Baten Kaitos Review

The Nintendo GameCube isn’t the ideal choice for purchasing Role-Playing Games, but many developers manages to create something for the RPG, GCN–only starved audience. Lost Kingdoms was one the few RPGs that a few quite enjoyed, but in the process it wasn’t stellar. However, the first “true” RPG that hit GameCube was Skies of Arcadia Legends, an updated port of the popular Dreamcast title. But in 2004, there were three excellent RPGs to satisfy the GCN audience. For instance, Tales of Symphonia’s debut pleased many GameCube owners and the highly anticipated Paper Mario 2: The Thousand-Year Door received praise among websites. With two RPGs that have come and gone, Namco and Monolith went beyond the boundaries and delivered a RPG of surprising proportions. Baten Kaitos not only is one of the most beautiful games to grace the GameCube, but it’s battle system, excellent soundtrack, and powerful storyline will grab gamers and find them a place in the skies.

The main character is Kalas, a young man with one wing, while the other is a artificially made wing crafted by his late grandfather. At the start of the game, Kalas meets you, the Guardian Spirit, in which you get to select the gender and name for and from here on end, you and him become one and the same. The story itself starts off rather slow, but the FMV introduction clearly gives you the basic details of the storyline. A powerful Empire is trying to resurrect a powerful god named Malpercio by gathering the five End Magnus, which are sealed within the floating continents. As the story slowly progresses, you will get a chance to delve deep into the roots of each character. Many gamers may play an hour of the game and think that it’s going to be nothing but cliches and a straightforward story, but the game’s linearity will suddenly ravel into a web of complexity, intrigue, betrayal, and various plot twists that will keep you guessing until the end. Kalas isn’t your typical gun-ho, let’s save the world type person, his journey actually was about avenging the death of his grandfather and his brother Fee by the hands of the Empire. Xelha’s path is collecting the End Magnus and preventing the Empire from obtaining all five. This resulted in Kalas’ interest to help in order to get closer to the Empire. Gibari is a fisherman that boasts he’s the best. Lyude is a representative of the Empire, but does not possess the cruel behavior as its denizens. Savyna is an enigmatic hunter that resides in Anuenue and Mizuti is a mysterious wizard from another world. These colorful characters express the diversity in real life as well as their environments.

The gameplay’s high point is the battle system. Many people will get turned off with the idea of using cards, but in reality, it’s an RPG through and through with a simple battle system. Don’t expect the card playing aspect a Yu-Gi-Oh! copy. If you want to compare Baten Kaitos’ battle system with any card game, it’s poker, in the sense that it is both strategic and somewhat dependant on luck of the draw.

In battle, you select cards from your deck and they will be executed in battle. In the beginning of the game, the battle system serves more of a warm up for first time gamers, since you are given infinite time to execute an attack. But in the later parts of the game, you must think fast on what cards you must choose on your deck, because you are timed. The battle system is very fun and downright exhilarating and causes you to think and act quicker as you progress. You can execute combos and gain bonus damage depending on you performing straights (5,4,3,2,1) or pairs (2,2,1,1,2). The numbers on the corners of the cards do not determine its strength, just for reiteration everyone.

While your characters are on the defensive, defensive cards will be used in battle and you must time them carefully in order for them to work. When you run out of cards, you shuffle your deck, but at the cost of losing a turn. Certain Magnus have attributes that are color coded respectively based on their elemental properties (Red is to fire, white is to Light, purple is to Dark, green is to Chronos, etc…). Perhaps one of the few flaws found within the battle system would be the obvious long battles. Many battles are usually your group against two or three monsters at a time and they take around three to six minutes to finish completely. Another flaw would be the idea of randomizing. It’s definately not a cumbersome flaw because normally it’s the player’s fault for not having a proper deck set up. You may have more defensive cards than you need or rather you have more healing items. Another gripe would be the idea of “no sharing”. In most RPGs whenever there’s a need to heal your whole party, you can do that, but in Baten Kaitos, you’re only able to heal one person at a time, plus have to sacrifice your offensive turn, which may or may not be much of problem.