My ‘Beyond Good & Evil: 20th Anniversary Edition’ Devastation
Beyond Good & Evil Beyond Good and Evil Ubisoft
Mitch Wallace
Beyond Good & Evil remains a sixth generation gem, despite a game-ruining bug that's never been patched out.
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I was really looking forward to revisiting Beyond Good & Evil via the 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 originally experienced it on PS2, it’s fitting that I’ve been playing the remaster on PlayStation 5. My, how time and technology fly.

Ubisoft’s wholly original, cinematic space fantasy adventure, wherein you take photographs of extraterrestrial wildlife while secretly aiding in a burgeoning political uprising (as one does), lit my imagination on fire when it hit store shelves—and my PS2’s DVD drive—back in late 2003. Coming back to it over twenty years later, I can honestly say that everything about Beyond Good & Evil still feels enduringly charming to me.

The ocean world of Hillys, with its still-impressive reflective waterscapes, feels lived-in, populated and strangely cozy. Sure, the overall map is quaint and limited by today’s gaming standards, and the level design can seem stunted and counterintuitive at times, but the underlying vision remains impressive, especially by 2003 standards. Ambitious is an apt description. Not a surprising quality, given that Michel Ancel envisioned this first title to be part of a larger trilogy. The wait for Beyond Good & Evil 2 rages on, though.

You’ve got to remember that open-world games were just getting their footing in 2003. Grand Theft Auto III released in 2001, and Shenmue, the arguable grandfather of the genre, launched back in 1999. Developers were just beginning to understand what made an open-world game both functional and fun, and Beyond Good & Evil incorporated a lot of those fledgling elements into a largely workable—if not ultimately linear—product.

Then there’s the art style and the visuals: Bright, stylish, compelling. There’s a 3D cartoon quality to the graphics that I love to this day, and the PS5 version is displayed in glorious 4K at 60 fps, which makes the game feel much less dated. It’s simply beautiful, even if the voice-acting and melodrama can be downright atrocious, like a low-budget sci-fi horror movie. I’m still fascinated with all the creatures that Jade has to photograph, mostly notably that one shy organism living in the nautilus shell.

By way of some dark magic, the controls in Beyond Good & Evil manage to continue feeling fantastic (maybe they updated them?), although 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 does seem watered down, predictably, when compared to what we have available in the industry today.

While my soft-spot for Beyond Good & Evil will live on forever, it doesn’t mean this is a flawless game. There’s a lot of sixth generation jank present here, and it’s a good reminder of how far video games have come in the last two decades, especially in terms of design. The stealth sections are just as dumb and infuriating as they were back then, while much of the menu, inventory systems and objectives aren’t clearly explained (it took me way too long to figure out how to equip new character outfits, for example).

On top of all that, you’ve got the modern annoyance of stuff like Ubisoft Connect’s intrusive achievements, which materialize in laggy pop-ups that, if opened, take forever to dismiss. Why do we need an extra level of achievements over the platform-centric ones? Ridiculous. Plus, there’s only one manual save slot in this 2024 reissue, something I find difficult to forgive, because it lead me to encounter what I consider a devastating blow to this remaster: An un-fixed, game-breaking bug.

Around 10 hours in, I came to the realization that my companion character Double H had gone missing, and because I was only left with a handful of autosaves and one terribly timed manual save, I couldn’t reload to a point in time where he was materialized and present. I was completely out of luck. Poof. Over. Despite still being able to hear Double H’s dialog, I could no longer progress, because you need Double H in the digital flesh to solve particular environmental puzzles on the way to the moon section of Beyond Good & Evil. And to complete the newly added treasure hunt quest, by the way.

The bug occurred somewhere in, or right after, the slaughterhouse section of the game. And apparently, this is a glitch that can be traced to the original release. Evidenced by forum posts that go back to at least 2005, Double H has made it a habit of up and vanishing in certain instances, and through several software re-releases—this year’s 20th Anniversary Edition and 2011’s Beyond Good & Evil HD included—Ubisoft simply never fixed the problem. Great.

Will I start over so that I can complete the game? Sadly, probably not, at least not for the time being. The truth of the matter is, there’s too many other interesting things to play right now, and I’d be risking stumbling across the same glitch again, since no one can truly pinpoint how or why it happens. I don’t think I ever encountered it back in 2003, which makes it all the more devastating in 2024.

Beyond Good & Evil, I will always love you, but not enough to retread those ten hours anytime soon. And Ubisoft, please release a patch that finally addresses this. We’re busy. We have families. We have kids now. We have indigestion. Do us a solid and find Double H. He might be getting wasted at the Akuda Bar.