Well this held up a lot better than I expected!

Just a lean and charming little thing. No game has quite matched the serene sci fi vibes of Beyond Good & Evil, even in the 20 years since its release. For all that modern tech and design progress has brought to the video game medium, there's a spark here that can't be replicated through the advancements we've made. There's a warmth to Beyond Good & Evil, a smile on its face. You can see it in the charming visuals, mostly-lovingly reimagined for this rerelease. You can hear it in the game's excellent score, which boasts a shocking variety of genres. You can feel it in its cool but clunky combat, and its puzzle-box style stealth gameplay. Every room you encounter is at least one puzzle waiting to be solved, sometimes several more if there are extra animals to photograph or pearls to collect hiding around.

I was replaying the game on the save-less Speedrun Mode when it crashed on me halfway through, and I don't really feel like spending another two hours getting back there, so I'm putting it down for now. Maybe that's just another example of how faithful this remaster is, but it's still a bummer. I was enjoying the primary gameplay segments even more on this second straight playthrough, so it's a shame I didn't get to see the more complex Slaughterhouse area again - could've bumped this up to a flat 5.

Still, even with its technical shortcomings, Beyond Good & Evil is an adventure we're not like to get in video games again. A small team of people who were passionate about creating something great in a vast and strange new world, uninhibited by restrictions. They took a lot of risks here, and I think every last one of them pays off. BGE might not be the most fun, well written, or exciting game on the market, but it has always been exactly itself. A cool and calming shade of green in a medium full of reds and blues.

"Enough... I have endured more than enough..."

Elden Ring has never been among my favorite FromSoft games. While it has some incredible highs, it also features some tedious annoyances that From's more linear and adventurous games do not. For every great legacy dungeon, there are 5 identical catacombs waiting to be explored, and of those 5 catacombs maybe 1 of them will have a cool level design trick or an item you want in them. For all of the things Elden Ring got right with its world design, it got just as much wrong, and it all totals up to a lot of wasted time. I've seen a lot of people critique the game's final stretch, but that was one of my favorite parts of the game because the world size condensed and the areas you had available to explore felt more meaningful because of it. I was very optimistic going into Shadow of the Erdtree, because I think From has always excelled at putting out DLC content that improves upon the main game. This one has been cooking for two years. Surely they would fix all of my problems and make their greatest game yet!

Well, no, not quite. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is more Elden Ring. It has similarly astonishing highs as well as some of the same lows. However, by virtue of its reduced scope in comparison to the main game, the ratio has changed. The highs win the day here for me. Shadow still reuses bosses to an excessive degree and has a few tedious areas with bland empty design (the Abyssal Forest is a cool idea on paper but the level design going on there is atrocious) but it makes up for it by featuring Elden Ring's best boss and some of the best levels that From Software have created to date. I think it also quietly excels at something that never impressed me in the base game - storytelling.

Elden Ring takes place in this enormous fantasy world with a rich history, full of interesting characters with the same names who have done badass shit. But there's so much to take in, so many different avenues to learn bits and pieces, that it all kind of jumbles together when you're playing it and it can be hard for any of it to stick to you and resonate. At least, that's an issue I had. With Shadow, the more focused playspace brings with it more focused storytelling, there are only a few major players here and they all get fleshed out remarkably well in both gameplay and story tidbits dropped via lore descriptions and environmental storytelling. Classic FromSoft stuff, but the stories here feel especially well told and emotionally impactful. Messmer may be Fire Hitler but he's also a Fire Sadboy, and when you learn the full scope of the history between him, his mother, and the victims of their schemes, it's a really potent moment. I think it's the greatest moment in any game FromSoftware has ever made from a storytelling perspective, and I'm so pleased to see them continuing to evolve and master their ability to tell a grand story as wordlessly as they do. There's a massive difference between the wordless storytelling of a game like INSIDE and a game like this - games like the former are extremely focused, cerebral tales about specifics. Shadow is telling the story of a war, of the people involved, of the history of the land itself. For it to be so successful that it's able to make me glassy-eyed without even so much as looking at the camera and explaining a single detail, that's immense writing and design prowess on display. It's easily the best story in a FromSoft product since Bloodborne, and I'd wager it's a good deal above even that.

When it comes to other remarkable design feats, there are two I'd like to give special mention to. Bosses in this DLC range from absurdly overtuned to flawless, with the final boss being one of the worst From has ever designed. It's doable but it demands such perfection and executing on it is such a slog that even on my dominant final attempt I felt no joy in the victory. But Rellana, the Twin Moon Knight, I think is the other side of that coin. She is perfectly tuned, delivering an incredibly difficult challenge with an enormous moveset but all of these moves feel fair. All of these moves can be easily learned and avoided 100% of the time. There's nothing like a Malenia Waterfowl Dance here, it's just about learning her tricks and responding with tricks of your own. It's the most dance-like fight From has ever made, and I think that's what they excel at. A great From boss fight to me isn't overpowering your opponent by tanking their bullshit and bullshitting them in kind, it's a sort of harmony with the enemy where you enter a zen state. I know this move, I dodge here here here and here and then I jump and I then I can get two quick hits in or take a risk and charge a heavy, but she might be able to counter that so I better be ready to - yup, there it is, now parry real quick and take advantage of that. It's beautiful to witness and no boss in ages has felt better to learn and beat than Rellana. Hopefully From is able to make more bosses like her and less bosses like that final one in the future.

About halfway through your exploration of Shadow of the Erdtree, assuming efficient but thorough exploration, you'll come across one of several entrances to Shadow Keep, a fortress surrounded by water and filled with enemies. While at first this seems like a pretty standard From location, you quickly discover just how many areas of access to it there are. Then you figure out how each of those areas of access lead to different levels. Then you figure out how each exit from those levels leads to ANOTHER level, each with unique bosses and rewards and interactions with OTHER levels that cause changes in NPCs and the environment. This sprawling sequence easily takes a good 5-10 hours to go through, and connecting to it is The Ancient Ruins of Rauh, an area that feels like From's attempt to turn one of Elden Ring's open world zones into a full blown legacy dungeon. And it's a total success! Exploring the Shadowkeep and all of its adjacent areas made for the absolute best experience I've had in a From game, the interconnectivity of it and how unique each section felt made me feel like I was playing a whole Dark Souls game condensed into a fairly tight playspace. Just immaculate level design, with some fun enemies to fight and a wide variety of challenges to overcome. Amazing stuff.

So again, we have Elden Ring. Oh, Elden Ring. I see what Miyazaki means now - about this being close to the perfect dark fantasy rpg, but not there quite yet. I agree with him, but maybe not for the same reasons. If From can give us another game of similar scope, maybe a bit longer, with less boss reuse and more fights like Rellana and less like the final boss (and less dragons oh my god PLEASE less dragons holy SHIT) then I think we'll have a real greatest of all time contender. But for all its negatives, the immense highs and the cohesiveness of it all makes me hesitate to give a score any lower than this. Even if I feel a 4/5 would be more fitting for what this is, it just doesn't sit right with me. I had such a great time here overall - and a much better time than I did with the base game, which I do think is a 4/5 - that even an equal score feels oddly unjust.

See you next time, Miyazaki and From Software. Please stop beating my ass so hard.