The Beyond Good and Evil 20th Anniversary Edition is here and, if you’ve not heard, I’m not a fan. But amidst the stuttering and incongruously uprezzed textures, Ubisoft also saw fit to add in a questline referencing Beyond Good and Evil 2 (via Eurogamer), the original game’s stuck-in-stasis prequel that currently holds the record for the game with the longest time in development.
It’s the closest Beyond Good and Evil 2 has come to being an actual, real videogame since Joseph Gordon-Levitt took to an E3 stage and asked if the fans fancied making it instead, so it’s no wonder Ubisoft made a lot of fanfare about it in the marketing run-up to the 20th Anniversary Edition’s release. Now the remaster has been out for a while, fans are starting to pick apart just what the new quests tease, and it turns out the news is actually fairly substantial. Spoilers ahead for Beyond Good and Evil, of all things.
As you can see in the above video from Handsum German—which is what I originally asked for my byline on PCG to be—the new treasure hunt kits Jade out with a whole bunch of video diaries profiling characters you might recognise from BG&E 2’s last 16 years of showcases and trailers, including that one monkey guy (he’s called Knox). It goes into more detail than we’ve ever really seen before about what Jade’s childhood was like aboard the pirate starship Gada, where she and her uncle Pey’j lived before the events of the first game.
They’re cute hand-drawn scenes, and contain the revelation that one particular character—long hypothesised to be Jade’s dad—isn’t her father at all, but there’s one other revelation that really counts. The diaries are all narrated by the Gada’s captain, Dakini, and in one of them she straightforwardly declares herself to be Jade’s mother. So that’s about 20 years of fan debate about Jade maybe, possibly, kind of being some type of alien clone cleared up then. I still remember reading arguments about that kind of thing all the way back in 2007 or so.
Then again, I wouldn’t put it past the second game to still do something weird with Jade’s backstory that makes her something more than the rebel child of a pirate queen, but I also wouldn’t put it past the second game to never, ever come out, so perhaps this is all we’ll get. Regardless, in a cutscene that unlocks when you finish the new quest, Dakini appears in hologram form and tells Jade “If you’re seeing this, it means you and Pey’j have made it through.” If BG&E 2 does ever become a real-life videogame, I suspect it might all end tragically.
And then Beyond Good and Evil 3 can wrap up the cliffhanger from the first game’s ending some time in 2068. Settle in, folks, there’s still a long road ahead.
