**This post expands on the content found in Part 032 of All PS1 Games In Order**
**This post was originally published on 7/15/2024 on Giant Bomb dot com**
It took almost exactly one year from the PlayStation’s North American launch for it to receive its first traditional Turn-Based RPG. This was significantly longer than with the previous generation of consoles, with the Genesis seeing Phantasy Star II seven months post-launch and the SNES seeing Final Fantasy IV after only three months. Though, the time-to-RPG for the three consoles was closer when looking at their original Japanese releases. Across the Pacific, the Mega Drive had five months to PSII, the Super Famicom was around for eight months before FFIV (If you want to count Ys III, that goes down to seven months), and the PS1 waited eleven months for Beyond the Beyond. That last one would go down to nine months if you counted Wizardy VII instead, but you can’t make me do that. Also, if we look at Action RPGs or Tactical RPGs, those times go down dramatically. The PS1 saw Arc the Lad and two whole King’s Field games in Japan before Beyond the Beyond, but for prestige reasons, the traditional turn-based games were the ones that typically counted. That’s likely due to that sub-genre’s association with Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, which tended to make all the money.
That prestige and long lead time without a traditional JRPG is likely why Sony made such a big deal of Beyond the Beyond leading up to its November 3rd, 1995 release in Japan. It then speaks to the quality of the end product that the game was immediately memory-holed when Final Fantasy VII was announced in February ’96. Then, because of the interplay between the relative speeds of international game news and game localization, very few people in North America gave this thing the time of day when it came out later in ’96, since the future of the genre was visible on the horizon. That was a common trap for games to fall into back in the day, but this is kind of an odd case, and you might be able to guess why from looking at the above paragraph.
The first JRPG or two to hit any new console had a habit of selling well, kicking off franchises, or otherwise becoming well remembered. Let me show you what I mean. Hydlide sold too many copies when it beat Dragon Quest to market by a month on the Famicom. Phantasy Star II got its franchise off the ground by being so quick out the door on the Mega Drive after the first one didn’t leave much of an impression on Sega’s previous console. I don’t know about you, but for me the original Ys is synonymous with the PC Engine. Final Fantasy IV on the SNES is an all-time classic of the genre and still sees re-releases. Even the early non-turn-based JRPGs on the PS1, King’s Field and Arc the Lad, did well enough to kick off their own franchises. Heck, if I felt like being smarmy, I could mention that even Quest 64 got a sequel on the Game Boy Color. If you noticed that I left out the Saturn and 3DO, well, that’s because everyone did.
Thus, the question is begged as to why Beyond the Beyond couldn’t capitalize on being an early console entrant when even actual garbage like Hydlide and King’s Field could do so. What was it about this game that inspired such universal disinterest? We’re going to have to disassemble this thing into its component parts to find the answer.
Developer: Camelot Software Planning
Publisher: SCEA
JP Release Date: 11/3/1995
NA Release Date: 8/31/1996
PAL Release Date: lol
—
Produced, Directed, and Written by: Shugo Takehashi
Main Programmer: Kenji Numaya
Battle Visual Designer: Masashi Muramori
Window System Programmer: Makoto Yamamoto
Character Design: Ami Shibata
Map Design: *3 Pseudonyms*
Animation Design: Kunio Naka, Shinji Suzuki, Shin Yamanouchi
Graphics Lead: Hiroto Nakashima
Graphics: Mieko Koguchi, Katsunori Sato, Kouichi Murakami, Akifumi Yama, Youichi Sakurai, Kahoru Kujo, *5 Additional Psyeudonyms*
Opening Movie: Tomoko Murakami, *1 Additional Psyeudonym*
Music Composition, Arrangement, and Sound Effects: Motoi Sakuraba
—
Time to Saving The World: 40 Hours
The Plot
The primary requirement when Playing a Role in a Game is to have some kind of story, plot, premise, or lore that can establish context for what you’re doing. The better that written element is, the better the RPG, almost regardless of gameplay. Look at Mass Effect for example, that game plays terribly but, man, that codex is something else. Meanwhile, you could have something like Fire Emblem Engage where the gameplay is as solid as that series has ever seen, but the writing is such abject trash that it’s had no staying power. Beyond the Beyond fits neither paradigm. In fact, I’m having an extremely hard time trying to remember what it’s even about.
