I’m replaying Beyond Good & Evil for the (don’t laugh at me) fifth time with Brainy Gamer‘s Vintage Game Club. It’s true – I’ve played the game four times before, and purchased four copies of the game over the years. But about a year ago, when I made a list of my favorite 51 games of all time, Beyond Good & Evil took the number 1 spot in fierce competition with Half-Life 2. So the question then is why Beyond Good & Evil is my absolute favorite game of all time.

I can tell you for sure that it’s for more than one reason. It’s not that the game doesn’t have flaws. If you wanted to poke holes in the plot, it’d be as easy as poking holes in a paper wall. The camera control is problematic at times to say the least. And given that the game is now six years old, the graphics are quickly becoming dated, even when I can crank the game up to a 1680×1050 resolution. (and I like the 1680×1050 resolution very much, thank you.)

But the game has a variety of gameplay seldom seen in games today. It’s got combat, it’s got puzzles, it’s got stealth gameplay, it’s got vehicular combat and racing, it’s got minigames, it’s got the photography sidequests, and it’s got collection of pearls and MDisks. Personally, my favorite portion of the game is the stealth gameplay – I tend to be a sucker for that.

And just as important as the gameplay variety are the game’s characters, which really make the game shine. The relationship that you can see between Jade and her adopted uncle Pey’j really stands out, in no small part because of the game’s excellent voice acting.

It’s funny that on my 5th playthrough, I’m still noticing new things. For me, at this, point, the novelty is completely gone, but going back to play the game is like going back to watch a favorite old movie, and I’ll never tire of watching films like Empire Strikes Back. Neither do I imagine that I will tire of Beyond Good & Evil.

The last (4th) time I played through the game, I was on a completionist kick, and I got every pearl, a photograph of every animal, and every MDisk. This time, I was on a speed playthrough, and let a bunch of it go.

(Spoilers follow – if you’ve not played the game, you need to go drop ten bucks and buy it)

On question that I’m left with after finishing the game is what exactly is going on with Jade? General Kex at the end of the game says that “he” has been searching for Jade for centuries. Are we supposed to believe then that Jade is in actuality some ancient being? On the other hand, Secundo notes after the game’s very first fight that “Something got inside (Jade’s) psycho-karma”. Despite not knowing what the frell “psycho-karma” is, this always led me to believe that some kind of infection began only here rather than with Jade’s origin centuries earlier.

But the end speech is lengthy and convincing. “You are not who you think you are. The pig has hidden your origins from you. You are the source of my powers, the instrument of my strength. They took you away in the hope of destroying me. They made you human, but you are not like them.”

The ending of the game after all this leaves me feeling very much like I did after the end of the first Matrix movie, where we’re given a feel of Neo’s powers, but don’t understand them. What is this “prodigous energy” Jade posesses, and what are its applications and implications? Ancel has a lot to explain in Beyond Good and Evil 2, and I can only hope that he does a much better job than the Wachowskis did in Matrix Reloaded.