Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean

"A good, but not great RPG"

Baten Kaitos was one of two exclusive RPGs (the other being Tales of Symphonia) that Namco was to develop on the Gamecube. Obviously, this was pretty big news, considering the fact that the Gamecube had next-to-no RPGs. Developed by people who had worked on some big-name games such as Chrono Cross and Xenogears, expectations were fairly high for this game. Did it live up to the expectations? Read on to find out! (yes, I had to say that).

The first thing that will likely jump out at you in this game is the unique graphics and art style. All of the backgrounds in the cities, dungeons, and various locales are pre-rendered, and most of them look stunning. Each location in the game is given an entirely different feel, from a quaint fishing village to the mighty imperial capital. Some of the places in the game are so far-out that you may just wonder what the developers were smoking while creating them. I don't want to spoil too many of the fun surprises, but let's just say that one of the villages is quite tasty. Little graphical touches like groups of chicken, misty clouds, and swaying tropical plants really help to bring everything to life. There's so much detail in the artwork that makes up the graphics that you may just find yourself gazing at it for a while to take in all of the beauty.

For all of the good points of the graphics, there is at least one big drawback. Since the backgrounds in all of the locations in the game are 2D artwork, you won't be getting the choice of multiple camera angles here. In fact, the camera in the game will usually only pan left to right, meaning that it will never zoom in and out of the environment that you're in. This can be quite disorienting when you're way to the back of a particular area and can barely see your tiny character, and sometimes not see him at all when he is blocked by an object. The truly bad effect of the camera in the game, however, is that it detracts from almost any feeling of suspense or tension that you would otherwise feel in the game if it had a normal camera system. Are you surrounded by a thousand enemy troops pointing guns at you? Is the sky about to fall and crush you like the puny insect that you are? Well, you'll be hard pressed to care too much when the camera is zoomed out and unmoving, and the characters look like tiny, lifeless puppets in the distance.

The music is probably the next thing that you will notice. Suffice it to say that this is easily some of the best music to ever appear in a videogame. You'll find a huge range of wonderful music in Baten Kaitos: grand orchestral music, high-powered electric guitar tracks, beautiful classical guitar pieces, and more. From melancholy tracks, to peaceful town themes, to energetic and catchy battle themes, to experimental tracks that are like nothing you have heard before, the game's music effectively covers just about any kind of music you would want to find in an RPG. It's beyond the scope of this review to analyze the music too much (to be sure, an entire 1000 word review could be written on the music alone) but just consider the fact that out of everyone who has played this game, almost all agree that the music is some of the best to ever appear in any videogame. Oh, and the main battle theme of the game uses a violin as the primary instrument. Yes, a violin.

Like most RPGs these days that have the luxury of a large storage medium (i.e. the DVD, or in the Gamecube's case the mini-DVD), much of the dialogue in the game is voice acted. It's hard to judge the exact quality of the voice acting (for obvious reasons), but it's probably somewhere between average and somewhat below-average. It's certainly nowhere near the worst voice acting to ever appear in a videogame, but it's also far from the best. Most of the main characters in the game have at least decent voice acting, and one or two are good to exceptional (Kalas and Mizuti). One of the main characters, Lyude, stands out as having the absolute worst voice actor of the bunch, which is unfortunate because all of the other voice actors for the main characters are at least tolerable. Some of Lyude's lines will likely make you want to cringe at how bad they are; very few of the lines are read anywhere near fluently, and when strong emotion is called for, you certainly won't hear it in his voice. The quality of the NPC voice acting varies a great deal, as is to be expected; King Ladekhan truly sounds like a king, with a fantastic regal voice and superb acting that you wouldn't be surprised to see in a Shakespearean play, while the old fortune tellers in the game sound so awful that you'll have little doubt that the voice actress behind them is a 20 year-old hack pathetically trying to act like she's 90.

The basic story of Baten Kaitos can be seen in the opening FMV sequence that plays whenever you start up the game. Basically, a long time ago, when humans still lived on the Earth, there was a fierce battle between the gods and the humans. The humans won and entombed the wicked gods and left the barren and polluted earth to find a future in the sky. The game starts on one of the five floating islands in the sky, as you meet the main character, Kalas. The way you meet him, however, is what is unique. You play the role of a guardian spirit, a spirit from another dimension in the game that can occasionally bond with people in the world of Baten Kaitos. During the course of the game, Kalas will face the TV screen, looking at you directly, and ask you (the spirit) certain questions that you can choose to answer in one of two ways. This whole device of playing the role of a guardian spirit certainly creates an interesting and somewhat surreal effect, as if the game is acknowledging that you exist outside of the game's world and yet are interacting with it. You meet a young woman named Xelha at the beginning of the game, and off you go on your adventure.

Since I'm supposed to avoid giving away any big spoilers, I'll just say that the rest of the plot deals with you trying to track down pieces of a mysterious and ancient power, while the enemy is trying to do the same. The plot is fairly typical of Japanese RPGs in general, and apart from one "big" plot-twist and a couple of lesser plot-twists, there likely won't be anything in the plot to surprise you or grab your attention too much. It's not bad by any means, but at the same time there's really nothing exceptional about it. One thing that hurts the flow of the story is the fact the game takes quite a while to really get going; the start of the game is almost painfully slow, and it won't start to pick up until you're several hours into the game.