Let’s take this step-by-step to see if I can jog anything loose in the ‘ol brainpan. The game opens with your silent, teenage protagonist living in the small village of Isla in a fantasy kingdom. He had been delivered to the family of a retired castle guard as a young child for unclear reasons. You’re initially introduced to that family, especially their precocious daughter Annie, who will be the first party member. Protag’s real(?) father Sir Kevins also shows up occasionally to train him while abdicating any other parental responsibility for whatever reason. Finally, Protag has a little dragon buddy named Steiner who follows him around to theoretically crack wise and assist in combat. No one else has a dragon buddy, don’t worry about it.
As the story opens, Annie takes issue with Protag’s deadbeat dad randomly showing up to kick his son’s ass. She’s dismissed by the adults because she’s just a girl, at which prodding she runs off to a nearby monster cave which Protag had been tasked with spelunking to prove she can handle herself. The one-sided Manzai team of Steiner and Protag proceed to go after her into the tutorial dungeon. Annie of course gets in over her head, only being a healer and all, and has to be rescued from the tutorial boss. After returning with the wayward healer, Annie’s older brother Percy stumbles wounded into town. She heals him and we learn that he’s a castle guard at the capital, Marion, which has just been invaded by the neighboring evil empire of Bandore. The king of Marion is dead, the prince is locked up, and Percy is the only knight to make it out of the bloodbath. Our underage duo volunteer to rescue the captured prince in place of Annie’s old beat-up father.
The trio of child soldiers make their way to occupied Marion and learn that the biggestest, strongestest guy in the kingdom, Samson, is still on the loose. After watching Samson kick ass and faff around with some hidden tunnels, he gets recruited into the party. He’s initially set up to be the kind of overpowered early game character who chaperones you while you figure out the mechanics, like what you see in the Fire Emblem or Shining Force series. Anyway, the gang sneak into the castle dungeon, find the prince, Edward, and get ambushed by the evil emperor’s magical henchwoman, Ramue. She puts an unhealable curse on samson that quarters his stats, just for giggles, before the party flees. Everyone hightails it out of Marion with the goal of getting Edward to the neighboring friendly kingdom of Zalagoon in order to request help.
Because of the whole invasion thing, the only open route to Zalagoon is through a secret tunnel, which is hidden behind the world’s most random sliding tile puzzle. Once in the tunnel, the imperial forces catch up to the party, at which point Percy selflessly and unnecessarily sacrifices himself in a delaying action. The survivors trudge through a couple more random dungeons before hitting daylight next to their destination. Mission Accomplished, right? Of course not. Once in Zalagoon, the city’s obviously evil vizier convinces the king that he can’t trust that Edward and Samson are who they say they are, despite the head knight knowing Samson personally and vouching for him. The vizier seems to know that Samson’s been cursed, so he proposes a test of strength for him to prove his identity as the strongest man in the world. This of course goes badly, and the crew are kicked out of the castle. Samson’s old friend gives the party a magic bean and vague instructions to go south. Thus begins the most baffling section of the game.
You see, the plot maintains a relatively brisk pace for the first few hours. You’re gradually introduced to the core four party members, given a defined mission, and shuffled through something like three towns and five dungeons. Even though the story hews suspiciously close to the Fire Emblem formula, it’s still functional. That changes now. Instead of finding some other way to prove Edward’s identity or unmask the obviously evil vizier, we begin an extremely drawn-out side quest to uncurse Samson so that he can pass that test of strength. This little diversion brings the plot to a screeching halt for a full quarter of the game’s runtime. This adventure uses more of the game world than everything that came before, introduces the optional but necessary fifth party member, has the first real boss fight, takes the party to something like four towns and six dungeons, with one of those dungeons being jumbo sized, and ends with an uninvited lore dump which explains the wider conflict that doesn’t matter until the final act of the game. That’s a lot of junk when all you’re trying to do is see a sage about a curse.
Anyway, the first place the party hits on their southward meander is a town of no importance, other than the MP potion seller. Across a desert is the pirate town of Luna, where the NPCs deliver disconnected snippets of information. Not bothering you with the details, the party has to turn north and go through a cave to reach the hidden wizard town of Simone. The mages there try and fail to uncurse Samson, saying that their great sage could probably do it, but he’s blocked up in a shrine that’s been cut off by a landslide. Instead of clearing the rubble themselves or waiting for the path to be reopened, the party backtracks to Luna. Also, by interacting with certain non-descript parts of the environment in Simone, you get an optional fifth party member, Tont, who is a boy that fell into an alchemy pot and literally turned into a four-foot-tall ceramic jar. Life’s rough like that sometimes. Being from the secret wizard village, Tont is a summoner who is extremely necessary for crowd control and boss damage.
