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indigozealFinal round-up of Baten Kaitos:
GOOD:
- The settings and world design, no question. The basic concept of a floating archipelago with inhabitants blessed with different types of wings is a fertile one, and the individual continents are rendered with such imagination: Diadem's cloud castles and rivers of stars? A mechanistic culture whose machinery is modeled on brass instruments? A intradimensional kaleidoscopic realm scintillating with light, rife with psychedelic imagery (that isn't framed as a cheap joke)? There're so many unique ideas just so lovingly rendered. This is one of the most beautiful games ever made, a road trip through natural and cultural beauty of a quality only the Mana series has reached.
- Lyude and his neverending barrel of emotional drama and trumpet guns and platters commemorating the ends of immoral relationships and "This will cleanse the evil out of you!"s and parasitic mind worms and angelic gun turrets made of light and stories about not being able to eat candy because his nurse told him his teeth would rot. God bless you, sir.
- I really liked this party overall. Xelha is an excellent example of how to do a "pure," cute, "girly" heroine who isn't a damsel and doesn't skimp on intelligence, will, or wit (FF4, take note); she has the strength, charm, determination, and complexity to make a better leader and protagonist than the sword-swinging sorta-nominal lead. Savyna's perhaps the best the tough-chick archetype has ever been done - no machismo or bluster, all cool, competent business. Gibari is a great marriage of voice and gregarious attitude, and Lyude, of course, is in a class all his own. (Even Mizuti has a good, solid character underneath her mask and goofiness, and Kalas the Reluctant Party Member is funny with his grumping about "more charity work" and exhortations to the rest of the party to stop giving him "the look.") Conversations between the party are usually really well-done in the back-and-forth dialogue department, particularly in the first half of the game. I just really liked these folks.
- I found the card-based battle system really fun; it's fast-paced, keeps you on your toes, and introduces enough of a random element where battles aren't determined disproportionately by luck but where you have to think on your feet and deal with situations as they come instead of falling back into preset attack patterns. I liked that there were no dedicated healers, that you had to balance attack items with defense and healing items in each character's deck and that the proportions of each were entirely up to you, and I liked, in a way, healing being this precarious thing where your items would decay unless you found or made more. And the idea of attacking with cards with antipodal elements in the same turn having the effect of actually cancelling those attacks out sounds aggravating but actually becomes a big element of your deck-building strategy and round-to-round tactics. When you're first thrown into the battle system, it's all WHAT DO I DO WHOA WHOA WHOA, but it's kind of amazing how much information you become accustomed to processing in such a short period of time.
- On that note: I liked seeing how the Magnus evolved and decayed in often-clever ways. With time, a Small Fire becomes a Large Fire becomes Insurance Money; a succession of unanswered Love Letters eventually devolves into a Stalker's Letter (a weapon with a 60% chance of death).
- They did a really good job of differentiating the characters functionally in battle in an original way. Kalas has access to every element but is the master of none; he's flexible, but his decks are such a jumble that you have to watch having elements cancel each other out. Gibari is a bit stronger but has a slight concentration in Water and the less-useful Wind; he's quicker to strike, so you have to choose his cards relatively quickly. The mages are great at exploiting elemental weaknesses and can pack a big punch offensively but have very few (Mizuti) or no (Xelha) neutral cards, so you always have to watch out for elemental clashing, and you're not gonna have enough cards of a single type for a mage to specialize in just one or even two elements. Savyna's strongest attack cards are almost all Fire and Water, but those elements aren't as useful in Baten Kaitos as they are in other games; she delivers lots of hits but has a very short window for choosing her cards, so you have to be on your toes. Lyude, like Savyna, specializes in two elements only, one of them being the not-very-useful Dark but the other being Light, which can almost-always be parlayed into extra damage; his average base attack ranges from great (earlier on) to less compared with the others (endgame), but he does, unlike Savyna, have higher-end neutral weapons available. Then there's stuff like how Gibari and Kalas (and, to a lesser extent, Savyna) have weapons that can double as armor by parrying enemy blows, so you don't have to spend as much deck space on armor cards for them as you do the mages or Lyude, or how Xelha's turn almost always comes up first while Gibari's almost always comes up last of your heroes, or how Xelha has a lot of light-based specials... There's a lot more character depth than the typical RPG "weak mage; strong knight" staples.
- The spell and special attack graphics looked really impressive, imaginative, and dynamic without taking forever to unfold. Spell graphics seem to have become a fashionable area on which to skimp in RPGs (I'm looking at you, Lunar: Harmony of Silver Star), and while I know Baten Kaitos isn't a recent title in any frame of reference but that of my own permanently-stuck-in-16-bit self, it's nice to see a relatively modern title handle them right.
