Beyond Good and Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition, Revised

I can’t do it, there are too many memories: We’ve reiterated this many times before we get to the end credits of Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition, more than twenty years since the last time. Directed by Michel Ancel, the game debuted in 2003, yet many aspects of the experience are still present, showing how true the initial ideas were.

We know that Ubisoft is working on the second chapter of the saga, although development is moving very slowly, and in these cases, playing the remake card is practically necessary to try to clear those characters and those stories for a potential new audience. If it’s a version packed with extras and available at a very affordable price, so much the better.

The story behind good and evil

Despite the inevitable naivety of video game narratives that at the time could not rely on the cinematic approach of some current productions, the story of Beyond Good & Evil It still has a lot to say regarding character characterization and the game worldSo much so that he is as emotional today as he was twenty years ago.

In reality It’s a little Star Wars, what Ansel was able to put together.: A sci-fi adventure set in a galaxy far, far away on the planet Helis: a world tormented by the attacks of a mysterious alien being, DomZ, who has brought the population to their knees, making them completely dependent on the defense forces of the Alpha Squads.

In this scenario, Jade is a young and brave photojournalist. She lives inside a lighthouse on a small island, accompanied by her Uncle Pig (a funny but witty anthropomorphic pig who raises her like a daughter) and a group of young orphans she takes care of. Economic hardship pushes the girl to accept a series of assignments, but one in particular turns out to be different from what she imagined.

Jade was actually recruited by Iris, a secret organization that aims to uncover the exciting truth about Alpha Squads and their leader. A quest that quickly turns into a very personal matter for the protagonist, which will take her to explore different areas of Hyllis and even travel beyond the confines of the atmosphere.

Toys and structure carry the weight of the years?

Experiencing the remaster of Beyond Good & Evil after all this time is undoubtedly a learning experience, considering that The game is still flowing and it is a pleasure. This is clearly due to the brilliance of the intuition originally put forward. There are many situations that reveal how much this work is inspired by modern action adventures.

Of course, the aspects that left us scratching our heads twenty years ago have certainly not improved, and we point in particular to combat: The effect performance is inconsistent and the display tends to go crazy a lot.But at least the new control scheme (active by default, but if you want, you can also choose the original one) makes some moments less wooden than we remembered.

The stealth genre hasn’t evolved much over time, so Beyond Good & Evil’s sections where you have to hide from enemies, and then maybe catch them off guard from behind, prove to be quite modern. Mechanics of photographsWhat’s more, it still exists today as a smart solution to incentivize and reward exploration.

The adventure itself is not very long; The campaign rarely lasts more than twelve hours. The fragmented structure of the scenarios inevitably ends up feeling dated compared to the open-world approach, but the situations offer a fair amount of variety: there are secrets to discover, and if you want, it’s possible to try your hand at speedruns.

A renewed technical sector

Beyond Good & Evil: 20th Anniversary Edition is a remaster and not a remake, meaning that the skeleton of the game remains the original, although in this case the developers They not only increased the resolution and frame rate. In fact, the work that has been done on the textures is evident, and almost all of them have been replaced with different, higher-quality textures.

The scenarios, but above all, the characters have benefited greatly from these changes, especially with regard to shadows and ambient coverage, adding depth to the objects (some of which have been transformed from simple sprites into polygonal models), although The animations and interactions feel the weight of the years a lot..

The PC version runs at 4K and 60fps with all settings at maximum without any particular issues, although the options have actually been reduced to the bare bones: graphics quality, texture quality, presence or absence of anti-aliasing, shadow quality, and ambient occlusion And bloom, that’s all. Unfortunately, business fluidity suffers in some cases Small doubts due to the usual stuttering phenomena.

The soundtrack is still a jewel today, thanks to the variety and character of the soundtrack that Ancel himself worked on in collaboration with Christophe Heral. Italian dubbing It is the original version and can still be listened to with pleasure, with the hope that Beyond Good and Evil 2 will eventually also feature a full translation into our language.