If you are big brained enough or bored, you would have the party next backtrack across the desert to a conspicuous pyramid, which serves as a dungeon. At the bottom of the pyramid’s basement is a thingy that you use to trade with a random NPC back in Luna for another thingy that you need to use after crossing through a non-descript dungeon in order to part the sea and get to an island. That island has another dungeon, at the bottom of which is the pirate Domino, who had stolen a magic vase from Luna, and a pissy water demon. Said demon mentions something about a supernatural bounty that’s been put in the party’s heads and now’s the first boss fight of the game. That’s right, we’re only now getting to an actual boss fight, and it’s against some random jobber.
Here’s the thing about this boss, he loves using attack-all spells. That sounds normal, but up to this point you haven’t had access to any heal-all capability, which means you lose any attritional fight where your whole party is taking damage each turn. Without the ability to heal-all, this boss is borderline impossible, and is likely where most players bounce off this game. The key is that Annie learns a heal-all spell at level 11. That’s significant, because you can easily get all the way up to the boss with her at level 9 or 10. If she’s below 11, you lose; if she’s at 11, you win without issue. This means you need to grind for something like an hour until you reach that level threshold, entirely to have access to that one spell. This is a bizarre design choice. It’s not uncommon to see RPG bosses be several levels more difficult than the surrounding area, and that usually requires the player to improve their entire party and rethink their build. That’s not the case here, you just need that one spell which requires a bunch of grinding to access. This is probably the worst part of the entire game.
After out-healing the water demon, Domino takes off and leaves his ill-gotten magic vase to the party. Now everyone has to backtrack all the way to that pyramid from before, climb to the top and combine the magic vase with that magic bean from several hours earlier. This does the obvious fairy tale thing, leading to a two-part dungeon where the party climbs a giant beanstalk and then the large tower waiting for them at the end. After like 16 or so combined floors, they get to the top of that tower and meet Arawn, who I guess is God. Arawn lore dumps a bunch of stuff about evil gods called Vicious Ones who are sealed away in The Abyss that are trying to break out and destroy the world. He tasks the party with collecting five stone tablets, defeating the powers of evil, and resealing The Abyss. That’s nice and all, but we’re here to uncurse Samson. Instead of taking care of it himself, Arawn teleports the party to that great sage mentioned earlier. Samson is unceremoniously uncursed, the path to Simone is conveniently unblocked, and the party is informed of a secret tunnel connecting Simone and Zalagoon. That would have been convenient earlier.
The punchline to that whole digression is that by the time you get Samson restored, his stats are similar enough to everyone else that he slots in as a normal frontline fighter. Now that we’ve wasted several hours of our lives on this wild goose chase, Samson passes the test of strength, and the obviously evil vizier is unmasked. The resulting scene where that guy has an “I need scissors” moment before turning into a giant monster is probably the most intense one in the game. The monster itself is the second boss fight and isn’t worth discussing. Once everything is taken care of, there’s some talking, and the king of Zalagoon very quickly agrees to send his army against Bandore occupied Marion and install Edward to the throne. The party proceeds to follow their new friends across the border and storm Marion castle. After some daring-do they find out the king of Marion is alive and rescue him; there’s also a scene where you come across Ramue stuffing someone, who totally isn’t Percy why would you assume that, into some cursed black armor before teleporting away. The emperor of Bandore is forced to flee, and we finally meet the biggest bad guy of the game, Shutat. Turns out Ramue works for him, and he had been pulling Bandore’s strings the whole time. He mulls killing Protag now just to get it over with, but dramatically leaves instead because of course.
With the battle over and Marion restored, Protag discovers that Sir Kevins was captured and taken to Bandore before their retreat. Remember Sir Kevins? I sure didn’t. None of the relevant kings feel like invading Bandore, so after checking in with Annie’s parents the party decide to do some tier one operator shit and rescue Kevins on their own. The party fights their way through the border, find the obligatory secret tunnel into Bandore Castle, and reach Sir Kevins. Instead of leaving, he dumps some lore onto the party about Protag’s parentage and pulls a reverse Empire Strikes Back by telling Protag that he’s not his father. I don’t see how that last part matters, since we’re already there to rescue him anyway. The party doesn’t get very far before he’s recaptured and carted off to a nearby volcano for human sacrifice purposes.
