Pick A Card, Then Attack With It

Yeah, it's April Fools, and UnCalvinPitt was going to show up to ruin your day (and mine). And he did show up. And then I hit him with a folding chair. Repeatedly. I wasn't in a good mood. So now it's later, and I feel like doing a video game review, which I guess is sorta the opposite of what normally goes on around here. So, Baten Kaitos: Origins.

No, I don't know what "Baten Kaitos" means. The game is a prequel to Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean, both for the Gamecube. They're RPGs, that're also card battle games. Odd, I know.

Story: The main character is a teenager named Sagi. You aren't Sagi, but you are his Guardian Spirit. Sagi is initially part of a Black Ops group (to earn money to support his mother and her orphanage), and while on a mission gets framed for killing the ruler of Mintaka (which actually was his mission, but people weren't supposed to know about it). You spend a while on the run with your paramachina pal, Guillo (think magic-using android), and eventually wind up in the employ of a government official (who's pro-magic, roughly) who's at odds with another government official (your former commander, pro-technology), leading you into a bunch of battles on the different lands (which are all islands in the sky) trying to stop the one official's attempts to make everything mechanical. Additionally, you periodically travel to the past, where everyone calls you by a different name, and the major evil is trying to make everything magic, taking people's bodies, leaving them as disembodied essences. It's trying to teach me about balance, I guess.

Gameplay: Run around, ask people questions, bring them stuff, fight monsters. Standard RPG fare. For the fights you have a deck filled with various attacks, health items, armors, etc. Drawing cards with sequential numbers on it means better combos, and potential relays between characters. Of course, if your hand doesn't have anything good, you waste turns discarding until something decent comes out of the deck. I think I preferred the first game's system, where each character had their own deck, instead of the one large combined deck. Cards can be for certain elements (ice, fire, thunder, etc.,), and you can build multiple decks, to deal with different kinds of enemies.

Also, you carry blank magnus cards, which can store the essence of things, to be released when neccessary. So you could store the essense of an apple, then if you met someone that wanted an apple, you could release the essence, and viola! They have an apple, provided you haven't had it so long it's gone rotten. You can also combine the essences of different things to make new magnus. So far, I've learned how to make clouds. I've since forgotten, but I don't think it'll come up again.

It is annoying that enemies respawn if you leave an area and then return to it. I know that's pretty normal for RPGs, but it can really slow you down. I just killed everything here five minutes ago, how did everything come back already?!

Controls: The camera angle can make it a little tough to gauge your position relative to something you're trying to take, but other than that everything works well enough.

Music: They have some pretty catchy fight scene music, really gets me into the flow of things, so I'd say it's good. Nice carryover from the first game.

Gripes: Some of the crap you have to do to advance the story. Case in point: I'm currently stalled in a large town. I need to travel to the other side of the island, but can't make it through the jungle without a landmark stone, the only one of which is held by the Headmaster of the School of Magic, who doesn't like me because she thinks I dismiss her for being a child (I was completely respectful of her, for the record). *deep breath* So to get the stone, I have to receive credit in History, Chemistry, and the Classics from various professors. The Classics prof is a crushing bore who wants "fun times" to liven up his lectures. So I have to gather the essence of "Fun Times" for him (I am completely serious here), which requires me to bring a number of cookies the town is known for to a gathering outside of town. But I can't take them the cookies unless I have even more of a new, unpopular variety, because one of the people pushing those is blocking the way. And that, is why I haven't played in a month. It just seems so maddeningly pointless, that I'm afraid I'll go nuts trying to do it. I'm trying to save the world here, can't I just start hacking people up until they give me what I want? Cripes.

That and the fact that roughly three-quarters of the boss battles have been ones you can't win. You read that right. All you can do is try to stay alive for a certain amount of time, then a cut scene is triggered, and somehow you live to fight another day.

Conclusion: When I'm not trapped in one of the situations described above, it's a pretty fun game. Getting to be a coliseum warrior (it's an optional sidequest thing), is a lot of fun, if sometimes frustrating. I'm enjoying restoring the Magnus Town of Sedna (the essence of the town was taken and scattered across the lands, and I've gradually been bringing it back one piece at a time). I'm really curious to see what twist they wind up throwing in (the revelation of the traitor in the first game was truly stunning), and to see how what's happening in my trips to the past relates to the current state of their world, and to the situation in the first Baten Kaitos game. So, 3.8 out of 5 sounds about right.