Great game, terrible everything else.
Like most role-playing games since the genre's inception, Baten Kaitos' plot once again involves an evil emperor bent on acquiring X number of ancient relics in order to free an unspeakable evil and obtain ultimate power. As always, it's up to an oddball cast of plucky, young adventures to stop him and save the world. The gang's all here: from the brooding, self-centered male protagonist to the naïve love interest with stars in her eyes and hope in her heart. Set in a world where massive islands drift in a sea of clouds, nothing about the game's storyline, characters, or universe is unique. The plot itself is perfectly competent, but it apes story elements from other RPGs so blatantly that it never adds up to anything more than a well-executed series of clichés. But while Baten Kaitos may fail as a piece of interactive fiction, it still succeeds as a game.
Much of the gameplay revolves around Magnus, magical cards able to trap the "magna essence" of real world objects (or magical forces). In combat, Baten Kaitos plays like an elaborate card game. Characters draw Magnus cards from their own unique decks and play them to execute corresponding actions. Selecting a sword card causes you to swing a sword; selecting a "fire burst" card sets enemies aflame. Additionally, each card has up to four spirit numbers – one per corner – that you can combine in traditional poker-style combinations like straights and pairs to greatly amplify your cards' effects.
Despite its deep, strategic nature, combat is actually extremely frantic. There are no random battles; running into an enemy in the field will transport your party to a separate playing area. Here, you trade offensive and defense blows while under strict time limitations, forcing you to act rapidly while still thinking tactically. Individual turns play out very quickly, but battles themselves tend to drag on longer than in other RPGs. You'll be so engaged stringing together combos, however, that you won't mind, as even the most throwaway encounters provide a great deal of depth. Unfortunately, the game move so quickly, you'll often accidentally sabotage your own combos, as the C-stick used to select cards' spirit numbers is small and imprecise, leading to more than a few botched fatal blows. Baten Kaitos also features the sort of level system you'd expect from an RPG, but rather than instantly leveling after you meet experience requirements, you must first visit a nondescript church, only accessible through certain save points, to pray and reflect on your experiences.
Aside from their obvious influence on the game's combat system, Magnus also affect gameplay outside of combat, playing a central role in the game's plot and factoring into the dungeons. In addition to your combat decks, you also have access to several blank Magnus cards that can absorb the essence of nearly anything in the gameworld, from milk and apples to adventure novels and pickaxes, allowing you to transport materials or overcome obstacles. The game's dungeons make heavy use of this mechanic. Clever Magnus-based puzzles aside, Baten Kaitos' dungeons are the game's real highlight, and before your adventure is through you'll visit a topsy-turvy, upside down garden featuring a Tower of Druaga homage complete with 8-bit graphics, a maze of crystalline mirrors that fragment and distort the screen, and a massive tower whose floors contain some of the most diabolical block puzzles ever created.
Magnus also grow and change over time. Fruit and meat go bad with age while other Magnus cards transform and evolve into new forms entirely. You can also create your own Magnus in battle by playing a series of cards in a certain order. To get cooked rice, a powerful healing item, you'd play a power helmet (to use as a pot), uncooked rice, water burst, and then fire burst. The game's crafting system is surprisingly deep, but also completely superficial; you can easily complete the game without ever touching it. Still, for those looking for even more depth from an already deep game, crafting adds yet another layer of interest. For everyone else, it amounts to little more than an inventory filled with spoiled food.
While the actual gameplay remains excellent throughout, Baten Kaitos isn't so successful on a technical level. The game's writing is pretty poor in and off itself, but the stilted, off-key voice acting transforms passable dialogue into a grating assault on the senses. To make matters worse, the voice samples themselves sound hollow and tinny, no doubt the end result of squeezing hours of voice work onto two tiny Gamecube discs. Thankfully, there's an option to disable voices entirely. The fully orchestrated soundtrack, however, is varied and excellent, though tracks are noticeably recycled throughout the game.
Baten Kaitos also looks great, though the hand drawn, 2D backgrounds outshine the fully 3D character models. The painted backdrops are richly detailed and subtly animated, outdoing the mid-generation 3D models at every turn. The characters themselves are garishly overdesigned, bogged down by excessive nick-knacks and accessories. Characters are so heavily differentiated from one another that it's hard to believe any of them are from the same planet, let alone culture. In fact, while all of the game's varied locals are beautiful and visually interesting, they never feel as though they're part of a cohesive world.
Aesthetically, it's easy to see the game's seams. With a plot, characters, and world directly ripped from other prominent RPG franchises, the universe of Baten Kaitos doesn't offer anything we haven't seen before. The storyline amounts to little more than a finely crafted string of clichés, while the banal dialogue and mostly gorgeous, if inconsistent visual design paints a fractured, disparate world. All of this nearly destroys the experience, but the underlying game mechanics and core gameplay are so good they manage to shine through the layers of tired conventions. As undeniably excellent as Baten Kaitos' gameplay may be, though, the boring storyline and stock characters weigh down the game too much to easily recommend. There are better RPGs out there, even within the Gamecube's limited library; Baten Kaitos' developers ripped them off to make this game.