compartmentalized that it takes away from the feel of exploration and sneaking into somewhere you're not supposed to go; most everything you need will just happen to line up perfectly for you and it feels like being led by the hand to every major event and observation point.. not many side areas, no alternate routes, and not much to convince you that the halls and rooms you wander have any purpose beyond arbitrarily-placed challenges for a video game level.
i'm also not a fan of iris and the alphas; neither side of the conflict makes much sense and they both function kind of like the t-virus in resident evil games in that they're however potent or weak the plot needs them to be at that moment. iris is an underground spy network with galactic reach that winds up feeling more like a ring of disgruntled indie bloggers. the alphas are an oppressive military regime that, were it not for what they do to pey'j, would look like bumbling doofuses incapable of supervising a fast-food joint, nevermind planet-wide kidnappings and cover-ups. i can't really see either as anything but background information that muscles into the main story, and a lot of the writing for the iris characters or the general and domz priest is also especially groan-worthy compared to jade and company.
and for that matter...our enemy, the domz. what is their deal, exactly? a dying race of unlikeable chitinous jerks? there's not much substance to them beyond being the ugly bad guys, and yet the game's final twist suddenly shifts them from mysterious entities that can safely remain behind to curtain to central figures in a grand overarcing plot that ties directly and specifically to jade. that means they have to start talking about their plan, and i agree with kimari here that the story isn't better off for it.
the sudden change at the end, regardless of the foreshadowing, just feels unnecessary to me. if jade has to become of special interest to the domz, there's a perfectly good reason already; she's already opposed to them in every possible way. the domz are conspirators that obscure the truth, jade is an investigator that reveals it. they want to consolidate information, she wants to distribute it. the domz can only understand things on their own terms, and either subjugate or destroy anything that doesn't fit. jade approaches every situation with an open mind and is willing to reassess her understanding of world in light of new information, however unbelievable it might appear. hell, the domz even see anything other than themselves as slaves to be used, while jade treats others as allies that can contribute to the whole in their own ways.
to the domz, currently unable to live without clandestine, parasatic exploitation of another species, jade's actions don't just represent military or political setbacks that can be recovered from by conventional means. the obvious extrapolation of jade's views is a world that is idealogically toxic to the domz; it would not just push them back but remove their only means of survival. any threat of extinction should be unnerving to a species with one foot in the grave, and the fact that this particular individual is inspiring a planet through her behavior should have any domz with higher brain functions clacking its mandibles in abject terror. sure, iris professed a lot of this stuff too, but i don't see them sneaking into restricted areas at great personal risk, fighting jack-booted power-armored thugs, or flying to the moon to smack alien god-kings in the jaw.
so yeah, i think jade deserves some respect - and fear - from the bad guys purely on her own merits, alien messiah or no. instead, we get bwa ha ha you are nothing and i will obliterate you but also please join the dark side because you and i are one and the same and oh hey maybe i'm your dad. while i could accept that kind of arrogance from their general killemall, having even the grand high poobah of the bad guys failing to recognize the threat jade represents seems like a waste.
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| | crimsonclone
Registered: 09/02/08
Posts: 154
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Reply with quote | #5 |
Coming into Beyond Good and Evil I'd heard about how the story was one of the best in gaming or how it had a serious message and so on. So really I'm not sure if I could have come out of this playthrough anything but disappointed. It didn't help that for the first couple hours and off and on throughout the rest of the game I had a fight with the controls (a casualty of the PC port) but after those issues were mostly resolved I never felt like I was experiencing the same story others described. Where others enjoyed a deep relationship between Jade and Pey'j I found a an at times awkward companion mechanic and a character (Pey'j) that was yanked away just as I started to warm up to him. Where others found statements on the nature of the media I was left scratching my head at the apparent ineptitude of the major organizations in the game.
I think the problem I have is Ancel never develops his setting to an extent I would like. Its never entirely clear why Iris, the Alpha Sections, and Domz, or heck why anyone else is doing what they are doing. The world makes a big deal that the Hillys is being oppressed by a brutal military order but then has increasing numbers of street protesters. I'm forced to try to make assumptions over why things work the way they do but as the game went on Hillys felt increasingly fake.
