Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean

I suppose it’s a tenet of video role-playing games that they have to be so inexplicable and have a story so mysterious that you’re not going to fully understand it until you play it several times over. Then you get to go on message boards and debate with other people who played the game what the significance of the scene with the chickens was, and whether or not the love interest was justified in giving the protagonist the cold shoulder.

The story in this game wasn’t particularly convoluted, but it was weird. The best I can remember (without spoiling too much for you if you ever decide to play it) is that at some point something catastrophic happened that made the earth uninhabitable and destroyed the world’s oceans, so some floating islands became the last place where people can live. It’s cool, though, because most people have ‘wings of the heart’ that let them fly around a little bit. The Empire (the bad guys… or are they?) have developed machines to help them with their everyday life so they don’t have to rely on outdated notions like ‘wings of the heart’. (Science vs. Faith, eh? Riveting!). Kalas, a young man with only one wing (outcast, you know), had his brother and grandfather killed by the Empire and is trying to avenge them by any means necessary. The plot takes lots of twists and turns to get you there, but that should get you started. What’s interesting is that instead of you taking on the role of the main character, you’re what’s known as a ‘guardian spirit’, a creature from ‘another realm’ that watches over the main character and provides advice (and some special powers). Occasionally Kalas will turn to the screen and address you directly, asking what he should do or what you think of the situation at hand. I thought that was a clever
way to draw the player into the story.

Story aside, it’s a pretty typical console-style role-playing game. You wander around the landscape talking to people, solving insipid puzzles, developing your characters and generally trying to work your way toward the next plot point. The battles take a different tack than what you might be used to, though. In this universe, there is a weird technology that allows folks to put items on cards called Magnus. Everything gets put into Magnus form, weapons, food, medicine, pretty much anything that’s not alive. What this means is that each character carries around a deck of cards to use in the battles. When your turn comes up, you pick attack cards to attack with, when it’s the enemy’s turn, you pick defensive cards to defend with (natch).

There are lots of problems with this system. Each character has their own deck of cards that you have to worry about. In the beginning this isn’t too big of a deal, but once you make some headway into the game you have over half a dozen characters, each with a maximum deck size of around 60 or so. You end up spending lots of time tweaking your decks to get the right balance of attack, defense, and healing cards. The other big problem is that you’re constantly at the mercy of the cards to dictate what you can do. Your turn to attack and all you have in your hand is defensive cards? Too bad. Enemy attacking you and all you have to defend yourself with is a hand with nothing but bananas? You get smacked pretty hard. Depending on your relationship with Kalas, some better cards might come up a little more often, just for him, but it didn’t seem to work very well for me.

The other big problem with this game is making money to buy upgraded items. In most games when you beat the native fauna to death they’re inexplicably carrying large amounts of game currency. Why? Don’t worry about it. But this made getting money a nice side effect of level grinding. In this game, though, things are a little different. When you’re building your deck, you have to put in special ‘camera magnus’. When these come up you run up to the enemy, usually in the middle of a barrage of sword swings, and take its picture (“Say cheeseburger!”). You then take these pictures to the shops to sell, and then use that money to buy what provisions you need. Of course, the rarer the picture is, the more it’s worth, so pictures of bosses sell the most. So part of your strategy is to avoid getting stomped into a bloody smear long enough for the camera to come up, take the picture of the boss, and then hope that you didn’t waste too much time and still have enough good cards in your deck to kill the thing.

The whole magnus system is weird, but it does have some kind of neat effects. Food that you get will eventually age and change forms. Grapes will eventually turn into sour grapes, which will eventually turn into wine, which will eventually turn into vinegar. Each of the stages does something different, so it keeps you on your toes and makes you have to fiddle with your decks more often than you would probably like. And you have to keep buying food all the time because yours keeps going bad, so you have to go out and take lots more pictures.

You’re also going to notice right away that the sound in this game needs a little more work. There is a ton of spoken dialogue, which is normally great, but it sounds to me like the folks at Namco compressed the audio a bit too heavily to get it all to fit on the disc. As a result, everyone sounds like they’re speaking inside pipes. It’s a little jarring and breaks the illusion a bit.

Those issues aside, the game is actually not too bad. I’m pretty jaded when I play these kinds of games anymore, but the plot twist in the middle I completely didn’t see coming, which was kind of refreshing. And to think, I almost didn’t play this game. I found the sequel (which we’ll talk about another day), thought it looked decent, then I realized it was a sequel, then sought out and found this one. I’m pretty glad I did, and that I finished this one first, since the stories dovetail nicely with each other.

One Response to “Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean”

  1. [...] original Baten Kaitos game was a little on the weird side. That’s OK, I like weird. I actually only played it [...]

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