Beyond the Beyond - Retroview

Review Breakdown
Battle System	1
Interaction	1
Originality	2
Story	2
Music & Sound	3
Visuals	3
Challenge	Hard
Completion Time	20-30 Hours
Overall
Encounter...

   When Sony announced its entry into the videogame business, many scoffed; after all, Nintendo and Sega undoubtedly monopolized the market with their respective systems. Nonetheless, a few developers pledged games to the console, among these being Camelot Software Planning, which had developed RPGs for the Genesis under the moniker Sonic Software Planning, giving the fledgling system its first RPG, Beyond the Beyond. Since it would be the only RPG Camelot would ever provide a Sony system, I suspect it was a conspiracy to wreck the console’s chances of achieving greatness, given the game’s abysmal quality.

   Conspiracy theories aside, among the biggest offenders is the sadistically high encounter rate (since you know you’ll encounter enemies after a few steps, it really isn’t random, if you think about it). It wouldn’t have been too bad were combat remotely enjoyable, as the battle system just screams generic. Characters receive the skeletal options of attack, defend, magic, item, and escape, the last not always working, even though the player gets up to five chances to escape if he/she has five characters in his/her party. The player also has a few A.I. options for his/her party, though avoiding them, as usual, is a good idea. As with most other rigid turn-based RPGs, the player inputs his/her characters’ commands and lets them and the enemies beat the crap out of one another in a round. As usual, enemies can beat your characters to healing, and since the game groups some foes into sets, you don’t actually know which one you’re attacking if you select a set to attack.

   During a round, the game utilizes an Active Playing System; when I first heard of this, I thought it was a sort of timed addition system, but since it just involves random button mashing to rarely give a character increased damage or defense, a counterattack, or salvation from zero VP (Vitality Points, which I’ll cover shortly), I was proven wrong. Moreover, rather than having simple HP, the game divides it into two categories, VP (Vitality Points), and LP (Life Points). When a character reaches zero VP, it means not death, but grogginess, cured when that character reaches his turn in a round thanks to decreased LP increasing VP to a sizeable level. Reaching zero VP and LP marks a character’s death, in which case the player must resurrect him/her at a church. While this may sound interesting, it was actually far worse than a traditional HP system, especially since VP remains relatively low throughout the game, and when I fought multiple magicians, for instance, they could easily send all my characters into groggy state in one round with their spells, screwing them out of their turns.

   While the player can promote characters to upper classes when they reach level twenty, and a loophole exists where magical defense-increasing items, for some reason, work permanently, combat was, in my experience, far from enjoyable, since even the simplest battles seemed to take forever, what primarily with the bogging down of combat speed via the shoddily-implemented Active Playing System. Overall, the developers definitely could’ve made an effort to make combat even moderately entertaining.

   The interface is equally abysmal. While it does have its small quirks, such as being able to change window and font colors, and being able to see how weapons and armor affect stats before buying them, those, quite frankly, are nothing new to the RPG genre, and a few other annoyances result in this category’s quality being lurid. A small one is that a character can’t remove a piece of equipment unless he/she has another one of the same type in his/her inventory. A bigger one is the limitation of inventory space, since items don’t stack up, not to mention the fact that you can only buy one item at a time, and merchants barrage you with dialogue while you shop. Moreover, the warp system is needlessly complex, requiring the use of Light Orbs letting the player warp to towns only where he/she’s placed an extra character; why, additionally, couldn’t they have just let the player manage all characters at once rather than forcing him/her to teleport to those towns and put them into his/her party? Overall, the interface could’ve easily been better.

Encounter...

   As for the localization side of the interaction coin, SCEA provided a mostly spotless, though bland, translation, featuring for instance bastardized forms of names taken from Tolkien and Norse mythology, such as Gimri, Gundalf, Barrog, Tolle, and Fenril; while the translation mightn’t have been the best I’ve ever seen, I’ve definitely seen worse.

   While Beyond the Beyond is technically the first turn-based RPG to encourage the player’s active participation in its battle system, it fails to do so by mathematical means, and consequently, no future RPGs would dare mimic its flawed formula. Moreover, while the division of HP into two categories may seem original, the SaGa games did something similar, too, though in a different disposition. Overall, Beyond the Beyond isn’t exactly the most creative, influential game, if you think about it.

   Story isn’t any better. It stars a hero, default name Finn, who, along with his dragon friend Steiner, gathers up allies, some clichéd (one wishing to avenge his family, for instance), and searches for his father Lord Kevins, helping to fight villains called the Vicious Ones along the way. While a few deaths and revelations throughout the game are mildly poignant, the storyline, overall, isn’t exactly a masterpiece.

   The music, though, is actually one of the game’s better aspects. While Motoi Sakuraba’s soundtrack may not exactly be on par with his other works, what primarily with its painful instrumentation throughout the game, it does have its charms, namely a greater diversity of normal battle music than you would hear in other RPGs. Many sound effects, though, are decisively primitive, such as the weird laser sound the player hears when encountering one of over a thousand enemy parties or casting a spell. The aural aspect, in the end, could’ve used more polish.

Swirly blue means more iron--I mean Encounter...

   The graphics could have, as well, despite being another high point in the game. Some of the dungeon and town scenery is actually pleasant and the world map is one of the much better-looking ones I’ve seen in a Playstation RPG, though sprites are rather simplistic, and most character portraits are downright hideous. The battle visuals, too, contain a heavy degree of jaggedness, although the characters and monsters somewhat reflect a very early form of cel shading. Again, though, the visuals could’ve been better.

   For an old-school-style RPG, Beyond the Beyond is surprisingly short, taking from twenty to thirty hours to finish, and is a bit on the evil side of difficult.

   In conclusion, Beyond the Beyond wasn’t exactly a spectacular start for Playstation RPGs. Happily, though, Camelot’s crazed conspiracy to ruin the system failed, as much better RPGs have since populated the Playstation. That said, unless you’re an aspiring developer who wants to see what an RPG should never be, I’m afraid I can’t recommend Beyond the Beyond.