How High Can You Fly On Broken Wings?
Baten Kaitos is a turn base RPG for the Game Cube. Its combat system puts an interesting twist on traditional gameplay, but an uninteresting story, and a voice cast that is so bad you will want to play the game on mute keeps this game from soaring.
The combat in Baten Kaitos is quite fun, it’s a card based system which works very well. All you pokemon fanatics from yester years will enjoy spending hours organizing your decks upon decks of cards and exploring the world looking for even more powerful ones in order to vanquish the hordes of monsters that roam about. The game itself looks beautiful as well albeit it's not presented very well. The problem is the camera is so zoomed out you feel like your merely observing what’s going on rather than feeling like your part of the action and the story…. which may be a good thing.
The Story revolves around the character Kalas, a one winged blue haired card collecting junkie, who is on a quest to avenge his Grand papa and pod brother Fee, both who where killed by the evil empire. Along the way you will meet a large array of colorful characters (all of whom voices are absolutely terrible) all with there reasons to join you on your crusade. The story itself is by the numbers and at times excruciatingly boring, but around hour forty or so there is a plot twist. Now I’m not sure if its because the story and dialog where so uninspired till that point, or that I learned you can actually turn off the mind numbingly bad voice acting. But the plot twist is surprisingly very good and for a fleeting moment the story is engaging. Sadly however this does not last as the game continues on with moments that will leave you simply dumbfounded. The last two hours of the game are particularly nonsensical. Everything from you fighting humpty dumpy to one of your characters pulling a humpty dumpy, the story just falls to pieces. You would be hard pressed to find a more confusing and frustrating ending to an eighty five hour experience.
In the end of the day Baten Kaitos fails to get off the ground, all the elements are here for a good game but other than the combat nothing comes together very well. Characters and story are the wings for any RPG and unfortunately for Baten Kaitos, its wings are broken.
