Nintendo’s little lunchbox isn’t exactly a breeding ground for high quality RPGs.
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is a pretty decent adventure but older audiences who are looking for something a little more serious have pretty much been left in the dark. Namco tried to remedy this with its early summer release,
Tales of Symphonia, but older audiences failed to take the bait. Now the company strikes back with
Baten Kaitos, an excellent RPG that will satisfy the craving of all those hunger starved RPG fans.
Baten Kaitos tells the story of a young man named Kalas and his quest to avenge the death of his grandfather and brother. He won’t go at it alone, however, as he’ll run into a unique cast of characters who have their own reasons for hating the enemy. Due to some geological anomalies, the world’s inhabitants live on floating masses of land, well above sea level. Most people have heard of this thing called the ocean but few have actually witnessed the image with their own eyes.
This game succeeds because it makes you empathize with the characters. Every character has a personality and through their dialogue, you really get the sense that they care about their causes. They have genuine concern over the world and their loved ones. They’re not just a bunch of random people on a quest; they’re a group of individuals tied together by fate. Epic is a good word to use to describe the storyline, it comes on two discs and will cost you more than 40 hours of your life. Technically it can be beaten in a shorter amount of time but that’s only if you decide to ignore the game’s numerous subquests and vast trove of hidden secrets.
Namco opted for a turn-based card combat system to govern all of the game’s combat. Every time the player wants to commit an action he must use a card from this deck. There are two times at which a player can use a card; in the attacking phase and in the defense phase. Decks are randomly shuffled before each encounter and players can hold more cards as they level up. There are two phases to the combat; the attacking phase and the defensive phase. When attacking, players choose cards that they want to use to deal damage to the enemy. Special bonuses can be gained by using cards with values that are in sequence (such as cards with values of 3, 4 and 5 respectively) or combining certain items together. For instance, you can combine a blank notebook with a magic pen during combat to make a Prophet Notebook which gives you more information about your cards. On the defensive end, players can use shield cards and other defensive items in order to protect themselves from attack.
Technically there’s nothing wrong with the combat system, it’s easy to grasp and not too difficult to master. The real problem with the system is that it’s un-necessarily cluttered and the pertinent information is difficult to access. After each round (an attack or defense) a screen pops up to tell you the damage that you have dealt or received. The problem is that the interface is extremely difficult to read and is absolutely unnecessary. If the designers would have stuck with the traditional method of displaying the damage on the screen as it happens, it wouldn’t have stilted the gameplay so much.
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