The original Baten Kaitos game was a little on the weird side. That’s OK, I like weird. I actually only played it because I found Origins, which is its prequel (that came out later), at my local video game store, and thought it looked like a pretty good game. But I didn’t want to play the prequel/sequel without playing the original game first. So I hunted down and bought a copy of the original game, and liked it enough to think that Origins wasn’t going to be too big of a waste of money.
Origins takes place something like 20 years before the events in the original Baten Kaitos. So you kind of get a chance to see the characters (at least the ones that have been born) and what they were like before they were old and embittered. And a lot of the holes in the story are filled in for you. Though, if you never played the other game, that’s not really going to matter. You don’t have to have played through the old game to enjoy Origins, but you’ll miss out on some of the foreshadowing.
The game plays a lot like its predecessor, but there are some pretty important differences.
- The voice acting sounds like it was done by actual voice actors instead of people dragged in off the street, and the recorded voices don’t actually sound like they were recorded in a tile bathroom on the other end of an iffy telephone connection.
- You fight your battles with those silly cards (‘magnus’), but you return to full health afterward, so you don’t have to worry about carrying around food that goes bad after a while.
- Enemies drop money when they’re defeated, so you don’t have to lug a camera around with you to take pictures of them to sell for money (which was a completely ridiculous idea to start with).
- You only have three people in your party to worry about, and they all share the same deck of cards, instead of the half-dozen characters each with a deck with 50+ cards in it. So you spend way less time micromanaging your cards.
There are a few more changes, but those were the big ones for me. I ended up liking this game as much, and maybe a little more than the old one, but I was really glad to have played them both back to back like I did. Right after I saw the ending sequence to the the first game, I unwrapped and popped in this one. I think having it fresh in my mind helped me to see some of the elements that tie the two together a little more clearly.
One of the things that still puzzles me is a particular song that plays during the game’s fights with the boss character in the video above. He gets his own song in this game called ‘Chaotic Dance 2′ which is a remix of his song from the first game called (shockingly) ‘Chaotic Dance’. Now, I’ll let you try and rationalize how a guy has a song called ‘Chaotic Dance 2′ in a game that happened earlier than the one where he has one without the ‘2′ on it. But the first version of the song had some kind of unintelligible lyrics. Here, take a listen:
Now, I naively chalked up not being able to understand the lyrics due to the wacky distortion that the composer used. It turns out that’s not exactly the case. I’d like you to compare that clip with this one:
With the distortion removed, I still can’t make out the words. I think it’s English; I hear what I think might be English words in there. But there’s other sounds in the song that might be words, but I can’t make heads or tails of them. It sounds like all of the consonants have disappeared from the words, and consonants are some of my favorite letters. I guess another explanation is that the songs are being sung in Simlish, which means that my attempts to decipher the words are going to be in the worst kind of vain.
But other than that, I got a lot of fun out of this game. It plugged up most of the holes in the original game, and left most questions answered. There are still a few ambiguities left, but I’ll let the Message Board Pundits(tm) debate those.