Fortunately, the volcano is right next to the castle, but unfortunately, it’s probably one of the biggest hassles in the game just from an encounter table perspective. Partway up, Shutat throws a magic wall and some dragons at the party, after which a mysterious Black Knight lets them through before running off like a tsundere. After trudging to the peak, the party finds Sir Kevins again, except, it’s not Kevins! It’s the shapeshifter Yeon, who is an absolute little shit goblin. A series of events then occur, which I cannot remember for the life of me, resulting in both Yeon and the real Kevins falling into the drink, and by “the drink” I mean boiling hot magma. It’s very dramatic. Now that the rescue fission has mailed, Arawn calls up Protag and friends to remind them that they still have a bunch of tablets to collect. Luckily, sealing the Vicious Ones dovetails nicely with the motivation of revenge against Shutat and Ramue because Shutat is the leader of the Vicious Ones. Everyone backtracks down the volcano to Bandore, at which point a scene plays out where Shutat disposes of the now useless Bandore emperor and sails off for evil scheme reasons. This is also the convenient point where our old acquaintance Domino rolls up in his pirate ship to offer his services.
We’re now entering the final act, and this is where the plotting finally turns into a jumbled mess. With Domino, who joins as an extra party member, and his ship now available the overworld has finally opened up. That’s right, we’re just now getting to the ship. You can technically go all over the world, but the only places that are accessible are the next story areas and one small side area. Down the coast from Bandore is a village where NPCs talk about a place called Barbatos Castle, where it is, and how the king has a weird ancient tablet. That makes it the next stop, and I can tell you right now it’s a pain in the ass to get to, with a bunch of rivers and mountain valleys in the way. Once the party gets there, they meet the king of Barbatos and his tomboy princess, Lorele. They tell Protag that he ain’t shit and if he wants their help, he should git gud first. This brings us to the mercifully brief diversion to get everyone up to their advanced classes.
I’ll explain the levelling system later, suffice to say that the party has to find a place called DISCIPLINE TOWN and go through a puzzle dungeon to prove their worth. This also has the effect of letting any party members over level 20 prestige and start over at level 1 in an upgraded class. From what I’ve read you get the most efficient power curve by getting everyone levelled to the 24 – 26 range before classing up. Steiner also makes gains somehow and grows into a big boy dragon that you can ride around on. We went from a sailing ship to an air mount in like three towns and a dungeon, but whatever. Going back to Barbatos, we see that Shutat has been there because everyone’s dead. Well, everyone except Lorele, who joins the party. The tablet is also still there, so the party grabs it and leaves.
With both a dragon and a ship, everywhere on the map not surrounded by mountains is now available. There’s also one more tablet to get before the next story sequence. I should clarify that. Arawn gave the party a tablet back when they climbed his stupid tower for no reason. A second tablet is squirreled away in the basement of Bandore Castle, accessible with a key the emperor drops when he gets got. This now puts us at three, with the fourth languishing at the bottom of a dungeon on some random island. There are also a couple of side areas you can visit, such as a hidden cave housing Merlin. He teaches a party member of your choice the optional but necessary resurrect spell. There’s also a village with a mithril smith, who’ll turn mithril nuggets in the nearby ice dungeon into top-tier weapons and equipment. There really isn’t a lot of side stuff here, Final Fantasy VI this is not.
After delving into that random dungeon for the fourth tablet, it’s time to use them to summon a sunken techno pyramid. How are you supposed to know to do that, and why is there a sunken techno pyramid? Don’t worry about it. This place is a dungeon in itself, at the bottom of which is a control room. That’s right, the techno pyramid is actually a giant techno diamond and it’s an airship that can fly over mountains. The moment is ruined when one of Shutat’s goons, named Dagoot, shows up in a ship and blasts Steiner out of the sky. This is the first impactful character death of the game, but it’s fine because you can find a mountained-off dragon temple near Marion where Steiner has been nursed back to health. You don’t need him as a mount anymore, but he does make for a good screen-clearing summon. With that taken care of, it’s off to a previously inaccessible shrine containing a fifth, super special tablet. Dagoot shows up to be both a problem and the third real boss fight of the game. After wrapping him up and getting the tablet, it’s now time for the final stretch. Well, there’s another side quest involving a ghost dragon and Protag’s dead parents, but it’s pretty insubstantial.
