When I first picked up this game, the last RPG I had really played was Final Fantasy VIII (Editor's note: booo!). I hadn't tried any RPG's on the next-gen consoles. I had thought that all hope was lost for RPG's and GameCube, but then I found Baten Kaitos. This game breaks most of the rules that RPG's always have, but that doesn't take anything away from it.

For starters, this baby has no FMV's, less the opening cinematics, but are not part of the game. That's right folks, no great movies depicting the ship flying away while your character stands there and curses it till the day it dies. Instead, everything is done using the game's rendering engine. It doesn't look half bad, but there are some places where I think that an FMV or two is needed, namely when the in-game graphics engine just can't keep up. If you feel that you lack something by not seeing FMV's, watch the opening movie once or twice. It's a very nicely done FMV, which leads you to think that the rest of the game will be just as FMV-laden, but it isn't.

Although there are no FMV's, the in-game graphics engine does its job well. The graphics will have your head spinning. The effects during battles are simply spectacular. Flame, water, and sparkly light effects are all going on at the same time, while you're trying to think about what you're going to do next. Not to worry though, the battle system is easy enough to learn, but you'll spend hours mastering it.

The story is another part of the unconventional style of this game. Long ago, the world was at war with the evil god of destruction. They won and imprisoned the god, but were forced to leave the earth in search of a cleaner, more inhabitable place. The ever-inventive humans decided to take to the skies, and eventually evolved into winged beings that live on floating islands in the sky. You're job as the player is a spirit guide to the main character, Kalas. Kalas is an eighteen-year-old boy with blue hair and only one wing. The other wing is a mechanical "winglet" that his grandfather made for him before he was killed in a mysterious fire two years prior. In your travels, you meet a girl named Xelha (pronounced 'Shella'). She is an attractive girl about your age. So far so good, right? Well, you would think that Kalas and Xelha would fall in love, right? They don't. In fact, you, as the responsible spirit guide, decide to talk through Kalas saying that he's looking for Xelha or something; he'll yell at you and lose faith in your judgment. That's cliché breaker number 2. Just because there's no love story, don't think there's no character development. The spiritual depths of the characters are explored thoroughly, and will keep you entertained well into the final hours of gameplay.

I don’t know what that thing is, but it sure isn’t happy...

The gameplay itself is pretty good; aside from a couple of things to get used to at the beginning, it's pretty straightforward. Out-of-battle controls are pretty standard; it's the battle system that will throw you for a loop. The system keeps itself simple, if that's what you want it to be. Otherwise, it's vastly complicated, dealing with elements and spirit numbers and whatnot. Allow me to explain.

Each thing in the Baten Kaitos world has an essence called a Magna Essence. This means that it can be stored inside of a Magnus card. These cards allow players to carry around tons of stuff in their pockets. The magnus change over time, so if you have a banana today, it may be a black banana tomorrow, losing its healing powers, and gaining poisonous ones. With these cards, you battle. Each magnus has what the game calls a spirit number. It's a number in one corner of the card. A magnus could have more than one spirit number, which would mean there would be 2 or 3 numbers on the card. Higher-level magnus have 4 numbers on them. These numbers can be used to make pairs and straights, compounding the damage you unleash on your enemies. It gets all complicated when you want to use a number that's not on the upper right corner of the card. In this case, you must use the C-stick to select the number you want, and think about this while you move the control stick to the card; all this in just about 2 seconds. If you try to make complicated combos often, you may get confused and ruin the combo entirely. It really sucks to have 5 cards in a straight, and then accidentally choose the wrong number. If you want to avoid thinking entirely, you can just press the A button and select the number in the top right corner always, making it so that all you have to do is select the card you want and press A.

Hey look, Gollum’s making a surprise appearance!

Whenever I think hard about that battle system, it makes my head spin, so I'm going to stop and move on towards the sound. This game has wonderful music, but not so wonderful voice acting. The voices were highly compressed and often sound detached. Sometimes the characters lines can just get downright cheesy. For instance, during one of her special moves, Xelha says, "Watch out, I'm not that innocent" like it's straight from a bad bubblegum pop CD. During normal walkabout in a city, half of the people you meet are voice acted, and the other half aren't. When characters have conversations, they often sound like they are reading off of a script (which the actors were) and they don't portray realism. This could also be a byproduct of extreme compression, seeing as how all the characters are voice acted during all major scenes. If they could have taken out some of the useless voice acting and added an FMV or maybe just better voice acting, that would have made it a lot better, at least in the sound aspect of things. Voice acting also takes away from the player's use of imagination. I liked the old Final Fantasy days when you got to imagine what each of the characters sounded like. Oh well, that seems to be a thing of the past now; I'll just have to go play FFIX with vigor and imagination, remembering the good old days...

Overall, this game is a must buy for anyone who enjoys RPGs. It has two discs, and at over 40-50 hours of gameplay, it will keep you entertained at least as long as a season of your favorite TV shows. Yes, all 10 of them. This game really does not disappoint. It does lack FMV's and decent voice acting, but the gameplay and soundtrack can make up for those. Namco has done it again. Hopefully we'll see another game like this soon.