Beyond the Beyond

Beyond the Beyond is probably the first true traditional rpgs to have been release for the playstation. Unfortunately it's not a very good rpg. The story itself isn't bad but what hurt the most about this game is the battle system. Frustration is a word that comes to mind when playing this game.

The story begins in a village called Isla in the Kingdom of Marion. Here our hero, Finn, is training to become a good knight. After a few sudden events, the village of Isla has been invaded by the neighboring Bandore Empire. Finn manages to escape to seek help within the royal family at Marion Castle but it turns out that Marion Castle too has fallen under the control of the Bandore Empire. Here is where the true quest lies. With a small band of loyal servants of Marion Castle, the group under Finn leadership sets off exploring the world of Beyond the Beyond looking for help from other countries.
Now the story itself is very good and it's probably the only thing that keeps you going with this bad rpg. It's not a mind blowing rpg story but decent from the makers of the Shinning Force series.

The one thing the Beyond the Beyond provides is a good assortment of characters including secret characters you can recruit. While the character developement isn't in-depth by all means, each character does have their own characteristic plus their own usefullness in your party. Like with any rpg game, you'll probably have your favorites and least favorites in this one.

Surprisingly for a 32 bit game, this game sure looks like a 16 bit game. In fact the only thing 32 bit about this game is the somewhat 3-D battle graphics. Other than that, the entire game is your basic 2-D render environment with 16 bit sprites. It's not bad graphics but the game could've and should've been made for the SNES or Genesis system. I say the graphics is equal to that of a Shinning Force 2 or SNES FF game.

Now you gotta hand it to the music though. The one thing that really doesn't suck is the music quality in this game. This is by far the best feature in this game. You have lots of different tunes for different occasions. If you look around including this site, you can find some really good tunes from Beyond the Beyond to listen to.

And now for the god aweful gameplay. Where to begin?? Well, the game is your basic turn base rpg game. Travel around to your next destination and get into random encounter battles. So what's so bad about that?? Well, for at least one third of the game you have absolutely no idea as to where to go next. Sure you know what your overrall objective is. But to actually find out how to get there and which town to go to next is like looking for a needle in a hay stack. Very frustrating. Especially if you have to deal with constant random battles every 3 freaking steps. The random battle wouldn't be such a bad thing if one of your fighter (who happened to be your best fighter) isn't cursed. Which you can't cure. And second, your magic guy is useless cause his MP is way too low for him to be of any help. I don't know why they gave all your magic guys such low MPs. Second the game uses a LP (life points) system. So you have your HP, Mp, and LP. Now if your hp reaches zero, it doesn't mean you die. It means that your fighter will be in an unconscious state for a while. You lose 1 LP everytime your HP reaches zero. You only die if you LP reaches zero. Now the problem here is that all characters have such low HP that after every two or three times being hit, they end up being in an unconscious state. This can be frustrating as hell as each fighter take turn being in an unconscious state. You just can't get any good flow of an attack going.
The battle system itself is pretty turn base and simple with the one exception that they include the awefull random button pushing. Basically, before you attack or an enemy is about to strike you, if you can press your control buttons in a random sequence in a correct order, you can get off a counter attack, special attack (double attack) or a block. This is very frustrating, annoying, tiring as hell after a few battles. Nothing pisses a gamer off more than having to mindlessly press your control buttons in some random sequence in hope of getting off a good attack or block. The funny thing is that you really need to do this random button pushing in hopes of beating a boss or having a good chance at beating a boss.
It seem everywhere you look, there's always one thing that annoys you when playing this game. Whether the fact that your magic user runs out of MP after only three attacks or the fact you're tired of having to fight every three steps, this game gives you more pain than enjoyment.

There are a few extra stuff in this game that you can get including secret characters. Nothing worth a mention since you've probably seem it a dozen times in other rpgs before. Replay...Huh?? You mean you actually want to replay this game again???

Overrall the game wouldn't be all that bad if it weren't for the aweful game system all the way down to the battle system. The story is decent as well as the music. It's the kind of game that you only want to play it once just soley for the purpose of the story than never ever want to play it again. Five is a generous score here as it should be lower than a five. But the music and story help give it an average score at best.