Anyway, from the moment the party gets the techno diamond, a big desert area south of Bandore opens up but isn’t immediately relevant. After getting the last tablet, that desert needs to be crossed to get to a cave which leads to the final zone. This is mostly to let the game smack you around a bit before the final dungeon, but the cave holds an encounter with that Black Knight from before. Being a tsundere, he wants to fight Protag but also doesn’t want to fight him. The key is to defend for ten turns against him until he breaks out of his mind control. Turns out the Black Knight was Percy the whole time! There was no way to see that coming. He becomes the final extra party member and is easily deposited at the final village on the other side of the cave. From here it’s one final overworld run to The Abyss.
Upon entering the shrine sealing off The Abyss, that rat bastard Yeon shows up to gloat about being alive somehow and turns into the fourth real boss fight. With that out of the way, the party uses their tablet to open the seal and head down into the final dungeon. The dungeon itself is as much of a pain as you would expect from a 2D JRPG, with a cameo appearance from Sir Kevins’ ghost before reaching Shutat and Ramue at the bottom. Shutat dumps some lore and gives Protag the same kind of false choice that’s at the end of the original Dragon Quest. As funny as that is, we’re there for the boss fight, and it’s a doozey. With the two big bad guys down, a third, bigger, badder demon guy shows up as the real final boss. With him dealt with, The Abyss is given a fresh seal and that’s that. There’s a little bit of denouement which I have completely forgotten, then credits.
I spent 18 whole paragraphs recounting the story of Beyond the Beyond to make a point. You might have noticed that I didn’t include details of character interactions or development. That wasn’t a product of summarization, I didn’t include it because there isn’t any. Each character is given a scene to introduce them and then basically remains static for the rest of the game. Even Samson isn’t particularly fazed by his debilitating curse. The world and quest are generic, you never feel the stakes, and even the big “Luke, I am not your father” plot twist is more unintentionally hilarious than anything else. Maybe part of the generic feel comes from the allusions to other, better RPGs from earlier years. Aside from that Dragon Quest homage at the end, Camelot directly ripped the Black Knight subplot from Final Fantasy II. That’s not to mention all of the item names and other details borrowed from the Shining Force series. There’s nothing unique to this narrative and world that you can latch onto. Except maybe for Tont. Tont’s my boi.
It doesn’t help that the translation is middling, but this is also 1996 so I didn’t have high expectations to begin with. Likely even in the original Japanese, there’s nothing in this 30-to-35-hour game that builds player attachment to the characters or the world they’re moving through. That would have been normal in like 1987, but times have changed, and this is the first real JRPG on 32-bit systems (ignore Lucienne’s Quest). This is a mediocre story told poorly, with the additional contradictory issue of there not being enough of it. There’s only enough plot in this thing for like a 10-to-15-hour game, with the difference spent on the high encounter rate and handful of mandatory grinding sessions. When I say this story is on par with one of those Kemco RPGs that came out on Japanese flip phones, I’m not exaggerating. And yeah, I’m complaining about having to play a video game, but I straight up forgot about important characters and lore in the hours between plot beats. If so much of the experience is spent engaging with the mechanics instead of the story, are those at least any good?
The Gameplay
While the writing is the keystone of any RPG, the gameplay serves as the foundation of the experience. It’s fine to build your structure on a generic concrete slab, but if you build your castle on a swamp it’s going to fall over and sink. I’m not sure where I’m going with this analogy, let’s talk about combat.
Though, there isn’t much to talk about with the combat, which is the problem, so let’s talk around it. This is a menu-based game that gives you the standard Attack, Magic, Defend, and Item commands along with a Flee option and some tweaking of limited party automation, which you shouldn’t use. Each character has a set class with set spell unlock progression and randomized stat enhancements when levelling. The magic itself consists of standard elemental spells, healing, summons, and limited buff/debuff options. That last part is of disappointingly little utility, with straightforward attack, defense, and crit ups and downs that don’t last anywhere close to long enough to be useful. Item usage is also limited in combat by the game’s insistence on having small character-specific inventories. Even then the available items are usually one step behind the power curve and are only good for use in emergencies. That leaves normal attacks and offensive magic, but that magic is throttled by limited MP pools for like the first two-thirds or so of the game. The lack of mechanics or options to mess with causes combat to become tedious pretty quickly. Though, there is one mechanic the game wants you to mess with.
