Baten Kaitos was much better than expected.
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.