- The bit about you being a character in the game was actually pretty well-implemented. It was smart how writers used it to skew your perspective on the proceedings, make you take for granted how the "main" character is your eyes and ears, your spiritual ally, and therefore unimpeachable and undivorceable from you, and thereby sandbag you with a good plot twist. Being quite often addressed by the party members and asked for my input and advice made me, at least, feel more a part of the proceedings, closer to the cast of characters, and more responsible for their well-being, and the way the very ending was framed around this gimmick, with the characters all lining up to say your goodbyes to you and Kalas asking you in a rather meta way what you were looking for when you came to this world, made it really affecting.
- Twists. Most of the plot twists were at least in part genuinely surprising, and the big ones were game-changing. *The* big plot-twist scene is a real gut punch in both concept and execution.
- I like how the game pokes fun at and subverts genre conventions without delving into stoo-pid territory. Like when Kalas is making-believe that someone stole the End Magnus from him and, in the middle of an argument about how it was lost, he rails, "Why do I gotta be in charge of all our stuff?!" Or when you first visit the Moving Block Tower from Hell and its guardian gives you the basics of how it works - lighting a lantern activates the blocks on each level and makes them moveable; the blocks go back to their original positions when the flame is doused - and then adds, "Don't ask me. I don't know, either." Everyone wants to be Working Designs these days, and there's a lot of inelegant lampshade-hanging as a result, so I appreciated how Baten Kaitos was gentle and wry (and not overly frequent) about needling RPG cliches or smartly stood them on their head instead of being all flatly "LOL this is so dumb" about it.
- Taking this one step further, when the game flashes back to when you first meet Kalas as a spirit, it suggests - at least, this is what I got on my first viewing - that you might have been in halfway with what Melodia & Kalas were planning only to attempt to back out once they revealed the whole plot and/or demanded that you be stricken with amnesia. Again, I might be wrong to a certain extent about that, but, not completely, I don't think: the game does work the angle of trying to enlist player sympathies to throw in with the hero before they realize the full ramifications of what he's planning - you have Kalas crying over the body of his grandfather and little kid brother in the opening, and vengeance is one of the most common and instantly-relatable motivations for a main character in a JRPG. You unveil a story like a dead father figure and kid, you're instinctively on the hero's side. But then you learn that Kalas basing his life and decisions around being able to hurt another person has actually made him a worse human being, and helping fulfill his wish makes the world worse off, not better. (Had Kalas actually gotten his wish on the Goldoba, when you think you've actually killed Giacomo, Ayme, and Folon, the world would've been completely screwed.) Xelha goes on a bit near the end about how we all want contradictory things (we want adventure, yet we want to be safe; we want to lash out, yet we want to be understood), and it's a nice perspective on the theme of how no one is wholly evil, no one should be dismissed or cut loose from the human tapestry, and one day, you might need forgiveness, too. The reflectiveness is welcome, and it's a kind of more positive spin on the ideas that Shadow of the Colossus and Spec Ops adopt with taking the player to task for blindly taking destructive actions in games or playing them for antisocial reasons, and yet not just giving up on the player and having comdemnation be the be-all end-all - taking the time to show them a better way.
- The game having main character turn and ask the player why she plays games like this in the first place, in an ending that hinges on all the little friends from another world you've made turning to the screen and saying their goodbyes and how much they cherish you. I think you already know why, game.
- The mechanic of getting money not directly through battle but by taking photos of enemies (and all the little ancillary stuff such as playing a Light card before using your camera to improve photo quality and having to choose between collecting your photo or the other battle loot) worked out well. You'd think it would upend the game monetarily, but things were actually pretty balanced right up until endgame, where the money situation in RPGs typically comes unhinged anyhow.
- The detail of the shopkeepers. Seeing how they were animated and dressed and what the interior of their shops was like and just their sheer *size*, for animated characters so elaborately realized, was a treat and a memorable loving touch.
- Having a female main villain was refreshing.
- A minor thing, but I liked the idea that you didn't rise in level automatically as you gained the requisite XP - you have to go to the church to cash the XP in, so to speak. It makes you approach dungeons a bit more carefully: you're not going to be given new abilities or improved stats in the field without backtracking to a town, so you have to think more about how you're going to use what you have when you go in.
- I haven't played The Tower of Druaga or much early Namco stuff or much Namco stuff in general, but I liked the one dungeon that was inspired by it, insipid 8-bit soundtrack and all.
- I'm repeating myself here, but I liked that the game was about forgiveness and "even the wise cannot see all ends" - no life is made to be thrown away, and even alleged evil gods of destruction can have a positive impact on the world. It's a good message, and not one you frequently see to a meaningful degree in gaming.
