#7: Baten Kaitos
Man, that sounds like the scientific name for some really funky disease!"I think you'd better sit down, mr. Azz, I have some bad news for you. We have checked the scans and you're suffering from a severe case of Baten Kaitos..."
"Oh god no! Say it isn't so! What shall I ever tell my wife and 56 children?"
"Get out of my office, you freak!"
And having played the game, I still don't know what the hell a Baten Kaitos is! Granted, that may have been because I forgot. It's possible that it plays a very significant role in the game, I just can't remember.
"How the Hell can you forget something like that, you retard?", I hear you shout.
First of all, your mom.
Second of all, because the rest of the game is so fucking good it'll make you forget anything else.
Damn, yo, this has to be one of the best next-gen RPG's around. I even daresay I haven't played anything this fine since Final Fantasy X. It's great to finally see an exclusive RPG for a Nintendo Console again, that doesn't totally suck, and what's even better, I read they're bringing it to DS too. That rules out every chance of me buying a PSP right there.
What's so great about it then?
Everything I tellz ya! Pretty scary, considering this was made by the same people who did the abysmally boring Xenosaga games.
Graphics: Top-notch. Beautifully animated, lusciously colored pre-rendered backgrounds, superb magic and special effects, totally gobsmacking.
Music: Kick-ass. Motoi Sakuraba is back to deliver his progressive rock goodness, mixed with the obligatory majestic sweeping orchestrations and bombastic event music.
Extremely varied but consistently high quality.
Gameplay: Superb. The whole game works with a Card system. Not only do you use cards for attacks during battle scenes (cards represent active attacks though, no Yugi-oh monster card crap here), Cards are also actively used for puzzles solving and event progressing. There's over 1000 cards in the game, containing weapons, armor, special attacks and items amongst others. Combining them in the correct order can open the path to new attacks and rare items, with about 150 possible combo's in total.
You also get a number of Event Cards which can be filled up with event items of your choice. Some are used for puzzles, others for sub-quests to earn cool stuff.
This game is PACKED to the brim with side-quests and it has an impressive main story to boot. It comes on 2 GC CD's which are known for not holding as much data as the competition, but the game still weighs in at a hefty 50+ hours with very little backtracking. You're pretty much moving to new territory all the time until the very end. Monolith has shown that with effort, you can still do a lot with a relatively small amount of data.
If there's one gripe I have, and I ALWAYS do, it's that the experience system was messed up needlessly. I mean, you get experience at the end of every battle, old-school styly, you know, like it's SUPPOSED to be, and yet they chose NOT to give you any clue on how many points you need before you can level up, and what's even worse, even if you have enough points YOU WON'T LEVEL UP AUTOMATICALLY!
"What?"
Exactly!
You see, there's this flower type thingy in the game which functions as a save point.
Now there's 2 kinds: The red ones and the blue ones.
The red ones only save, the blue ones save, heal and allow access to The Chapel.
Inside the Chapel there's this priest (bet you didn't see that coming) who has to do the levelling up FOR YOU, provided you have enough points. Typically, the blue flowers are ONLY found in cities, and NEVER in dungeons. There's a red flower in the room before the boss, as are the rules, but never a blue one. Which basically means levelling up before a boss becomes totally useless. Unless you like to walk around not knowing how many points you need, and then haphazardly leaving the dungeon to go and see if maybe you earn another level.
Such a shame, cos if they hadn't done this, this game would have been Perfect. As it is, it's just really fucking good.
So I give it a 9.3
More like this please!
posted by Ingen! @ 11:04 AM
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