Reviews: Beyond Good and Evil and Anachronox (PC)

So, I haven't done any reviews for awhile. This is mostly because I've been playing Anachronox for pretty much ever. This is a good and bad thing. Mostly bad, though. I think.

Beyond Good & Evil
So, Beyond Good & Evil (BGE) was pretty damn fun. Actually, playing both of these games reminded me of ye olden tymes when there was the occasional AAA game that had a really interesting setting, a legitimately engaging gameworld. BGE has such a charmingly idiosyncratic sci-fi/cartoon/steampunk/sort-of-Madagascar world that I found myself really wanting to explore it.

Like Disney, but with redneck Han Solo in boar form.

Fortunately, the game follows this up with excellent mechanics, so exploring its semi-open world is a joy. It's a game that's fun to play not necessarily because of any particularly innovative or brilliant mechanic, but more because it offers a number of different game modes and all of them work pretty well. Like a lot of more modern games, BGE lets you fly a spaceship, race a hovercraft, explore dungeons, battle using a melee weapon, solve puzzles using a rhythm-based combat move, stealth your way into enemy military bases, take photos, talk to townsfolk, go shopping, talk to your party mates...and I could probably go on if I thought hard enough. All of these things (except, arguably, the hovercraft) feel pretty natural, are easy to pick up without having to learn a lot of complicated controls, and perhaps most importantly all fit well in the game's world. When you suddenly have to start flying a spaceship, it seems like a natural progression in the game's story, and in your role as the puppet-master rather than a developer throwing another toy at you to keep you playing for another five hours.

In addition to the world-fun and the game-fun, there's some story-fun to be had. The story, looked at in broad strokes, isn't particularly unique or compelling, but the voice acting, the (admittedly 2003) cutscenes, and the excellent writing make for a memorable cast of characters. Many of the game's most compelling moments come from character-on-character interaction: this is a game that's not going to pull back emotionally when it comes to dramatic punches because a) it's a cartoon or b) it's "just a game." There's some powerful stuff here, and that alone is almost worth the price of admission.

Get ready to feel some fucking boar-feelings!

If there's a downside to BGE, it's that it falls a little too much in love with its stealth-based sneaking gameplay in the latter half of the game. Having to sneak through large, open rooms and past guards happens way too frequently, considering that the game doesn't provide any sort of feedback to show how close you are to being seen or the degree of danger you're in. The camera usually swings around nicely to frame the stealth puzzles cinematically and this generally highlights the sightlines of the bad guys and the potential points of egress. But otherwise, you have no idea when you're going to fail, and when you fail (and you will), you may not necessarily understand why you failed. When you fail, you pretty much always get killed immediately: at first a large group of difficult-to-defeat armored guards descend on you en masse, and later on they just call in an airstrike from hovering laser-drones, which are a one-shot kill and are undodgeable. So, being seen for the last quarter or so of the game is a death sentence. This makes a lot of the stealth sequences trial-and-error in the "you die and die and die and figure it out eventually" sense.

Ultimately though, it's a great game with engaging gameplay and a fascinating and convincingly realized world marred ever so slightly by the old "too many cooks in the kitchen" problem. But not so much that you shouldn't but it immediately and play the fuck out of it.

Oh, and the protagonist is a woman who wears fairly sensible clothing and isn't made entirely of breasts.

Anachronox
Oh, shit. Anachronox. A game I've wanted to play since pretty much ever, but missed when it was first out on account of having a slow computer, then ignored for awhile due to apparent issues with getting it to run on a new computer, then finally purchased through GOG. This game is, in its own way, the most infuriating game I've ever played in my life. That's because it presents you with an absolutely amazingly written and voiced sci-fi epic that is as satisfyingly genre-correct as it is occasionally bizarrely unique (for example, one of your party members is an entire planet). It also gives you a visually consistent, convincing and striking universe for the game's sprawling story to unfold in. Then it makes you play a stupid, repetitive, almost gloatingly simplistic and slow-paced game to experience the story and the world it takes place in. Anachronox has a fan-made movie version in which all the game's cinematics are stitched together to tell a pretty effective version of the game's story while cutting out the gameplay entirely. That says a lot to me. To say this game isn't fun to play would be like saying having fire ants devouring your balls was mildly unpleasant.

Yep.

This game is not fun because:

1. There's about 400% too much backtracking, revisiting old locations, etc.

2. The characters just move too slowly. It takes forever to get from place to place, and when you want to move from one planet to another (which you do often) you need to walk all the way to a specific location on the planet you're currently visiting to change planets. When you want to change party members (also a frequent occurrence), you have to travel to a specific location in a specific planet, which for no necessary reason is also a far walk from that planet's spaceport. If you played this game as efficiently as possible, fulfilling only the primary objectives and nothing else, I'd estimate that 30% of this 30-40 hour game would still be traveling back to places you're already been and fighting battles you've already fought. Not knowing the most efficient route myself and needing to explore all options to complete a lot of the game's obscure quests, I'd estimate I spent about 80% of my first 15 or so hours backtracking, talking to the same NPCs over and over again, fighting the same battles over and over again...until I just downloaded a walkthrough and followed it for the rest of the game.

3. You either have to complete a lot of the game's esoteric subquests (which are obscure to the point of hilarity at times) or find a way to grind XP (hint: there is none) before you can even have a slight hope of being leveled high enough to finish the game. Many of the most obscure quests give you better weapons, which you need because without them you can't even hit your foes on a regular basis, let alone do significant damage to them. Most of these weapons can only be found during quests and can't just be bought somewhere. As a result, near the end of the game, I had a massive amount of money with no reason to spend it on anything, while I was undertaking hour-long quests just to get better weapons for my characters so I could actually defeat the monsters in the final dungeon (the final dungeon requires the use of two parties of three characters, which means you have to fully arm all your party members and not just max out a few favorites).

4. Battles are tedious. They're basic, FFVII-style ATB system battles, but they're painfully slow. There's an attempt at variety and tactics, but what it really boils down to is: 1) you get limit breaks, 2) you can move your characters on a hex-like field, but this never really plays a role other than as a novelty, 3) you can use magic spells but this drains your ability to boost your HP with shields...but this just remains a basic either-or proposition for the whole game, so again there's no real strategy here, 4) turns move incredibly slowly, 5) you and your enemies miss your attacks around 20-30% of the time, so battles last even longer, and 6) toward the end of the game, you're introduced to what's essentially a materia system, but the tutorial absolutely sucks and I found myself just not using the system at all...and you know what? It didn't matter. I beat the game just fine without ever learning it.

There are other things that I could rant about, but you get the idea and I'm tired of complaining. Honestly, I wanted to like this game. This game, with an entirely different game at the heart of it, would have been amazing. There aren't and haven't been many other games I've ever played with such a sense of place and such an excellent story and well-acted characters (except, maybe, BGE). But it is just so goddamn horrific to play that I can't honestly recommend it.

THESE ARE WORDS ABOUT SOMETHING I DON'T WANT TO HATE BUT HATE

ANACHRONOX!!!