In recent memory this is the most positive I've felt overall about a game where I strongly dislike the core gameplay. The stealth and combat are incredibly basic and feel forced in, and I'm sure they were used as selling points for the game back when it came out.
This could be the poster child for bad stealth segments. Basic enemy patrol patterns, vision cones that feel very inconsistent in when they catch you, very basic and boring stealth gadgets, and the game's already poor camera controls become so much worse in stealth sections for whatever reason. The worst are rooms that feel like you have to stealth kill your way through but there's basically no way to kill without alerting everyone, setting off the alarm, hiding, and waiting for the rest of the enemies to give up on searching for you 5 seconds later and reset. The stealth really doesn't make up that much of the game, fortunately, but as a big selling point for the game or a genre it tries to be defined by it fails miserably.
The on-foot combat is used even less, and it's less annoying because you can mostly just mash through it, but it's very shallow. This isn't helped by health and healing consumables being meaningless and just resetting at the start of a room whenever you die. It might be annoying if that wasn't the case and the rest stayed the same, but it's still pretty weak. The ship combat and boss fights are a bit better, but still nothing to write home about.
Before I get to more positive things to say, I want to note that the level design is really lacking here. They're clearly trying to mimic Zelda dungeons (among other inspirations from that series), but the level design felt notably bad at many points. I'd like to think I notice when level design excels more than most, but I rarely complain about it when it meets the baseline for good of feeling "invisible". That feeling was broken a lot here, with backtracking through empty zones with nothing to do where other games would loop around to the start, and very poor signposting of where to go with splitting paths where there's really nothing to do in all but one direction most of the time. The levels are also inscrutable to get around during some of those backtracking segments, there's a map that's usually available pretty early on in each "dungeon" and your main path through is pretty linear, but something about them just feels difficult and maze-like to navigate. I'd find myself checking the map far too often, and still being kind of confused on where to go.
All of the above complains largely just apply to the game's dungeons, and despite all of that I sort of wish there were more of them, because the game feels over a little too soon. There's only four main dungeons, with one of them being essentially a tutorial, although the last one is pretty great to end on. Almost everything around those is really cool, and even if there's some other small problems as well the game is overflowing with charm and original designs that make the world feel alive. I'm positive that kid-me would have fallen in love with this game if I'd played it back then, because it does such an excellent job of making the world feel bigger and more alive than it actually is. The characters feel cool and interesting even if their writing is pretty flat, the areas feel like a huge open world with a lot of possibilities even if it doesn't actually take that much time to explore everything, and the side content is impressively varied and fun.
The minigames were more fun to me than the core gameplay, many of them revolving around your hovercraft. There's races that are surprisingly fun, as well as chase sequences. In addition to a couple of other games you can play with side characters, and some secret mini-dungeons in the city, it's really not that impressive of a list writing it out but it feels fun and varied, and a nice break from the core content of the game. Exploring to find this side content is a lot of what makes it enjoyable. Even if both the on-foot section of the main city and the overworld are fairly small, they tie into that feeling I talked about of a big and living world, and they open up over the course of the game in a fun way. I also quite enjoyed the camera aspect of the game, which I don't really know where I should mention. Recognizing if you'd seen a creature before, and finding a good angle to snap a pic of it stayed fun throughout the game. It also ties into the missions pretty well at points where you have to sneak around guards to take pictures of what the baddies are up to, which I wish there was a bit more of compared to the traditional stealth.
The story really isn't anything special, but I cared enough to see it through just on the basis of how cool the characters and world are (with the exception of Double H, fuck that guy). Seeing the citizens not-so-slowly join your cause was a really neat idea, even if the pacing of it is a bit abrupt. The ending was a little out of nowhere but was executed fairly well overall, it was definitely setting up for a sequel we all know at this point is never coming unfortunately. I also still have no idea what the title is supposed to be talking about, there's really no moral ambiguity to be found here.
Despite a lot of shortcomings and rough edges in the individual parts, I think Beyond Good & Evil really succeeded overall at what it set out to do. It failed at a lot of the smaller gameplay things that Zelda games do well, but it succeeded in making a compelling world that players want to explore, similar to those games but also completely in its own way. This should have led to a full series of games that could further explore the parts of this that work well and polish up the rest, but sadly we don't live in that world.
