PlayStation

Beyond the Beyond

Beyond the Beyond has many strong points - a beautiful overhead map, the best battles (at least visually) in any RPG, cool puzzle dungeons and...well...I guess that's about it. Hyper 16-bit town scenes, poorly composed music and a reasonably lame story far outweigh Beyond's good points. Since it is the only RPG on the PS it's worth buying, but this wouldn't cut it in the 16-bit arena.

Playstation owners have been screaming for an RPG since their system came out and now they finally get one. The only trouble is, BtB doesn't pump out enough visual spark to come off as a true 32-bit, next-gen RPG. Besides it's 3-D battle scenes, cool magic attacks and colorful graphics, BtB isn't much of a step up from the 16-bit RPGs. Still, it offers a solid quest (although the cut scenes run too long) and lots of locales to explore. Since Playstation gamers have been without an RPG for so long, BtB will do for now. But with ultra-stunning titles like Breath of Fire 3 and FF7 on the horizon, it's hard to get too excited.

Beyond the Beyond lands squarely in familiar territory - nothing likely to convert new players, but for many it will be exactly what they're looking for. Judged solely on its merits as an RPG, this is not a bad game; rather, it's a solid product that should provide die-hard RPG fans with 20-50 hours of gleeful gameplay. If nothing else, it will hold us over until Square releases Final Fantasy VII for the Playstation.

Pehaps I'm being a little harsh. All told this game is no worse than many which I have spent dozens of hours playing. But that was years ago, on inferior machines. If you've simply run out of old RPG's to stuff into your Genesis, then Beyond the Beyond would be fine. Its easy to learn, because its exactly the same. It's also quite large, you will need a long time to solve it.

A lot of Playstation owners, including myself, have been waiting patiently for an RPG to be released over here. Unfortunately, they're going to have to wait a little longer. Beyond the Beyond is simply "below the below" the standards of what a good RPG should be like.

Beyond The Beyond is such a disappointing game; the end result is a serious blow to the genre in general. It feels so much like a regression of 16-bit games and doesn't even come close to bringing anything new to the table. The story has been told before, the characters are cliched and boring with little personality, and the graphics and sound are horrible. Anyone interested in this genre will want to pass this game up.

Sucky, stinky, terrible, bad, digusting, repulsive, pathetic, unimagineably poor, incredibly stupid, morally wrong. All words which come to mind when struggling to describe the quality of this sad, sad game. The characters have no personality to them, the storyline is as flat as a board, the graphics are uninspired pixels, the game design is poor, the random battles are frequenty, the sound is sleep-inducing and the game is overwhelmingly challenging. What other reasons could you want for not buying this game?

Though it isn't the worst RPG ever made, it comes close. Any fun the battle system might have had is ruined by an absurdly high encounter rate and poor implementation. The poor story and the fact that quite a few dungeons must be completed multiple times don't help either. Unlike most bad games, Beyond the Beyond doesn't try to cover it up with good graphics or excellent music either. The fun factor just isn't there, and the game doesn't work as a whole.

Being first isn’t a cop out for being crap, especially when there are past models of excellence (Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6) to build upon and mega-games (Final Fantasy 7) lurking in development. Simply producing a festering pile of dung without regard to quality to fill a niche will not move units. The cold truth is that Beyond the Beyond would suck regardless of when it was released. Time period is no excuse for this insipid swine of a game.