Baten Kaitos - Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean

System: Gamecube
Release Date: 2004
Published By: Namco
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

A solid, complex RPG with good depth. On the gameplay front, Baten Kaitos presents an unusual card-based interface, which forces the player to make decisions very much on the fly - especially in the late game, when you have very little time to choose the cards you want to play. The large number of different cards means a lot of different options when constructing your characters' decks, and also ensures replayability and good old Pokemon-style catching 'em all. The game isn't extraordinarily difficult if you put any effort at all into managing your card collection, but there's a good sixty hours of play here even for us grizzled old veterans.

This is a beautiful game, with visuals that show a lot of care and really demand that you upgrade to a big, high-class TV and a component video cable. The sound is a bit weaker, with a few areas (most notably Elnath) that seem to have wildly out-of-place background music. The voice acting is apalling, but the game kindly provides an option to disable it.

Those of you who obsess over story will find enough here to suit your wants. The storyline is clever and interesting, though not entirely original; at least two of the game's major plot twists will seem obvious to the experienced player. The characters, however, lack depth; half of them seem well-thought-out, but the others seem thrown in to round out a party lineup.

In all, an excellent game, and one of the best and most original RPGs I've played since the SNES went out of circulation.

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