Some may disagree, but characters are arguably more important in an RPG than even the storyline. Without good characters to connect to, even a brilliant storyline will seem distant and hard to feel a part of. The characters are really what bring a world to life and make the experience all the more believable. So how do the characters in Baten Kaitos stack up? Well, not particularly well. Apart from Kalas, the strong-willed and somewhat rebellious main character of the game, and Mizuti, an interesting little character that you'll meet fairly late in the game, the other characters don't seem to have much of a personality to them. While playing through the game, you'll likely get the impression that the game is taking itself too seriously and wish that one or two of the characters were completely light-hearted characters that basically only existed to make jokes and lighten the mood. Unfortunately, you won't these kinds of characters in the game, with one possible exception. There doesn't seem to be any real connection between the main characters in the game, which makes all of the dialogue between them seem hollow and somewhat fake.

You may be wondering why I still haven't touched on the gameplay, leaving it until the end of the review. The reason for that is that it's probably the least interesting aspect of the game. That's not to say that there's nothing different about it from the standard turn-based Japanese RPG fare, because there is. The battle system, and the game itself to a certain degree, revolves around the concept of "magnus". Magnus are blank cards that can trap the essence of an object into them; in other words, you can carry around a sword by absorbing it into a card, and then when you want to use the sword, you bring it out of the card. The battle system is based around these magnus, meaning that it's a card-based system. This is not Yu-gi-oh or Magic The Gathering, however.
The battle system works so that, when you start a battle, you're dealt a random selection of magnus cards. These cards contain any and every object that you can use in the battle: weapons, armour, items etc. When it is your turn to go, you can choose to attack the enemy with weapon magnus, or choose to heal your character with healing magnus. When it is the enemy's turn to attack you, you can choose equipment magnus to defend yourself with. The battle system works on the principle of strong and weak elements. There are six elements in the game: fire, water, dark, light, chronos, and wind. These six are grouped into three groups (fire-water, dark-light, chronos-wind), with one element of a group being strong against the other and vice versa. When defending against a fire attack, for example, you'll want to use a water-based piece of equipment to defend, and when attacking a darkness-based enemy, you'll want to attack with light. The real trick here, though, is that if you use both a water-based attack and a fire-based attack on your turn, you'll have the strength of the weaker attack subtracted from the strength of the stronger attack, decreasing the overall strength of your attack. This makes it absolutely essential to make sure that you're not attacking with opposing elements at the same time. One final aspect of the battle system involves the numbers on the magnus cards. At the beginning of the game, you'll only have one or two numbers on each card, but by the end of the game you'll be getting cards with three or four numbers on them. The point of these numbers is to make combos with your cards. For example, if you attack with six cards that have numbers going from 1-6 you'll get a "straight" and have the overall damage of your attack multiplied by a certain percentage. It's not as complicated as it may sound, and you'll pick it up on your own after not too long and be making combos like a madman.

So, now that I've exhaustively described the battle system, is it any good? Well, yes and no. Even though it uses cards, the battle system is sufficiently fast-paced to be exciting and never get truly boring. Later in the game, when you get time limits on your turn, the sheer frantic aspect of trying to select the right cards in such a small amount of time certainly makes it so that you're never snoozing on your turn. On the other hand, since all of the cards that you're dealt are random, you can never really plan anything to any great degree. This randomness of the battle system can frustrate you when it's your turn to attack but all you have are equipment magnus, or when it's your turn to defend and you don't have any defensive magnus. Most of the battles in the game are pretty easy, apart from one or two that may make you want to tear your hair out.

Finally, how is Baten Kaitos overall? Well, as the tagline of my review says, it is "a good, but not great RPG." The presentation of the game is outstanding, for the most part. The graphics are beautiful and detailed, and the music is some of the best you'll ever hear in a videogame. The storyline is decent, if not exceptional. The battle system is fun and fast-paced, with a decent amount of strategy to it, even if the randomness of it all can frustrate you occasionally.

However, there are plenty of flaws, big and small, to be found in the game. The static camera system is completely undynamic, and really hurts any feelings of suspense the game may have otherwise had with a standard camera. The voice acting in the game varies greatly in quality: you'll find a few outstanding voices, many average ones, and a couple that are absolutely abysmal.
Almost all of the characters in the game are uninteresting or just outright flat, with no real personalities to speak of.

With all of the criticisms that I've leveled against the game, it may surprise you to hear that I would still recommend it. However, I would only recommend it to a very specific group of people: RPG fans who have a Gamecube and not a PS2. With the very small number of RPGs on the Gamecube, if you are an RPG fan that does not have a PS2 (with its millions of RPGs...) you should pick this game up immediately, especially now that the price is almost nothing. If you are not an RPG fan, this is not the game that should introduce you to the genre, as there are many better ones out there.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/03/06