I finished up Beyond Good & Evil tonight by finally heading to the moon, after a last bit of shopping for some health replenishment items.
It started off easily enough with some simple mirror+beam puzzles, and I finally rescued Pey’j, after a bit of a fakeout. I then spent a while trying to figure out why the lift back to the entrance area wasn’t working, since it seemed to be clear that was where I had to head since there was a three-person trigger there that I could now activate. But no, I actually had to slide behind a sheet of glass back at the opposite end of the map…
That led to an area with a couple guards that I wound up fighting, since it was tough to sneak past them. Below that was a maze of lifts, but it was pretty small and easy to get through. That led to an area where I could take a photo of the Alpha Sections leader talking to the DomZ boss, and learned that they were draining the citizens’ energy in order to keep themselves alive longer. I went back to the transmitter room and broadcast this information back to the planet, but then a self-destruct sequence kicked off and I had to race back to the ship.
Outside again, the Alpha Sections leader was in a spider-like robot and trapped our ship in a tractor beam and dragged us along behind him while firing lasers and drones back at us. I had to go through multiple waves of destroying the beam sources and the main engine, but it wasn’t too difficult. Eventually, his ship crashed and I dropped the hovercraft and boarded it. There I had to fight three of his elite guards at once, which wasn’t as tough as I thought it would be since I was able to get Double-H to hit them in their gas tanks fairly reliably, making them easy to finish off. In the upper part of the ship, the Alpha Sections leader finally gave up and died, and I turned the tractor beam off.
I still had to go back and rescue the kids, but swarms of fighters then attacked. The Neutralizer Cannon worked well on them though, and citizens rallied by the resistance showed up to lend support and I was able to get through and land. It turned out to be a trap though, and I faced the DomZ leader himself, who revealed more details about Jade’s true past and how she wasn’t really human but the source of his power, taken away and hidden from him. A multi-stage boss battle ensued, requiring just about all the tricks I’d learned in the game, and throwing in reversed controls at the end too as an additional screw-you. I used nearly all of the health refills I’d brought, and only just barely managed to beat him in the end; this was far tougher than any of the other boss battles, though that’s largely because of not knowing what’s coming.
And so it ends with the captured citizens being restored to life and released, and…that’s it. The ending is a bit abrupt, but they had planned on doing a sequel, especially with the big tease at the end of the credits. Supposedly one is under pre-production right now, but it remains to be seen if it will get the full go-ahead, especially since this one apparently sold rather poorly. I hope there will be; it was a short game (just over 12 hours by the save game timer), but a rather satisfying one.