That’s right: many of these quests are mandatory. What makes this game different from other RPGs is that the level of difficulty for many of these puzzles rivals the optional quests of other RPGs. If you choose to play this game, you will spend at least an hour in each town doing this sort of thing. It’s like a fetch quest, except all you’re doing is talking to people to get further in the storyline.
Of course, you don’t know where someone is, and when you eventually find them, they send you to someone else. You know what I’m referring to: you go into a town, and you learn that to progress in the storyline, you have to talk to someone about something. What do I mean when I say “exploration?” Well, there’s puzzle-solving, fetch quests, dungeon navigation, and the ever-aggravating NPC trigger talks. Rather, I’m here to tell you that the game’s exploration is difficult. When I say “challenging,” people think I’m going to talk about some difficult battles. It is lengthy, and it is extremely challenging. Warning: Baten Kaitos Origins is not for casual gamers. However, the NPC extras, particularly the ones that did children’s voices, always grated on my ears.įor containing one of Sakuraba’s most un-Sakuraba-like scores and for having some decent voice acting, I’m giving sound a 90%.
All the other major characters had decent voice actors. With the exception of all the screaming and crying they were forced to do, they did their jobs well. The other two leads, Sagi and Milly, also had great voice actors. The two tracks are played simultaneously for every bit of Guillo’s dialogue! The reason for this is explained later in the game, but I personally was astonished to see how well the technique worked! Imagine having to match the intonation and style with another person for every line, and imagine the work the sound team must have done to normalize the audio and keep everything in synch! I thought it was great. Guillo’s gender remains undetermined, and to match this, every word spoken by Guillo has been recorded twice: once by a man and once by a woman. One particular point of interest is the character Guillo, who is essentially a puppet. The game also sports a fair bit of voice acting. Piano, guitar, and female voice (his wife’s) are staples for this game’s soundtrack. Instead, he used soft, traditional instruments to match the paint-like visuals of the game. I use the word “fitting” a lot, and the music is certainly fitting, but I think “sensible” is a better word here because Sakuraba could have overdone things with large choral vocals and sampled orchestra all over the place, but he didn’t. If I were to use a word, I would say that the music is sensible. Sure, the typical high-impact yet redundant battle themes are present, but the rest is very different. As noted in our soundtrack reviews, Sakuraba’s musical style varies greatly in Baten Kaitos. Likely thanks to his connection with tri-Crescendo, Motoi Sakuraba is back to score the prequel/sequel. Top this visual sundae off with some unique opening and ending cutscenes (using a lack of framerate to its advantage), and you have yourself one extraordinary piece of graphical art. This is just one example among many, though it is the one that stands out most in my mind. The ship moves along straight lines at a constant speed. However, as an object, it seems to have zero animation put into it. For example, the ship upon which the team travels, called the “Sfida,” is a nice shiny golden object. My only complaint has to do with animation during exploration. Some characters came out looking ugly, but most of them look fantastic. It’s a shame that to win almost any battle, one’s eyes are constantly drawn to the bottom of the screen since the card-based battling is so intense and action-based!Īll major characters have hand-drawn face portraits this art style seems strange yet beautiful to me a cross between the Romantic period and modern artwork. The battle animation, in particular, is some of the smoothest and most noticeably gorgeous I’ve seen in a turn-based RPG. Baten Kaitos is known for its excellent artwork and graphics, and it’s not a stretch to say that it’s the most gorgeous game for the GameCube.Īlong with the still backgrounds, I have nothing but praise for the animation. Like the transition from Final Fantasy X to X-2, Baten Kaitos Origins makes use of dozens of pre-rendered backgrounds from the first title. Being a direct prequel, taking place only twenty years before the original, the art studio was fortunate in that they had a lot less to do this time around.
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