One of the best RPGs i've played and heavily underappreciated by lots of gamers.
But has certain issues or minor flaws, the biggest one being the voice acting wich ends up being absolutely hideous at times but not allways eventually you may even get used to it.
I won't say any details about the story(at least on purpose) to avoid spoilers but there's more to it than what may seem at the begining.
In the world of baten kaitos there are "magnus" cards that are used to absorb items, some are normal items that you can use to heal and others are swords and shields, even special attacks are stored in the magical cards, one of the greatest aspects of the game is that overtime the cards will change food rots, swords rust and such things happen.
One of the things people have disliked about the game (besides the voice acting) is the battle system.
When you travel around the beutifull hand drawn landscapes you'll often see an enemy creature, wich you can avoid or contact to initiate a battle.
When the battle starts you're dealt a "hand" of cards from a deck you form before going into tha battle, this can include weapons to attack, shields and armor to defend and food to heal, actually even food when it rots can become a weapon to use in battle to inflict damage and status effects on enemies.
There's also special combo's you can perform in battle like
wood + fire attack = charcoal.
The problem is that at the begining of the game your turn is limited to 2 or 3 cards this makes the first few hours a bit of a drag to some gamers but if you keep going by every class level up you can use more cards each turn.
Bottom line is that this is one of those games that begin slow but keeps getting better and better every hour.
The music is all great from orchestral in some places to heavy riff rock in boss battles, all 60 or so tracks are amazing.
The main quest is long-ish (like 40 hours or so)but there is some replay value and some sidequests that lead to thousands of cards to collect and houndreds of special combos to do.
I can fully recommend this game to anyone who loves RPGs.