Everyone likes the Paper Mario series, right? Even if you answered “no” I’m going to assume that you do. You know the active battle system in those games, where you can press a button to either enhance or mitigate damage during attacks? It’s a nice system because it gives you something to do while the turn-based animations play out. Now imagine, if you will, that same battle system except half-assed and bad. Beyond the Beyond attempts a kind of active battle system where pressing the Cross button on specific frames of attack animations increases the chance to either deal a crit defend against an attack. Now, there’s already invisible dice rolls determining those things, pressing the button just improves the odds. It’s like the old superstition kids would tell each other about the early Pokémon games where jamming on the B button on certain frames would influence poke ball success rates, except in this case it’s real. The input windows are narrow enough, and timing diverse enough between characters and MoBs that I found myself having the best luck fast tapping the button during each attack. On average I would develop hand cramps after a two-or-so-hour game session. This mechanic is a paradox, because it’s simultaneously the worst thing in this game but also the only original idea in the whole thing.
Well, I guess that isn’t the only original idea, there’s also the LP system. HP is called VP (Vitality Points) in this game and works how you would expect it to. Each character additionally has LP (Life Points) that serve as a kind of VP refill counter. When a character’s VP gets knocked to zero, they’ll get groggy for the rest of that turn but then after the turn ends their LP will decrease by some amount, usually around two or three points, and their VP will refill either fully or halfway depending on dice rolls. Sometimes the refill can happen before the turn ends, also depending on an invisible dice roll. LP isn’t refilled by magic or potions, only by resting at inns. If someone runs out of VP and LP, they die and have to get rezzed at a church like in Dragon Quest. This setup can be conceptualized as working like stacked lifebars or a segmented lifebar. The main caveat is that if every party member is groggy at the same time it counts as a party wipe. You’re more likely to have to worry about that caveat or the occasional instant death spell than any character running out of LP naturally. This adds nothing to the game, other than making party management slightly more convoluted.
For as iffy as the combat is, there sure is a lot of it. Being a product of the mid-90’s, the encounter rate starts high and stays there. This is a problem in the early game, with the very first dungeon serving as a filter separating the reasonable from the stubborn. Speaking of the difficulty curve, it’s wonky as hell. The first dungeon only features the protagonist in the party and the game only vaguely acknowledges your problems. You end up needing to grind a level or two right off the bat like it’s the original Final Fantasy. Then there’s how the party composition changes over time. By the time you get through the beginning of the game and end up in Zalagoon, you have Protag, who’s an all-rounder, Annie, who’s the white mage, Edward, who’s a black mage, and the desiccated corpse of Samson, who would otherwise be the frontline fighter. If you miss out on Tont, which isn’t unlikely, then you have three and a half party members until you uncurse Samson, which bumps you to four until Domino shows up after Bandore. That would finally give you a full five-person party for the first time two-thirds of the way through the game. I doubt the difficulty of the first couple of bosses adjusts depending on party size, so I can’t imagine trying to play past Simone without Tont adding just that little extra oomph.
Since there are three optional party members (Tont, Lorele, and Percy) to go with the five required ones, that means the game’s party switching mechanic and fast travel just don’t exist without figuring out how to get those extra three or using a guide. Oh, right, there’s fast travel, but it’s weird. At the top of the tower or Arawn, he gives everyone their own Orb of Light item that mostly just takes up an inventory slot. Those items have three uses: allowing the characters to progress to their advanced classes, get thrown at the final boss in a cutscene, and allow fast travel when you have more than five party members. You see, you don’t take extra party members with you as you travel around. You tell them to go hang out in a specific visited town, and to get them in the party you have to go talk at them. Camelot most have realized late in development how annoying that is, especially if you forgot where you stuck someone. So, using the Orb of Light in the inventory lets you teleport the party to any town containing an extra party member. None of this is made particularly explicit in the game and it’s probably not meant to be exploited as fast travel, but it’s still a much-needed shortcut in the late game.
