Baten Kaitos Origins is one of the better games for the Gamecube, heck,
even solid title overall from the last gen. If you played the previous
Baten Kaitos and liked it, then you'll love this game. With an improved
battle system, less-linear gameplay, new lands and people, huge
improvement in voice work and leveling, with some of the same great
graphics and music, there's really nothing BAD about this game.
----------Battle System----------
Baten Kaitos is a turn based RPG that uses cards as weapons, spells and
armor. The battle system is completely different than the previous
Baten Kaitos. In the last game, all of your characters had their own
decks, which took alot of time to micromanage. In this game, everyone
uses the same deck, which makes things a little more difficult in a way
because you'll get a bunch of cards a character can't use, but it
offers some strategy to the game aswell.
The system is still
more different as well, because you have to set up your cards in order
to get a good combo attack. For an example, to start off your combo,
you can throw down a "Weapon" or "Armor" card, this will boost your
attack or defense. The following cards are your attack combos, which
are label as 1-Weak, 2-Medium, or 3-Strong. If you hit atleast one of
those, then you can use a Special attack but you need "Levels" to pull
these special attacks off. The more combos you pull off, the more
levels you get during a battle.
Ok, there's even more to it
than that. After you pull off a single characters combo, you can pull
off a "Relay Combo", which starts another combo with another character,
creating a double or ultimately a triple character combo, making a
massive attack overall. While this all sounds a bit difficult to
understand in written text, once you jump in, the game is so easy to
understand. This is such an improved system over the first one.
Now for even better news, after you defeat a group of monsters, you
gain experience, money, and technical points. They got rid of the
camera/taking pictures thing from the last game (thank god) and
actually have shops that carry stuff worth buying. When you gain
experience points, you can actually gain a level right then and there,
which eliminates rushing back to the Cathedral to level up ala Dragon
Warrior that was so dated and an overall annoyance. The Technical
points is new (I think), and once you gather enough of those you can
travel to the Cathedral through the Blue save Flower and rise your card
deck class. Raising your deck class will boost the amount of cards you
can carry in a deck at a time, and how many cards you can discard at a
time.
Theres a ton of sidequests in this game too, and they
keep track of them for you, so you can check the ones you did and
didn't do. Another good thing about this game is the fact that you can
travel between islands with ease without feeling trapped, so you can
tackle and sidequest you want.
The dungeons and fields
aren't very long, some short as 2 screens, but they offer enough
enemies, puzzles and blocks to keep you in the dungeon for a while.
----------Characters / Story----------
Baten Kaitos Origins takes place 20 years in the past before the first
Baten Kaitos, so you will be visiting most of the same towns, islands,
and even some of the same people from the first game. This is a neat
idea and if you've played the first Baten Kaitos (which I would
recommend to play that before you play Origins) then you'll get a
better sense who these people are, and how they became who they are in
the first Baten Kaitos. Since it takes place 20 years in the past, you
won't be seeing much of Kalas, Mizuti or Xelha since they weren't born
yet, but Gibari and Savyna make important appearances, along with
Giacomo, Geldoblame and many other characters. You'll even learn the
origins of Malpercio and the War of the Gods.
In Baten
Kaitos Origins, you play as Sagi, a Spirter. YOU play as the Guardian
Spirit, which is still the most annoying aspect of these games, but you
get over it. As Sagi's Guardian Spirit, you get to choose lines of
dialog, but the point is to agree with what Sagi will say, so you
should pick the most positive dialog. Later in the game you get to
choose more important dialog that will change the events in the game.
Guillo is Sagi's best friend and protector. Guillo is a robot that
talks in a weird mix of overdubbed male / female voice overs, which
works out pretty well. Guillo was found by Sagi as a child and doesn't
know of 'her' history.
Milly is a tag along spoiled girl that
escaped with Sagi and Guillo while they're on the run. She is always at
conflict with Guillo and tries to befriend Sagi as much as possible.
The game starts with Sagi and Guillo, who are rookie members of the an
Elite group of mercenaries owned by Lord Baelheit. Their first task is
to assassinate the current Emperor Olgan. As they enter is estate and
prepare to take out their task, someone beat them to the punch and
finish the job before them, but they get blamed for the murder and are
on the run from the Empire. With the Emperor dead, the Empire goes
through an election to find the new Emperor.
----------Graphics----------
The character models are rendered in 3D while the backgrounds within
the towns and dungeons are in 2D, with the occasional CGI sprite
flickering. You have to move your character across this plain fields,
like moving a character across a painting. This is pretty similar to
many PS1 RPGs like Final Fantasy, Legend of Dragoon, Chrono Cross and
loads of others that used this technique. So there's no camera control
at all within these screens, but the camera will follow your character
left, right up or down the screens. The biggest problem I have with the
still screens is there's also no zooming, so if the camera is WAAAY
back, then your character is about the size of an ant, and you might
have trouble seeing stuff.
Compared to the first game, the
graphics are about the only thing that haven't improved. I mean, in
some spot's it has improved, like the monsters are rendered alot better
and are bigger, and the special attacks are ALOT better, but the towns
are basically the same. The opening cutscene is short and uses a weird,
paper cut out puppet style of animation, which is cool and artful, but
compared to the opening scene in the first it seems a little poor. I
like that they use 3D animation in some important dialog scenes that
require action, but they just use the battle engine to render the
graphics, and it looks choppy and the backgrounds look like crap.
----------Sound----------
The music is plain and simple amazing, but there's alot of reused tunes
from the first game, or slightly modified versions of them. Heck I
think the Giacomo theme is an improvement. I loved the music to the
first game, so I can't really fault anything here, except for the
reused songs of the first game.
The biggest change from the
first game to this one is the HUGE improvement over the voice work. Not
only has the sound improved, from the echo-y tin can sound, to a more
natural sound in the voices, but the voice acting is also an overall
improvement, and it's some of the better voice work I've heard in an
RPG in a long time aswell.
----------World Map----------
The world map is a connecting dots map, similar to Final Fantasy
Tactics, or even more similar to Blazing Heroes but no one has played
that. The world consists of various floating islands, and inside each
island are ports, towns, fields and dungeons. The only difference
between a Final Fantasy Tactics styled map and Baten Kaitos map is the
ability to manually walk from town to dungeon. There's no monsters or
really anything to be found on the maps, so manually walking is almost
pointless.
If you walk into a new dungeon you have to go
inside of it, but once you made it through the dungeon for the first
time you may walk right over the dungeon for quicker transportation.
You can save anytime on the world map aswell.
While the first
Baten Kaitos was very linear and confined within each island with
little chance to move from island to island within your own choosing,
Baten Kaitos Origins has much more freedom in backtracking if you want
work on sidequests, plus using a blue save flower you can not only go
to the cathedral to upgrade your deck, you can go to a Colosseum to
battle and to a sidequest town to build.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
48:27:35
I fought the final boss(es) at the 47 hour even mark, so the rest of
that time is end sequences and credits and the final scene, which is
cool. So the ending is big and worth watching. After you beat the game
you get a New Game+ by carring over your "Gathering".