Really the game is about Jade's story. However, even with some foreshadowing it saves the major developments for the end of the game and then leaves the explanation for the sequel. The game hints throughout that not everything is as it appears but there is only so much unexplained mystery one can take before it stops being mysterious and just plain frustrating.
What the game gets right is it feels unique. From the artwork to the music to making the main character a photojournalist it has a vibe its going for and for the most part hits it. Even though I don't think Hillys was developed enough it certainly feels like its own place as opposed to inspired by star trek/star wars/blade runner/insert devs favorite sci-fi setting here. Jade is from personality to design a character that doesn't fit the standard mold that shows up in games. This is outside of her gender and appearance, she is anything but the standard gruff soldier or whiny arrogant adolescent.
What I take away from Beyond Good and Evil is that the game is pleasant. It wasn't a bad experience but the gameplay and story just weren't that memorable to me. I may revisit this world when the sequel is released but I can't say it is something I'm anticipating.
Edited 9/2/09 for awful grammar even by my standards
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| | MoriartyL
Registered: 01/20/09
Posts: 197
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Reply with quote | #6 |
Well, there certainly is room for improvement in a sequel. With that said, I found this to be an impressive first step into a largely uncharted kind of storytelling. We've played through so many kinds of gameplay here, and they're not just thrown in. This isn't gameplay for gameplay's sake, like you'd find in Zelda. This is gameplay for the sake of story.
Every kind of gameplay is twisted around to find how it can be used to create a feeling of going against authority. For instance, the platforming isn't taking you up and up to far places, it's taking you down and down through a maze of conveyor belts pushing you in the opposite direction. And the driving is used not so much to go along set paths to your destination, but to push through really weird and inaccessible areas where mines keep popping up in your path. This is a story about uncovering a conspiracy, and Ancel focused almost all the gameplay toward that end.
But beyond that, when have we had any abstract gameplay which didn't fit into the plot? Whenever the puzzles aren't supporting the theme, they're solving practical problems- fixing an elevator, shutting off Pey'j's machine. The action -okay, I'll concede that the action doesn't serve much purpose. The game probably would have been better off without it. But the point stands. This is a game which knows exactly what it's all about: story. It understands that if you mix lots of kinds of gameplay together, you've got to have it serve the story or you're just wasting the player's time.
And the story we've been given, flawed as it is, is unusual (which in my book is a great thing). The characters are unique, but so is the plot. When's the last time you played a game which was -at its core- about uncovering the truth? Now, it has been pointed out that Ancel keeps jumping back to the cliches: save the princess/pig, fight the monster, get the cutscene-reward. And that's why I've been saying that there's room for improvement in the sequel.
If people can't get into this game, I totally understand that. This is a problematic game from many angles. It's not my favorite metalude (Zelda: Ocarina of Time), and it's not my favorite Ancel game (Rayman 2), so I have no illusions about where this game stands. But if you see what could be, this is an exciting game to play through. There are moments of brilliance here- the slow-motion opening, the time Pey'j was pinned down by Crochax when you were just out of reach, everything behind the star door, the part at the end when the world finally sees your photos. I'm not sad about how this game sold just because people didn't get to play a very fun game (though it is that). I wish more people would play this because nowhere is it more evident what the next step is. You play this game, and you understand what the future of interactive storytelling should be like. Ancel was almost there --but not quite.
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| | davidcarlton
Moderator
Registered: 07/14/08
Posts: 354
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Reply with quote | #7 |
I might have more to say later about the game, but for right now my takeaways are:
* It's a well-done game, and less of a Zelda clone than I had mentally pegged it as.
* I still don't get the love some people have for this game.
* The ending really annoyed me, but not enough to wipe out my enjoyment of the earlier parts.
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| | Karkacabra
Registered: 10/24/08
Posts: 29
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Reply with quote | #8 |
I disagree regarding the storytelling methods of the game. I think this story could be better told as a movie than it was in the game. It's a clever story and characters, stitched together with many different kinds of gameplay. Yes, it's much better than most games at telling a story, but that's not saying much. BG&E doesn't tie the story to the gameplay, it merely sets them side by side and holding hands.
I look more towards the Half Life series, for never taking you out of character and [almost] never taking all control away from you for the sake of a cutscene.
