Well if you own a Gamecube and are craving some card-battling RPG goodness, Monolith Soft and Namco are coming to your rescue. Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wing Lost Ocean is the first title that we’ve come across that has successfully merged card battling and a standard RPG formula and it’s a Gamecube exclusive.
Baten Kaitos can be considered to have two distinct halves, one being the new and unique side while the other represents your token RPG. Thankfully, this doesn’t stop the game from being any good.
The game places you in a typically screwed up world with a typically disgruntled, stubborn, brazen youth as a protagonist. Along the way, you’ll find that Baten Kaitos contains many more tried and true RPG themes. Your main character Kalas, is out on a typical quest of revenge against the overbearing empire, who happened to kill his only family. Most of the other characters that you meet along the way have similar issues (loners, betrayers to name a few) and you’ll come across many other familiar themes including the above-mentioned revenge, romance and refuge. Of course, no good Japanese RPG would be complete without a good apocalypse or super-evil figurehead attempting to revive sealed god. The story isn’t anything radically new but there are enough twists to keep it going but the slow pacing is a slight downside.
There was a lot of talk about the characters being unlikeable, especially Kalas. This is not really surprising given the history behind of a lot of the workers at Monolith Soft. A lot of these guys were on board for the PS1 Final Fantasy titles. An example of this is a lot of people have commented on the scenario where Kalas steals the belongings off a couple of dead bodies. Sure, it isn’t the moral action but there is no need for someone to be so precious about a game. Besides, if you were in a position where the most powerful organisation in the land was after your head, I don’t think you’d be too concerned about the means of your resourcefulness. The fact remains, that each character is reasonably well developed and each has a distinct place in this world.
So what makes Baten Kaito unique? Well, the game takes every single item ever used in an RPG and replaces it with a magical deck of cards. What does this mean? Well your inventory is governed by “Magnus”. The Magnus is essential a blank medium (in this case a card) to store and transport any particular item. Basically anything from weapons to healing items can be stored on any single Magnus. It makes for quite nice departure from the norm.
Firstly and probably most importantly, the Magnus are essential to success in battle. Each player can construct a deck of Magnus cards that can contain pretty much any item that you can find, buy, sell, win or earn. This includes weapons, armour, healing items, boost-stat items and even inanimate objects such as twigs or something ludicrous like a chicken. With your deck, you set your preferences the way you like from the choice of the multitude of cards available to you. Next, it’s off to the battle zone.
Nice flashy effects
Battles are turn-based with two distinct phases. While you attack, the enemies defend and vice-versa. During the attack phase, you cause damage by putting together a combo of card placements. At first you can only do 2-card combos but as your character class increases, you can play over 5 cards in one turn. Your combo is controlled by how many attack specific cards you play; if you play a card that is incompatible you will break the combo and end your turn. Defence is similar except you play as many cards as you are able to or as many attacks the enemy throws at you.
A trendy feature is that all battles sans boss encounters are visible on screen. You have a choice whether you want to fight them or not. Though, for some reason the developers have included an archaic level-up system where you travel to a special church when you want to increase your level or class. Attacks are divided into elements. Other than the normal element, you have fire, water, dark, light, wind and chronos. Rather than a scissors-paper-rock system, there are only two opposing elements. That is, if a monster is a fire element, water attacks will do significantly more damage and only water defence can be used to defend against fire attacks.
The biggest strengths of the battle system lie in its unique features and premise. Firstly, For example, you can have a Magnus that represents grapes, a healing item. As time passes, the grapes will turn into sour grapes that can then be used to poison the enemy. More time passes and you’ve got wine, an even better healing item. You can have a camera in your deck that takes a picture of an enemy that can be sold at a nice price. There are almost limitless combo possibilities. Every card has a number on it (Spirit Number) that can help put combos together. If you have two 7’s and play them, you’ll get a bonus. If you play a 3, 4, 5 consecutively, you’ll get an even better bonus. You can find items like Hair Dryers and use them in a combo with fire attacks to increase the attacks power. The best combos occur by pure chance. When the right two element attacks are combined, they’ll temporarily create a brand new card that does a devastating amount of damage damage.
