Baten Kaitos

Written by Charlie Sinhaseni on 2/24/2005 for GC  

Nintendo’s little lunchbox isn’t exactly a breeding ground for high quality RPGs. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is a pretty decent adventure but older audiences who are looking for something a little more serious have pretty much been left in the dark. Namco tried to remedy this with its early summer release, Tales of Symphonia, but older audiences failed to take the bait. Now the company strikes back with Baten Kaitos, an excellent RPG that will satisfy the craving of all those hunger starved RPG fans.

Baten Kaitos tells the story of a young man named Kalas and his quest to avenge the death of his grandfather and brother. He won’t go at it alone, however, as he’ll run into a unique cast of characters who have their own reasons for hating the enemy. Due to some geological anomalies, the world’s inhabitants live on floating masses of land, well above sea level. Most people have heard of this thing called the ocean but few have actually witnessed the image with their own eyes.

This game succeeds because it makes you empathize with the characters. Every character has a personality and through their dialogue, you really get the sense that they care about their causes. They have genuine concern over the world and their loved ones. They’re not just a bunch of random people on a quest; they’re a group of individuals tied together by fate. Epic is a good word to use to describe the storyline, it comes on two discs and will cost you more than 40 hours of your life. Technically it can be beaten in a shorter amount of time but that’s only if you decide to ignore the game’s numerous subquests and vast trove of hidden secrets.

Namco opted for a turn-based card combat system to govern all of the game’s combat. Every time the player wants to commit an action he must use a card from this deck. There are two times at which a player can use a card; in the attacking phase and in the defense phase. Decks are randomly shuffled before each encounter and players can hold more cards as they level up. There are two phases to the combat; the attacking phase and the defensive phase. When attacking, players choose cards that they want to use to deal damage to the enemy. Special bonuses can be gained by using cards with values that are in sequence (such as cards with values of 3, 4 and 5 respectively) or combining certain items together. For instance, you can combine a blank notebook with a magic pen during combat to make a Prophet Notebook which gives you more information about your cards. On the defensive end, players can use shield cards and other defensive items in order to protect themselves from attack.

Technically there’s nothing wrong with the combat system, it’s easy to grasp and not too difficult to master. The real problem with the system is that it’s un-necessarily cluttered and the pertinent information is difficult to access. After each round (an attack or defense) a screen pops up to tell you the damage that you have dealt or received. The problem is that the interface is extremely difficult to read and is absolutely unnecessary. If the designers would have stuck with the traditional method of displaying the damage on the screen as it happens, it wouldn’t have stilted the gameplay so much.For its look the game utilizes the technology pioneered by the Final Fantasy series and takes it a step further. All of the landscapes are comprised of pre-rendered backdrops with 3D rendered overlays. So while the main area is a static background, you'll see plenty of rendered objects that give the entire image depth and life. It's a really beautiful look that really has to be seen to be understood. Even though I went into this game fully knowing that the backdrops were pre-rendered it never stood out at me until I decided to sit down and write my review. The animation is so smooth and lifelike that your eyes will be drawn to all the animate and moving objects. When you enter a farmland it's teeming to the brim with life. Sheets that have been placed in windows billow in the wind as pigeons gather in the fields to peck at the seeds. Every location in the game is teeming to the brink with life, drawing your eyes towards them and away from the static elements.

As is the case with most RPGs today, all of the important dialogue is spoken while the secondary dialogue (random banter between villagers) appears as written text. After hearing some of the game’s dialogue I’m convinced that all of the speech should have been canned in favor of the text. All of the speech is done in an accidental over-the-top fashion that keeps giving me flashbacks of South Park. If that’s not bad enough the dialogue has this really hollow echo to it, as if it were all recorded in the toilet of a port-a-potty. It’s odd that the dialogue was recorded so poorly because the music is just superb. There’s a classic, yet epic, feel to the entire soundtrack. The composer was wise enough to make his tracks memorable, yet subdued. This allows the music to accompany the action on a subconscious level, conveying the tone and the mood.

If you're planning on picking up this title be sure to put your friends on notice. As we stated earlier, it'll take a good 40 hours to beat and that's assuming that you don't partake in the game's numerous sidequests. You can easily spend more than 20 hours in the game and barely put a dent into the first disc. It's an epic, that's to be sure. Just make sure you have enough time set aside before you decide to jump into this one because your social life is about to take a hit.

On the whole, Baten Kaitos is a beautifully crafted RPG that provides the boost that the GameCube so desperately needed. When there’s little else available to satiate the needs of RPG fans, it’s nice to see that Namco is working hard to cater to this relatively quiet audience. With Baten Kaitos, they’ve more than exceeded the preconceived expectations that we had coming into the experience. In short, if you’re an RPG fan who owns a GameCube, you need to own this game.