I look more towards Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, which have so little gameplay and such sparse environments, as I truly believe those are stories that cannot be told, but must be experienced.
I even look more towards Fallout 3 which, though it has a mediocre story, provides an extremely rich and detailed world, laying much fertile ground for an entirely player-created story.
BG&E tells you a story and shows you characters and events, and lets you tie each chunk of story together with actions. But never once did it make me feel like I was actually experiencing something, or making my own unique mark on the world, which is what I believe sets the potential of games as above and beyond anything we've seen before.
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| | ILR
Registered: 08/27/08
Posts: 125
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Reply with quote | #9 |
Well, I didn't play the game this time around but it's not too far back that I finished BG&E, so here are some things from a hazy perspective untainted by the VGC introspection:
- The Hillys world, while small, is in one word exhilarating. The first time I jumped onto the hovercraft and took to the water area was one of those WOW moments in gaming. The world is not any cliched fantasy/scifi theme park but a unique entity filled with interesting characters and quirky little touches.
- That being said, I don't particularly enjoy the kind of game design in which there is only a single path around the scenery, in worst cases even bordered by very speculative barriers such as particularly thick foliage or knee-high boxes. The environment never feels a natural place to be in. This seems like a particular trope for console adventures, Jade(heh) Empire drove me nuts at first with this kind of design. For the opposite school of design, see Thief, Deus Ex, and - to some extent - Tomb Raider or Hitman where you can go where your abilities allow you to go. Granted, a puzzle game such as BG&E requires focused set pieces that a free-form environment doesn't allow, so the point is a bit moot.
- Overall, the game feels quite a bit too highly-regarded these days. A reverse backslash from its original obscurity, I guess.
- Didn't like the quick intro for the reasons outlined earlier in discussion even though it's been well justified here in that same discussion.
- Many of the supposed high points of the game or its story fell very short of their intended impact (Return to the lighthouse), felt too - pardon the pun - ham-fisted ("Gee, Jade, if it wasn't for you, I'd be smoked bacon by now"), or were annoying in their Deus Ex Machinity ("Pey'J resurrection).
- Double H was a likable character, I enjoyed warming up to him at the same pace as Jade.
- Photographing was a masterstroke game mechanic.
- At the final battle the game's title finally started making sense to me in all Jades divine potentials and whatnot but no matter how much I mull over the final scenes, it still doesn't exactly make sense. Maybe it was just an interesting name like it was noted in the early discussion. We need more titles like this, though; Sins of a Solar Empire, Beyond Good and Evil, I fell in love with a Litany of Colors. Don't be afraid to make it long and bombastic, dear devs.
- The dungeon environments weren't particularly captivating, afterwards I seem to have fond memories from only the moon for some reason. Stealth sections and fighting were challenging enough.
- As an invert-mouser, PC controls sucked big time (both axes inverted, or none).
Final verdict: A pleasant, varied game that oozes with charm and captivating little details but is a bit lacking in its coherency and gaming core.
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| | ILR
Registered: 08/27/08
Posts: 125
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Reply with quote | #10 |
Quote: Originally Posted by Karkacabra
I disagree regarding the storytelling methods of the game. I think this story could be better told as a movie than it was in the game. It's a clever story and characters, stitched together with many different kinds of gameplay.
Funny, this weekend I came to the conclusion that Grim Fandango has a perfect opera libretto in it. 
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| | davidcarlton
Moderator
Registered: 07/14/08
Posts: 354
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Reply with quote | #11 |
I put up my final thoughts in a blog post. I don't think I said anything there that I haven't said in one or the other of the threads here, though. I did spend a bit of time searching for other blog posts that commented on the game, though, so maybe a few of the links might say something interesting? |
| | Nelson
Registered: 03/18/09
Posts: 77
| | ILR
Registered: 08/27/08
Posts: 125
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Reply with quote | #13 |
Blah. This bites. The trailer got a lot of people really looking forward to this one. I do believe there were legitimate grounds for a moderate commercial success this time around.
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| | crimsonclone
Registered: 09/02/08
Posts: 154
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Reply with quote | #14 |
Pity, the leaked chase video actually made me interested in a sequel. Worth noting the the statement is 'on hold' not that it is no longer in development.
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