Other then the temporary combos, your deck is set and you never lose cards. Unlike in Lost Kingdoms where once you use a card, it’s gone. Here, once your deck reaches zero, it will take the next turn for the character to reshuffle the deck. Once you find an ultra-rare card, it’s yours for the keeping. Finally, it’s the game of chance and fast-thinking strategy that makes the game so much fun. People who love the Yu-gi-oh! style of deck building and a similar battle style will go crazy over this game. It seems complex at first but once you’ve nailed down the basics, the game is very accessible to everybody. The in-game character stats are essentially superfluous in comparison to the depth of the card system.
Put that light out! You're attracting more of them!
However, there are a few downsides to the battle system. Firstly, it’s very easy to break your combo. If you play a 3, 3, 4, you won’t get any bonus at all. Secondly, you can only target one enemy/ally at a time. If you want to heal your ally and attack the enemy, you have to do it in two separate turns otherwise you’ll hurt your ally or heal your enemy. There is a problem in the two-element system in that it’s too confusing and if you use two opposing elements to attack, they’ll cancel their attack. Well into the game, players will probably never be entirely comfortable because it’s too easy to make a mistake. Finally, it’s all good and well that it’s a game based heavily on chance but the enemy AI is so overbearing on individuals (often the weakest) that often a character with a deck balanced with attack and defence items will be stuck with a hand of useless cards, unless he is attacked. There should have been sort of option then allows to discard the useless hand and draw a new one.
Controls both inside and outside of the battle is pretty basic and it gets the job done reasonably efficiently. You’ll mainly be using the control stick and the A button. However, you’ll use a wider variety of buttons during the very easy and intuitive deck building, like the L/R and B buttons.
Magnus play an important role outside of battle. You have a small amount of Quest Magnus that can be used pretty much when it’s convenient. You can trap a blazing fire, take it to someone’s house whose fire went out and light it up for a reward. The Quest Magnus help with both main and side quests. During one sequence in a foreign besieged castle, you may trap the essence of the region’s Crest and use it to inspire troops to fight along side you. One Side quests involves you taking a man’s family tree and finding all his family members to be at his deathbed. On the Magnus, you hold a copy of his family tree.
It’s not as complex as it seems and while it sounds impressive, it could have been implemented a bit better. Sure it’s unique and present enough to justify its existence but there are not enough times where this unique system can is being taken at full advantage of.
Baten Kaitos is very solid adventure. The battling and questing will keep you going for at least forty hours. However, the game starts very slowly and can take a lot of patience to get into. It continues on at a rather plodding pace, though a few jolts in the story line here and there help it move before it gets to a standstill. Thankfully, the games dungeon-style locales aren’t very big and battles can get quite hectic so the slow pace is somewhat negated. The card system is very unique and very well implement, though a lot of the other RPG elements could only be considered as standard and nothing really revolutionary.
Looks nice, doesn't it
Graphics-wise, the game is a technical mix. The pre-rendered backdrops are artistically stunning but technically yesterday. The 3-D models have a lot of detail but are limited in their animation. The same goes for in-game battle animation. Though the game starts with a stunning 3-D opening sequence, the in-game cut scenes simply lack the life and can be boring. However, the game is an absolute stunner when it comes to artistry. There is nothing quite like it in the rest of the gaming world. It really creates the perfect image that the game is trying to convey. Sometimes, it is one of the best looking available.
Sound-wise, again, the game is a mix. Sound effects and the soundtrack are stunning and beautifully composed. However, the voicing is pretty terrible. Not only is the recording painfully poor but the acting itself is pretty pathetic. Sometimes it’s just laughable and totally implausible that what they’re saying would actually is real. It is almost as if they’re reading the lines directly off the script.
Overall, Baten Kaitos is a unique enough to carry itself on its own two feet. Mot everyone will accept the battling system and outside of the cards, there is not much else that makes it more redeeming than other available RPG’s. The majority of people that will end up not liking this game are those who couldn’t get past the slow start and overall pacing of the game. Those willing to give it a go and learn the intrinsic details of the system will reap some very deep rewards and satisfaction.
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