Now, you might have noticed I didn’t mention much about using Domino, Lorele, or black knight Percy. That’s because by the time I got each new character they would invariably be sorely under-levelled compared to the rest of the party, and it was never worth grinding them up to par. Not having all party members level-match kills player incentive to experiment with party comp, and while it took JRPG designers a long time to figure that out, 1995 is getting kind of late for badly it’s done here. It doesn’t help that the severity of random encounters is punishing for parties with any under-levelled members, meaning you can’t have a learning-on-the-job approach to getting new characters up to speed.
Finally, there is an in-game economy with Gold, item shops, and the whole shebang. It’s aggressively standard and not worth discussion. The only remaining bits of gameplay worth mentioning are the dungeon gimmicks, but I suppose that brings us to the next section.
What Is Level Design Anyway
Any frustrated DM could tell you that good dungeon and world design are vital for flowing all the parts of an RPG together into a cohesive experience. If I try to expand my previous structural analogy to include this, it will collapse under its own weight, so let’s just move on to the analysis.
Let’s start with the world map, which you can’t actually see in the game until you get Domino’s ship. I’ve taken the extremely helpful map from a turn of the century game guide site and drawn over it to the average of my abilities in order to illustrate the mainline route of this game.
The lines are color-coded by the latest available transportation method. The blue line is before getting a ship, where you have to hoof it everywhere. The orange line is when you have Domino’s ship, gold is for after Steiner has his growth spurt, and purple is for when you have the flying techno diamond. The five spots at the top with disconnected arrows are the optional/side quest areas, with the color of the arrow representing when they become available.
There are a few points to note. First, when I talked about how way too much of the game was concerned with uncursing Samson, I’m referring to everything south of point D on that map. Look at all that back-tracking and just how much ground gets covered, just for uncursing Samson. Next, the game gives you your first mode of transport way too late in the game, and from there the remaining two come quickly enough that they all feel pointless and underused. The paucity of side areas is what it is, but looking at the map like this, there’s a ton of empty landmass where the designers could have stuck literally anything. Just look at that whole bunch of nothing on the route from point D (Zalagoon) down to point F (Luna) up to the caves at point 5, which of course needs to be backtracked multiple times. The other offenders are the long, empty hike to Bandore (point L) and all the backtracking to and from Barbatos (point N). That last one is especially bad because it can’t be reached with Steiner as a mount, even though you unlock him at DISCIPLINE TOWN (point O).
But none of that is the worst part. The original release of this game was in 1995 after the 16-bit Final Fantasy’s, Dragon Quests, and Phantasy Stars had wrapped up, and on next gen hardware, yet the world design is simpler and less well thought out than any of those. Heck, Final Fantasy IV had three maps and good pacing and that came out in 1990. The closest comparisons for what we see here would be something like Final Fantasy II, which came out in ’88. Beyond the Beyond is designed like a 32-bit remake of some forgotten Famicom RPG. Though, despite being designed like a throwback, there is one aspect that is a bit too of its time.
From my recollection, something like half of the ~18 dungeons in the game have obnoxious traversal gimmicks. I wouldn’t even really call most of them puzzles, except for the world’s most random sliding tile puzzle. There’s a giant tree where you need to yeet yourself down holes to find various paths, there are lever puzzles, an obligatory slippery ice maze, and more. Yet, it’s all just there to make you walk around more and trigger more encounters. They don’t add to the experience with different gameplay modes or enhance the world, they just serve as speed bumps to make you drain more battle resources. You can have a couple of those in a game as a resource sink or stat check, but it’s at least half of the dungeons here. The gimmicks might seem clever-ish on the surface, because it’s a different one each time, but their abundance betrays a lazy thought process, which fits I suppose.
Where Did This Come From?
The obvious answer to that question is that this is Camelot’s first game, but answering where Camelot came from is much more complicated. I’m not making a flowchart for this, so I hope you have your conspiracy board ready.
As far as I can tell, Hiroyuki Takahashi worked at Enix for some chunk of the 1980’s, eventually ending up as a mid-level member of the staff on Dragon Quest IV. After that last project wrapped up, he and three others from the team left Enix to start up their own studio called Climax Entertainment in 1990. There, they would throw together a game called Shining Into Darkness under shoestring conditions. I guess Sega picked up whatever Takahashi was putting down, because in ’91 he started a second studio called Sonic! Software Planning with majority ownership by Sega. He ran both Climax and Sonic! at the same time, but I suppose this deal gave Sega control over the Shining series while allowing Climax to remain independent. The two studios codeveloped Shining Force before parting ways, with Sonic! churning out Shining sequels at a breathtaking pace and Climax doing its own thing.
