Baten Kaitos Anmeldelse

Hopefully fair Baten Kaitos full review

Ok, I just finished Baten Kaitos (around 60 hours total), and I felt like I should do a somewhat thorough non-spoiler review of the game.

I guess I'll separate the game into atmosphere, story, and gameplay.

Atmosphere:
One of the first things you will notice about BK is that it's a beautiful looking game. The CG backgrounds are both creative and gorgeous featuring a wide palette of colors and variety in the types of scenery. When you first see FMV branches or clouds blowing over the CG still background you'll be amazed at how good they pulled it off. The 3d models for the characters all look great on the map, and good enough when in battle (although close-up's show the low detail especially on the faces). Having found this character designer at Monolith Soft, was a great blessing as the main characters are drawn extremely well with many different pictures that portray various emotions. Pretty much all of the story related NPC characters also get well drawn portraits.

Also I guess I should note that the 2:20 mins of CG FMV in the OP trailer is amazingly well done. Besides this there is no other CG FMV in the entire game including the ending.

The music in the game is likely to draw alot of press for several reasons. One is that it is one of Sakuraba's finest scores and includes many excellent battle and non-battle pieces. Unfortunately the other press it will draw is not so flattering. Very similar to Monolith Soft's Xenosaga EP1, the game contains only around 50 tracks before you see the ending credits. For XS EP1 having a small amount of tracks worked because they were mainly just used during cutscenes and important dungeons. In BK there is music all of the time, and the game also contains a large number of dungeons and a good number of towns/cities. This means the music is repeated VERY often. You will often hear one town's music being used for 2 other towns, a dungeon or two, and probably a few story cutscenes :( I don't know if this was a budget issue or if Sakuraba just didn't have time to compose more music, but the game would have definitely benefited from twice the amount of tracks.

The sound effects are good, and some of the battle quotes will forever remain in my memory because they're so great. The Japanese voices are pretty good, the main characters fairing better than some of the NPCs. Sadly, similar to the Japanese release of XS EP1 Monolith Soft. has shown once again that they are lacking in the sound engineers. The voice samples are low quality (it should be noted that the sound is just completed screwed on stereo, you have to change the settings to surround to even get ok voices). This may be due to the lack of space on the 2 discs, but considering the Japanese XS also had low quality samples (The English sample quality of XS EP1 sounds amazingly better) I think Monolith just has some problems in this area.

Story:
Hmmm...where to begin. Well I'll start it out that there was a lot of potential for the game. The game does a good deal of things right, such as you, the player, being an actual character in the story. This works out great and is probably the most original and well thought-out concept in the game. The game also has very good dialogue at times. The game is filled with a large amount of cutscenes. Some short, some long, all told through either a static camera on a normal dungeon screen or using the battle engine. This means they are very old-school like the pre-32-bit rpgs. You won't get any sweeping camera angles or close ups of facial emotions of the character. These are told instead through the character portraits. The length of the cutscenes follow XS EP1's lead with some short scenes, quite a few medium length ones, and a few very very long scenes. Luckily the previously mentioned strong writing and various plot twists make them all quite interesting...at least until about 2/3rds through.

At first glance the story of the game seems somewhat shallow and simple like the rpgs of the olden days. Tales of Symphonia also started like this, but by 25 hours into that game it had become quite something else. BK keeps building and building up for some great twist to the main story...that sadly never comes. That's not to say there are no well-thought out plot twists or extremely well written scenarios. It's just the once you get past the twist and go "wow", 30 mins later you realize you're still stuck in a shallow tale. The characters while well-versed, never quite reach that level of becoming more than just a cardboard persona (well maybe 1 or 2 characters total do). So without really really good characters, or a ever-changing interesting story, you're stuck to follow a very linear path that really, by about 40 hours in, you're getting a little sick of waiting for the pay-off. Even when the final boss is defeated a large number of mysteries that the story hinges on 'still' haven't been solved and instead are quickly worked together in the ending leaving you feeling empty.

gameplay:
BK has a top-notch battle system. It's very creative, original, and even non-cardgame playing people such as myself are able to get pulled into it and understand it in no time. The various types of attack cards, defense cards, special attack cards, items, give you a wide variety of ways to set up your battles. There are a large amount of "SP Combos" which are basically combining two cards in battle to create a brand new card. There are hints throughout the game for many of these combos, but you'll also have to use your imagination in a way similar to Dark Chronicle/Cloud2's invention system. Sadly, you are never expected to push this system to it's max. In the entire 60 hour journey I spent with the game, I never saw the game over screen once. I'll probably reload my last save after I write this and die just to see if there's nice game over music. The normal enemies in the game are complete joke and pose no threat to your characters. The bosses will sometimes provide a nice challenge, but I'd say about 75% of the bosses can be killed in under 6 rounds. I think the reason the difficulty sits where it is, is due to the fact that luck really plays a big part in your battles. Since you never know what card you'll pull up next you really have to ration certain cards like healing items for when you'll need them. But I can see many people not using strategy and saving items and then complaining to Monolith Soft. because they keep dying due to getting bad hands. So I think they took the easy way out and toned the difficulty down a bit.

Outside of the battles there really isn't much to do. The dungeons are usually made up of 2-3 screens each, and besides getting all the treasures there are only the 3 game-length running subquests that require you to find a bunch of things. For the majority of the time, the game does not let you backtrack beyond the current main island you are on. Even towards the very end of the game when you would expect the game to open up, it keeps drifting you along to a new place with no way back until you finish the tasks at hand. At the very, very end it does finally open up and let you go anywhere previously visited in the game. But unlike many rpgs where there are tons of little sub-quests to do at this end-game point, BK has pretty much nothing to do. Once you're at the end, you either finish up the 3 main subquest collect-o-thons and claim your prize, or your head to the final dungeon. Those who disliked the linearity of FFX and XS:EP1 will probably not be very happy here.

Leveling in the game is also taken care of through trips to the church where you use the experience you've received to gain levels. While the BK team definitely are doing something differently with this system, there really is no benefit or major change that the system brings with it. Basically when you finish a dungeon instead of having just leveled up 5 lvls during your run through it, you will still be at the same level as when you entered, but when you leave you will get those 5 levels. You can though, at any time just backtrack through the 2-3 screens of the dungeon and find a save (which acts as the church warp entry) and get your levels and then head back to fight the boss.

You make money through photographing enemies. Which works fine because all though you don't get money every battle, when you do get money you get a large sum of it. As long as you keep a camera in your active deck, you will never be anywhere near out of money. But then again, the stores in the game aren't that great and you'll want to get most of your good weapons/armor/healing items by killing enemies and taking thier droppings.

Overall:
So here I sit contemplating on whether to say this was a good or bad game. I certainly liked parts of it, and many times did I read a line of dialogue and say "damn, that was a nice speech". But as I sit here I can't help but feel empty as if I'm waiting for the rest of the game to magically appear after the game over screen. Before the game came out, when I saw those gorgeous ads with the giant whale jumping out the ocean I couldn't help but sit and anticipate what an amazing adventure the game would take me on. It's by the creators of some of the most epic, interesting, and non-generic rpgs in the industry. What I got did not fit under any of those three :( It feels as though this whole game was an experiment. "Let's put the player actual IN the game", "Let's make a GC rpg", "Let's ditch the normal battle systems, leveling systems, money systems", "Let's try to do something different!"...something like that, and I applaud them for doing it, but as much as I want to rave over the game, I can't say that they succeeded.

It's like a book that has the best opening chapter that blows you away, and then the rest of the book is the most generic cliche'd book you've ever read. You have to give it credit for what it was going for, but in the end it fails because it doesn't follow through with it.