I had very low expectations going in with Baten Kaitos, but I ended up
enjoying it more than I had wanted to. There was a ton of flaws with
it, including the story, characters, and voices but I stuck it out and
finished the game without feeling bored. I did cringe with most of the
dialog though. The battles dragged on a little long, even the
sub-enemies, so I dreaded going into a fight. The way you level up is
really stupid, and the lack of CGI Cutscenes was extremely
disappointing. The positive side of things though, I got use to the
battle system and I can now tolerate it. The voice overs were really
bad, but I started to zone them out and it didn't bug me so much
towards the end. The graphics were down right beautiful and the music
was superb. I'm now a bit excited to get Baten Kaitos: Origins, just to
see if they improved on the first one. Let's hope.
----------Battle System----------
Baten Kaitos uses a turn-based card battle system. The system isn't
hard to grasp or understand, but it is hard to get into at first just
because its something most people aren't use to. At the start of the
game you have a deck of cards, you can only hold 20 cards at first. In
battle you'll get a random choice of 3 cards out of those 20 in your
deck. Some cards are armor, attacks, or healing cards, so you have to
choose wisely which cards to pick before going into a battle and in
battle. You can only attack or help one thing at a time, so you have to
be very careful what cards you use. If you attack a bat with a sword
and then follow up your combo will a healing spell, then you'll be
healing the bat and not hurting it. Once you use all the cards in your
deck, the cards will re-shuffle itself. Some Magnus Cards will evolve
for better or worse, but most of the attack cards will stay the same
through out the game.
There's 6 elements in the game: Wind, Chrono, Water, Flame, Light and
Darkness. Each element cancels one out, for example Water cancels out
Flame. If you throw out 3 Water cards and 3 Flame cards, then your
offense is going to be weak. Another example is the defense cards can
also can help or go against you as well. If the enemy is using an Ice
card, then you should throw down a Flame defense card to counter it. I
like to just keep 3 attack elements at a time so I won't counter my own
attacks on accident, since I did that alot early on in the game. I'll
give one character Flame, Light and Wind, since none of those counter
act on each other.
The level up system has regressed back to the Dragon Warrior days. To
level up you have to find a Blue Flower (save point) and warp to a
Church, inside the church is a faceless priest you have to Pray to.
When you Pray to the Priest he can level you up, or up your class. The
game tells you have much experience you have, but it never tells you
how much you need for the next level, so you have to keep going back to
the priest crossing your fingers for a level up. When your class moves
up a level you can hold more cards in your deck and have 1 more card
slot in battle. The more slots in your battle cards help out your
combos immensely. The only draw back is in battle you have a short time
limit to pick your cards, and if you have 5 to choose from it can get a
little hectic, on the positive side you'll have more cards to choose
from to get a better combo attack. On the corners of your cards lays a
number between 1 and 9. If you match numbers of the cards in your
attack hand, then you'll get a percentage bonus with your attack or
defense.
You don't earn money in the traditional RPG sense in this game. The
only way to gain money in the game is to take a photo of your enemy,
wait for it to develop and sell it to a shop keeper. You have to equip
the camera into your deck before a battle and wait for the luck of the
draw to attack with the camera to get the picture. There's not a whole
lot of options to buy at shops, and everything is limited, plus you get
a ton of money for the pictures, so I never had a money problem in the
game.
Early in the game you get Blank Magnus. With these Blank Magnus' you
can walk up to an item, for example a pot of water and take that
water's essence. With that item's essence you can give it up to a
person that needs the water or to complete a puzzle in the dungeons
like putting the water in a scale or globe. You use these Blank Magnus'
to complete alot of the sidequests in the game.
There's five major sidequests in the game. The first one is Quzmans
Family Tree. In the game is Quzman's family scattered across all the
worlds, Quzman is dying and wants everyone in his family to sign the
family tree and visit him before he passes. The second sidequest is to
collect Constellation stars and give them to the man in the Church. The
third is to combine various cards to fill out your Combo chart and to
get rare cards. The forth is to collect one of every animal in the
game. The last and biggest sidequest is to collect all 1,000+ cards,
from buying them, earning them, taking photos of your enemies and other
assorted ways.
One big annoyance is there will only be the maximum 3 enemies per
battle, and they stand in the exact same order 2 in front the middle
one in back, same as your party. You can't set where your characters
stand other than the order, so you won't have to worry about being
weaker if you in the back or stronger in the front since that's
eliminated from this game. That makes me sense to me, I never really
understood why your attack would be stronger or weaker where you stood
if you're still running up and slashing the enemy or shooting it with
an arrow. There's no suprise or pre-emptive attacks in the game either.
----------Characters / Story----------
You play as yourself, Kalas' Guardian Spirit. You follow Kalas through
his journey to get the 5 End Magnus' before Emperor Geldoblame gets
them first and destroys the world. Sometimes Kalas looks into the
"camera" and chats with "you". You have to give him advise and guidance
through this journey.
None of the characters are likeable, especially Kalas. The story isn't
that interesting to me either, but there was a couple HUGE swerves and
twists I was not expecting and enjoyed, this freshened up the otherwise
dull story. The inclusion of you, the Guardian Spirit makes some of the
dialog really cheesy. I can't help but cringe most o the time when
Kalas or Xehlia does this.
(possible spoiler)
There's a few inconsistencies in the game. There's a scene when they're
running away followed by a few soilders. They run past the secret well
(which is a dead end by the way) and run out of the town through the
original entrance. Then the next scene shows them walking up to the
secret well (which is in the middle of the town) after they escaped
from the soldiers. There's another part in the game when you leave your
ship at Mira, but later its waiting for you at Anuenue. There's another
instance where you meet one of Quzan's family members at the Ice
Island, where no one have visited for over 100 years! Doesn't make
sense!