Shugo Takahashi is Hiyoyuki’s younger brother by five years, and he first appears in our narrative as a programmer on the Shining franchise beginning in ’92. In 1994 a series of events happened resulting in Hiroyuki divesting himself of Climax and Shugo founding Camelot Software Planning. The point of this latest studio was to develop games for the brand-new PlayStation, since Sonic! couldn’t do so because of the whole Sega ownership thing. Camelot would provide development assistance on the Saturn entries of the Shining series while developing their own games. The first of those being, of course, Beyond the Beyond and the second being 1997’s Everybody’s Golf. Yes, they made that Everybody’s Golf.
Sega began winding down Sonic! Software Planning at the end of ’97, resulting in Hiroyuki taking over as president of Camelot and that studio putting together the three expansion discs to Shining Force III in place of its defunct sibling company. The Takahashi brothers seem to have cut ties with Sega entirely by the end of ’98, and Camelot ended up working on a Mario themed golf project for the N64. Mario spin-offs were a real mixed bag up to that point, and it’s hard to imagine anyone would want to see the pudgy plumber playing sports. Goofs aside, things turned out alright for Camelot, despite bringing eternal damnation upon themselves by creating Waluigi.
With all this information about Beyond the Beyond, what can we say about it not making any impact? For one, I can confidently tell you the experience is aggressively mid by the standards of the time. It makes sense that there wasn’t anyone involved in the design who would have made one these types of RPGs since the 8-bit era, because it feels like a throwback in most ways. It’s not a great look to put out a JRPG harkening back to the Famicom when it’s released alongside Chrono Trigger. There are also just enough weird and inept choices to mar what was already a standard experience. I could use that same sentence to describe the contemporary Shining Wisdom, which was Sonic!’s first 32-bit game developed in tandem with Beyond the Beyond. It doesn’t help that Camelot obviously used a branch of the old Shining Force engine, which contributes to its feeling behind the times.
From what I could find, this game sold something round 300k to 400k copies in Japan, which is better than what any of the King’s Field games, Virtual Hydlide, Suikoden, or Persona were able to do. That would have been good enough to start a franchise, but I think word-of-mouth plummeted once everyone who wanted a PlayStation RPG had their hands on a copy. That might be why Sony put no marketing effort behind it when they ported it to North America in ’96. I’m not exaggerating about that, I found almost no English language marketing materials related this thing, with my only result being the below 25 seconds from a demo reel. That isn’t even due to it being a JRPG, since even Lufia II and Lunar II had tons of magazine ads at that time. Sony dropped it unceremoniously onto shelves and let it twist in the wind. Yet even so, that version still sold somewhere around 100k copies. They could have tried their hand at a sequel as long as they had modest sales expectations.
As if that wasn’t enough, the real kick in the teeth is that the 14 months between the Japanese releases of Beyond the Beyond and Final Fantasy VII saw the releases of Suikoden, Persona, Vandal Hearts, and Wild Arms which all went on to spawn their own franchises with varying degrees of success. It really isn’t hyperbolic to call this game the unloved stepchild of PlayStation RPGs. Yeah, you could be able to make the argument that this game is the spiritual predecessor to Golden Sun, or that It’s basically a Shining game, but those arguments might start a fistfight in some crowds.
With all that out of the way, I might as well tell you the real reason Camelot never followed up on Beyond the Beyond, and it actually mirrors T&E Soft’s experience a bit. As mentioned earlier, Camelot’s second game was Everybody’s Golf. What I didn’t mention was that it sold 2 million copies in Japan. Two years later, Mario Golf sold 1.5 million copies worldwide. From a business perspective, trying to build a brand off a decent-selling mediocre JRPG wasn’t even close to being worth the effort when their Golf games were an order of magnitude better and more successful. The final punchline of all this is that when Camelot revisited the RPG genre with 2001’s Golden Sun, it was the first original JRPG for the GBA while being much better received and selling five times more than Beyond the Beyond.
Fifth Generation Gaming 
Leave a comment