This could be the poster child for bad stealth segments. Basic enemy patrol patterns, vision cones that feel very inconsistent in when they catch you, very basic and boring stealth gadgets, and the game's already poor camera controls become so much worse in stealth sections for whatever reason. The worst are rooms that feel like you have to stealth kill your way through but there's basically no way to kill without alerting everyone, setting off the alarm, hiding, and waiting for the rest of the enemies to give up on searching for you 5 seconds later and reset. The stealth really doesn't make up that much of the game, fortunately, but as a big selling point for the game or a genre it tries to be defined by it fails miserably.
The on-foot combat is used even less, and it's less annoying because you can mostly just mash through it, but it's very shallow. This isn't helped by health and healing consumables being meaningless and just resetting at the start of a room whenever you die. It might be annoying if that wasn't the case and the rest stayed the same, but it's still pretty weak. The ship combat and boss fights are a bit better, but still nothing to write home about.
Before I get to more positive things to say, I want to note that the level design is really lacking here. They're clearly trying to mimic Zelda dungeons (among other inspirations from that series), but the level design felt notably bad at many points. I'd like to think I notice when level design excels more than most, but I rarely complain about it when it meets the baseline for good of feeling "invisible". That feeling was broken a lot here, with backtracking through empty zones with nothing to do where other games would loop around to the start, and very poor signposting of where to go with splitting paths where there's really nothing to do in all but one direction most of the time. The levels are also inscrutable to get around during some of those backtracking segments, there's a map that's usually available pretty early on in each "dungeon" and your main path through is pretty linear, but something about them just feels difficult and maze-like to navigate. I'd find myself checking the map far too often, and still being kind of confused on where to go.
All of the above complains largely just apply to the game's dungeons, and despite all of that I sort of wish there were more of them, because the game feels over a little too soon. There's only four main dungeons, with one of them being essentially a tutorial, although the last one is pretty great to end on. Almost everything around those is really cool, and even if there's some other small problems as well the game is overflowing with charm and original designs that make the world feel alive. I'm positive that kid-me would have fallen in love with this game if I'd played it back then, because it does such an excellent job of making the world feel bigger and more alive than it actually is. The characters feel cool and interesting even if their writing is pretty flat, the areas feel like a huge open world with a lot of possibilities even if it doesn't actually take that much time to explore everything, and the side content is impressively varied and fun.
The minigames were more fun to me than the core gameplay, many of them revolving around your hovercraft. There's races that are surprisingly fun, as well as chase sequences. In addition to a couple of other games you can play with side characters, and some secret mini-dungeons in the city, it's really not that impressive of a list writing it out but it feels fun and varied, and a nice break from the core content of the game. Exploring to find this side content is a lot of what makes it enjoyable. Even if both the on-foot section of the main city and the overworld are fairly small, they tie into that feeling I talked about of a big and living world, and they open up over the course of the game in a fun way. I also quite enjoyed the camera aspect of the game, which I don't really know where I should mention. Recognizing if you'd seen a creature before, and finding a good angle to snap a pic of it stayed fun throughout the game. It also ties into the missions pretty well at points where you have to sneak around guards to take pictures of what the baddies are up to, which I wish there was a bit more of compared to the traditional stealth.
The story really isn't anything special, but I cared enough to see it through just on the basis of how cool the characters and world are (with the exception of Double H, fuck that guy). Seeing the citizens not-so-slowly join your cause was a really neat idea, even if the pacing of it is a bit abrupt. The ending was a little out of nowhere but was executed fairly well overall, it was definitely setting up for a sequel we all know at this point is never coming unfortunately. I also still have no idea what the title is supposed to be talking about, there's really no moral ambiguity to be found here.
Despite a lot of shortcomings and rough edges in the individual parts, I think Beyond Good & Evil really succeeded overall at what it set out to do. It failed at a lot of the smaller gameplay things that Zelda games do well, but it succeeded in making a compelling world that players want to explore, similar to those games but also completely in its own way. This should have led to a full series of games that could further explore the parts of this that work well and polish up the rest, but sadly we don't live in that world.