There's even a few moments in the game that seriously infuriate me to
no end. One of them is when one of the Children of the Earth is trying
to break the seal to Guhr, and Kalas & Co. just watch him from a
short distance until he does break it. Another instance is when they
watch as the bad guys steal or break an important item or when they
attack one of their friends and all they do is stand there yelling
their name! This happens alot in the game and its extremely frustrating
to me. At the end of the game everyone is on separate Islands talking
to each over having conversations! HOW??!!
(end spoilers)
----------Graphics----------
The background graphics are all pre-rendered with subtle animations
similar to a Resident Evil or a later Final Fantasy game. The camera is
always fixed, but it will pan left to right or up and down in certain
situations. The background is very limiting for searching around and
can make it hard to find people, as they look like ants half of the
time. You can't zoom in or rotate a camera.
All the towns, fields, dungeons and islands look great. Every house
looks different, there will never be a repeating house in this game.
The developers put a ton of thought into the graphics in this game. The
only downside is the towns are really small. The fields and dungeons
rarely have more than 3 screens to them.
I'm not exactly fond with what the characters look like since most of
them look like rejects from Final Fantasy X with wings, but they are
very well drawn with alot of detail. Xelhia looks like she wears adult
diapers though. The 'main' bad guys like Ayme, Folon, Geldoblame look
like clowns, but the field / dungeon enemies and huge bosses all look
great and are a blast to fight just to look at. The only draw back is
there’s about four monsters per-field / dungeon, some of them are
repeating leveled up monsters before previous stages. There's not a ton
of enemies in this game. There was some instances where I had to fight
the same boss more than once in two completely different scenarios. The
dialog box looks great, and has a great anime style picture of the
character who's talking in it. The picture changes up with their
emotions off and on also. I love when they have flashbacks and the
picture is in grainy black and white.
The special attacks are minimal for the most part. The finisher magnus
card is the longest one and its still very short and effective. That's
a very positive thing because if the attacks had longer animations then
it would severely slowed down the game, since you can have up to 9 card
combos.
There's an awesome CG cutscene as an intro to the first disc (its not
on the 2nd disc). The scenes in it follow the story pretty well, but
doesn't really ruin any of the story (except maybe for Mizuti). I don't
know if these were intended to original be within the game and got
scrapped and made into an intro or what, but this is the only
pre-rendered cut scene in the game.
----------Sound----------
The music, especially the battle music is really good. The battle music
is a real hyper violin track that gets really into the battle. The only
music in the game I disliked was the Industrial / Techno / Pop track
played while fighting Giacomo and Folon, this song does not fit the
mood of Baten Kaitos. The only game's I've played this summer that are
on par with Baten Kaitos is Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and
Kingdom Hearts.
The voice overs on the other hand go into a different direction. For
one, the production of the voices are HORRIBLE. When I say horrible, I
mean the worse Voice Over's I've ever heard in a game in my life. The
voices sound so condensed that it sounds like it was recorded inside of
a garbage can. Despite having really bad dialog in this game, it also
has extremely terrible voice actors as well. The tone in all the
characters sound like an adult talking down to an 5 year old that wants
candy before dinner. There's alot of odd pauses in the dialog as well,
this bugs the crap out of me since it slows everything down. The voice
actor of Lyude sounds like he is bored and reading from a script, and
the Great Mizuti sounds like a Jamaican Robot (and looks like a
floating Totem Pole). The kids in the game, like Palolo III, are the
worst offenders here. This was the major reason why I had trouble
getting through this game. Only about half of the storyline dialog is
voiced out though, so it won't get on your nerves to much.
On a more positive note, I enjoyed most of the battle cries in the
game, there's a ton of them also. Most of the major attacks have
distinct battle cries, sometimes more than one each. There will never
be an overkill and you won't get sick of them since there’s so many
different ones.
----------World Map----------
There's two world maps in the game. The main one is similar to Kingdom
Heart's world map, where you travel from Island to Island, except you
don't have to fly a crappy Gummi Ship to them. The sub-world map is a
blown up picture of the Island. The sub-map is another dot to dot style
map, except when you're on the world map you can physically walk to
each dot on the map but will not be attacked by enemies. Once you
defeated a level, you can walk across that dot without having to cross
the field again. The sub-maps looks good, but there's no monsters,
treasures or secrets to find. The way they fix that is have a town,
then a battle field, then a town on each map. You can save on the map
and do any of your menu options, sometimes there’s dialog on the map,
but otherwise there’s not much to do other than walk to your next
destination.
The first disc of the game is extremely linear, you never have control
of the main Island maps. Once you get to an Island you go to dot to dot
to dot, then the storyline ships you off to the next island and repeat.
When you get to disc 2 you get your own ship and get to pick which
island you want to visit for sidequests or to finish up the main quest.
----------Time to Complete Game (first run through, last save before final boss)----------
48:49:02
There's no bonus for beating the game, although the ending after the
final boss was extremely long, possibly 45 minutes long. I was pretty
disappointed that there was no CG cutscene at the end.
This is the longest Gamecube RPG I've played so far. Even though I put
more hours into Skies of Arcadia Legends, I completed that game 100%.
In Baten Kaitos I missed so many one-chance cards and other stuff I
ended up not caring about the sidequests. I've sure if I completed this
game 100% on the first run that it would take me roughly 62 hours or
more.
