On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me.. a badly made.. and clunky RPG!
Many moons ago on the most festive month of the year, I received a gift from my relatives that they had placed underneath our x-mas tree. They were well intended people, but not the greatest at identifying what type of games a young lad such as myself would like to play. Each year I would get a new-found knowledge about an obscure title that I would never have normally played had I been given the choice. This wasn’t always bad as occasionally I’d experience a pleasant surprise despite being underwhelmed upon unwrapping. I thank them for Everybody’s Golf 2. I curse them for Beyond The Beyond. A name that even in my youth I recognized as redundant.
Beyond The Beyond (1996) is a turn based traditional Japanese role-playing game developed by Camelot Software and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. It’s a game that has gained a great deal of notoriety online for being decidedly lackluster in all regards. From my perspective it does indeed have its problems. It has questionable graphics even for a Playstation launch title. Its sound design is jarring and generally irritating. It has a really poor level of storytelling in terms of telling you what the narrative actually is, despite it being a typical JRPG-fodder plot-line. This being said, I wouldn’t call it lackluster in all regards. No, even a game 
like this has a positive. A good aspect that many will not agree with me on. Lets talk about Ramue and Shutat.
A detriment to Beyond The Beyond in the opinions of many critics is the length at which it takes to get to a boss battle. There are only 10 bosses in the entire game and they are spaced out widely apart. The nature of this is a way of padding the game out. In my estimation it creates a mystique around the few bosses you do fight. The lead antagonists you will be facing with your ragtag group of five is a pair who balance each other in terms of character unexpectedly well. Shutat has a heart of stone and is cold in her mannerisms as a deceitful magic-wielding witch. Her vast power is built up in an encounter 20 hours into the gameplay. She soundly defeats you no matter what course you take. She mocks and she belittles everyone in the party touting her conquest as the inevitable decay of the world and the rise of the underworld she seeks to return. As a contrast, we have Ramue. A noble knight of a kingdom that is stripped from her right mindset and replaced with a shell-like exterior that feeds off human misery. The dialogue is most riveting amongst these two characters as the interactions of the actual party tend to fall into the territory of being generic.
In my opinion, These two spectres looming over your party throughout the game are a presence that hype you up for the ending due to one simple reason; while their connection to each other makes them formidable baddies to behold, their most defining trait is how utterly annoying they are – much like the rest of Beyond The Beyond. Weirdly enough it is in a different sense in this regard. Their motivations don’t extend outside the typical evil villain formula you would expect. While solid writing is present when they speak it is also overplayed in the worst possible way. The game creates a tension to a big fight through virtue of its own ineptitude. The gameplay is constantly interrupted to visit the villains as they proceed to reiterate their plans in every which way possible. This becomes a problem as you don’t get to actually encounter them until a huge chunk of hours have been tallied. Now, you may feel that this may sound like most RPGs of this variety. However, the difference in this regard is that they aren’t pushing the story forward or making an appearance with your party to make you feel a sense of urgency.
In other games like the Legend of Zelda series or the Final Fantasy series, they jump to the villains to get across what’s going to happen next and reveal the next string of plot. The sense that the plot of Beyond The Beyond instills on you is this powerful need to kill the two irritating taunters by progressing through the entire game listening to them chatter on about plot details that have been revealed multiple times already. The plot only goes forward on the basis that you want to see them meet their end. It is a story that drags its feet at every turn.
Despite my negativity, strangely this makes the pair the best element of the overall average affair that is Beyond the Beyond. The combo of these two actually improves the game vastly as you find that if you do make it to the final hours of gameplay — You get rewarded with finally being able to tussle with these mortal foes. Initially you might believe that Ramue could be sympathetic because she is just a pawn of a higher power — in actuality her background is so thin and her personality is so rooted in the trope of being evil that you really don’t care.
The final boss encounter is with the deity who was controlling Ramue the entire time. The true final boss for me was directly before as you square up both Ramue and Shutat. The gameplay’s rapid pace, atrocious in-battle sound effects and awful spinning camera angles surprisingly lends well to the feeling of frustration that this difficult battle surely wants you to feel. In summary, it’s a tough fight that tries its best to troll you and that is exactly why it is incredibly satisfying when you do eventually topple the pair from their pedestal of smugness.
We have to acknowledge that not all boss battles are good in the same way. I firmly believe that if a game can inspire you to illicit any kind of strong emotion with its villains then I think its done its job successfully. I felt the hatred. I wanted to be the savior of the people. I wanted to spare them from the torture of living in the presence of these obnoxious dictators. That in essence is the makings of two intensely memorable foes that stand out in a sea of mediocrity.
To end on a complimentary note; nice character design. Love the horns.
