But like I indicated up top, it’s not that part of the remaster that sticks in my craw. The original Beyond Good and Evil was, above all, a vibe. It was no graphical showcase, but a strong art direction created a world you could slip into like warm bathwater: A kind of comic-booky mishmash of bright colours and inventive characters with strong, identifiable silhouettes. Art direction, in other words, that all blended together to give Hillys a strong, cohesive sense of place, and that made it somewhere you could drift about for ages in your hovercraft, listening to that one twinkly piano track on repeat.
But the 20th anniversary edition has that Bethesda-modder disease: A relentless obsession with detail that ends up making a lot of its distinct elements feel out of place and discordant with one another. Jade herself might be the best example of this. In the original game, she was a bright block of green: A vibrant jacket, bandana and matching lipstick underneath a solid block of ruffled black pixie cut. None of these aspects of her character were a tax on your graphics card—her hair was not TressFX'd—but she stood out as bold and unique.
In the 20th anniversary edition, Jade has been inexplicably toned down. Still green, sure, but a kind of tired, matte, muted green that doesn’t pop (on an HDR-equipped OLED, no less) anywhere near as much as she did in 2003. Instead, her jacket and headband are now exhaustively modelled, you can see the weave of the threads that make them if you get your camera in close enough, and find strange divots and details in the texture. Her hair is the same: It’s the shape it was in 2003, but rather than a kind of featureless black block its texture now includes actual strands of realistic-looking hair. That weird realistic hair texture also applies to any anthropomorphic animal character with fur, and it looks, well, pretty awful, to be frank.
It’s all meant to make the game feel more real, I’m sure, but it just ends up creating a strange kind of uncanny valley effect, just like the ultra-detailed stones and twigs of umpteen Skyrim texture mods. Beyond Good and Evil never was realistic. That wasn’t the artstyle Ubisoft was going for in 2003. Trying to jam hyperrealism into that world 20 years after-the-fact just doesn’t work.
Turning a Pey'j
Not every textural touch-up is terrible. For a lot of the world textures, Ubisoft has actually taken a pretty deft touch, polishing things up in a painterly style that works incredibly well at highlighting what was great about the original game’s art direction without creating the “over-textured” effect you can find on a lot of the models. Heck, some characters look good too. The villainous Alpha Sections look incredibly sleek and sinister in their polished black armour, which seems to have escaped Ubi and Virtuos’ compulsion to fill every metal surface with a hundred pockmarks and specks of rust.
But ultimately, I think if the original Beyond Good and Evil were still easy to play, I’d recommend that over the 20th Anniversary Edition. The remaster whiffs the original’s iconic art style so hard in several key areas—across Jade and her companions especially—that it can be pretty difficult to look at as a fan of the original. And if it’s your first time in Hillys? You might be left wondering what it is about this world that’s kept people charmed across the last 16 years of sequel development.
