Review
Release Date: 11.16.2004
Platform:
GameCubeDeveloper:
Monolith Software, Inc.Publisher:
Namco Hometek, Inc.Reviewed by
Ashton Liu on 9.28.2005
| Review Rating: 5/10 | User Rating: 7.58/10 |
Typically, RPGs fall into two different categories – you have the ones that follow norms and offer nothing new but can be quite enjoyable regardless, and then there are the ones that try to break new ground, to destroy the norms of the genre, and end up being hits-or-misses.
Baten Kaitos ends up in the latter grouping – it’s a game that truly tries to innovate and come up with something new for the genre. Unfortunately, It doesn’t quite go all the way and ends up being another ‘miss’ in the vast ocean of the RPG genre.
The story of
Baten Kaitos starts off with the player assuming the role of the guardian spirit of the main character Kalas. Kalas has just recovered from a rather nasty wild animal attack as he awakens from his coma in a foreign village. In this village he comes upon the main female lead, Xelha, who doesn’t join up quite yet; it isn’t until Kalas ventures into the forbidden Moonguile Forest that he sees Xelha again, and the two are forced to battle and destroy a strange looking creature – who turns out to be the guardian of a part of an evil God of Lore. Of course, this means that Kalas and Xelha are forced to travel the world in search of new companions and teammates in order to prevent this ultimate evil from awakening and destroying everything in its wake. Admittedly,
Baten Kaitos features a fairly clichéd plotline – until you reach the halfway point of a game, where a massive unprecedented plot twist shifts the balance of the good/evil scale… for two hours. Then the plot twist is undone and the story goes back to the normal clichéd formula.
The gameplay is where
Baten Kaitos is incredibly different from most other RPGs – instead of the normal RPG fare, battle members in
Baten Kaitos utilize cards to fight. These cards range from weapons to armor to items to special finishing attacks. Depending on a character’s class level, he or she has a varying amount of cards available in his or her hand in battle. Combat is differentiated by attack and defense turns – self-explanatory, during attack turns, characters utilize weapon cards to attack, item cards to heal/confer bonuses, or finishing move cards to end a string of attacks with a devastating blow. Defense turns are executed by having characters use whatever armor cards they have (and in the case of two characters, their weapon cards as well). Sounds simple enough… until you gain elemental attribute cards. When the player selects a weapon or armor card to be used, he or she must take note of the elemental attribute of the card. If another card of an opposing element is used, the two cards will cancel each other out, rendering the attack or defense move meaningless. Additionally, if the cards are arranged in a particular order, then bonuses to damage or defense is awarded, but the strict time limit in which a player must select the cards to use makes it nearly impossible to execute these special bonuses. The difficulty is compounded by the often occurring scenario in which the player has the wrong cards at any given turn. Too often I’ve been forced to waste cards because I had nothing but attack cards during my defense turn or vice versa. While any game requires a certain level of luck within battles, it’s overdoing it when a boss can kick my ass six ways from Sunday one minute and be a total cakewalk the next.
That’s not the full extent of
Baten Kaitos’ attempt to be original, either. As characters gain experience, they don’t level – not in the traditional sense anyway. In order to increase a character’s level, the player must visit a church, accessible from any save point not inside a dungeon, and manually level the characters. An intriguing idea, of course, but it seems to be a change solely for the sake of being different. It doesn’t add another degree of strategy or thought to the game, it merely makes it more frustrating and annoying when you have to leg it all the way back to town if your level is too low for a particular boss battle.
And that's only the tip of the iceburg. There's the strange item system where each item changes form as time passes within the game - a healing item might become a blob of poison suddenly, and the character who tries to heal him or herself suddenly finds that he or she has ingested a poisonous substance. There's the fact that if you start a sidequest at the end of the game, it will prevent the player for setting foot in the final dungeon until said sidequest is completed. There's also the NPC that cheats you out of a rather large sum of money the instant you talk to him/her. Of course, the game offers you a choice, but no matter what choice you choose, you'll be out your hard-earned money anyway. These pitfalls and bizarre design decisions make
Baten Kaitos' mildly annoying quest into one of sheer frustration.
Of course, not all areas of the game suffers from awful designs. One area of
Baten Kaitos that is indisputably high quality is its graphics. Each island within the game has its own unique feel and each town on the island is designed quite beautifully. There are the cities that are filled with clouds, countryside towns, and bizarre locations such as a village in which every house is made of candy and a city where everything is sculpted beautifully out of ice. The one area that
Baten Kaitos fails to deliver in visually is in the character portraits. The character designs themselves are well-done; however, the art style that the portraits were drawn in aren’t particularly well-done. In fact, I’d go so far to say that it would have been preferable if there were no portraits at all. While a minor flaw, a poorly done art style detracts from the overall experience;
Namco probably would’ve benefited had they used the 3D models for the profile pictures instead. Nevertheless, character portraits aside,
Baten Kaitos is the perfect example of graphical excellence.
Unfortunately, the aural quality of the game fails to match up to its beautiful visual exterior. Motoi Sakuraba isn’t really the best in the business, and it still holds true in
Baten Kaitos. There are no memorable or even well-done tracks; the soundtrack itself ranges from ‘awful’ to merely ‘average.’ A lot of the music grinds at the nerves after a while, especially the battle music, which is the piece that’s probably most often heard when one plays the game.
The voice acting is even worse. None of the acting in the game is remotely believable. Half of it suffers from overacting, while the other half falls prey to ‘robot voice syndrome.’ The result? Any exchange that includes voices, no matter how serious or dire, instantly loses its effect when the characters open their mouths. One character will scream in emotion, and another character will make a statement in a neutral, robotic voice. I have no doubt that the story was quite serious, but any and all effect the story may’ve had was instantly erased by the sheer hilarity of the characters’ voices.
Baten Kaitos attempts to reinvent the RPG genre in an admirable fashion; however, the changes it makes to the normal formula are either negligible due to a failure of utilizing them to their full potential or totally meaningless and frustrating. The card battle system relies too much on luck, the alternate leveling system is unnecessary, the story’s potential is totally wasted, and the shoddy voice acting only compounds the story’s already lackluster presentation. All of this is wrapped in the incredibly pretty outer covering that is
Baten Kaitos’ graphics. I’m all for innovation, Namco, but
Baten Kaitos is honestly the wrong way of going about it.