- On a note seemingly contradictory to the last entry: I forgot to mention in my last playlog entry, but Kalas is not mandatory in the final battle. Thank you, game.
BAD:
- The opening CG movie is pretty bad. The characters are really off-model and rendered in this off-putting shiny, plasticky CG, the editing is at the level of Vay cutscenes, and some of the lines are out-loud laughable ("In this world, there are things that people mustn't touch...WHO CARES?!"). Apparently, there were supposed to be cutscenes throughout the game using these graphics, but the idea got cut due to cost? Good. Was that ever a bullet dodged.
- In fact, the first few hours of the game don't really work, mired in badly-voiced NPCs explaining the most basic RPG concepts to you as if they're brand-new. You're either doing really cliched stuff (rescue kidnapped girl from evil villains) or involved heavily with questionably-rendered low-level NPCs. The story didn't pull together for me until the defense of Diadem Castle.
- The story itself is very doohickey-dependent, and there're too many "this is our absolute last chance" false climaxes thrown in along the way. ("We cannot let the final End Magnus fall into the enemy's hands!"/"Wazn is the only land that might be able to save us!"/"The Ocean Mirror is the only thing that can dispel Malpercio's power!"/"Maybe the Children of the Earth can save us?"/"No, sorry, the Sword of the Heavens is the only thing that can dispel Malpercio's power!"/"Hold on, isn't Xelha's pendant part of that doohickey set, too?"/"Wait, I guess it's broken"/"OK, I guess all five major continents need to do a Sailor Planet Attack against the enemy's doom fortress then.") As I've mentioned before, while dialogue is mostly good, the writing in the overall plot is a bit cartoony (which can sometimes collude with the often-cartoony ancillary voice acting to bad effect, as in the scene just before you enter Cor Hydrae). I wish it'd aspired to more - focused more on its themes than on collecting objects.
- Speaking of the game's themes: It's inspirational how certain antagonists are able to affect great good in the world once they turn over a new leaf, but their changes of heart are often too sudden and unexplained really to take hold in the narrative or be believable. I still don't know why Kalas swtiched his allegiances back to the party so wholeheartedly - they made it out like it was the Ocean Mirror removing Malpercio's "taint," but the narrative makes it clear that Kalas consciously chose evil for reasons of his own, and we never learn why he abandons that line of thinking. Ditto Melodia: the story wants her to be a tragic villain, but it's very muddled how much her actions are due to the control of evil and how much they're due to her own insecurities...and even then, really, it's tough to understand what would be fueling the latter. Giacomo's turn is perhaps the most believable - he's a bad guy, but not so bad that he wants the world to burn with him, and he genuinely cares for his underlings and wants them to survive him - but there's a lot regarding his motivations in general that's unexplained, and he says all sorts of reconciliatory stuff to Kalas prompted by I don't really know what.
As aforementioned, I think the idea of having the major villains reform over the course of an RPG is laudable, but the story needs to be clear on the motivations for their actions and their changes of heart so the character development is believable and not just easily dismissed as lip service. This problem is connected to:
- That "A to C without going to B" issue that the script has at certain points. Things that needed to be firmly established or shown in the game: Giacomo's exact motivations concerning his own independent schemes, and how exactly he thought what he wanted to happen would happen; what Kalas knew about Melodia's big evil plan (yes, we learn a little bit more on this at the end of the game, but it doesn't make sense that the others wouldn't ask Kalas about this when he rejoined the party); Kalas reacting to Xelha being a queen; the status of Lyude's siblings; Melodia's motivation, or how much of her actions were due to taint and how much were volitional; what exactly made Kalas change his mind about his whole evil transformation; what Fee was doing at the end of the game... It's not that you can't quite make some suppositions, but certain scenes are robbed of their full impact because they don't have the circumstances and stakes adequately established.
To tie the above two entries together: There's a bit in the artbook about how Ayme & Folon hated Kalas's grandfather Georg because he was the one who experimented on them (though he would've left the Empire when they were very young...maybe they knew him as the one who developed these experiments?). That gives them a legitimate grievance against Georg, a reason for vengeance in their own right that nevertheless turns them into monsters, and would've been a good illustration of the "an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind" idea had the writers chosen to emphasize it properly. Furthermore, it's understandable that the only parental figure who actually cared for them dying in pursuit of a hopeless pseudo-vendetta and then exhorting them with his last words to use their power to protect instead of destroy would incite them to reform. From our perspective, at least initially, they're bloodthirsty thugs who've committed a horrible atrocity, killing an older man and his two children; from theirs, they're giving a butcher his just desserts and terminating two of his errant experiments. There's a good story here, but the game doesn't present it well. The script needed one more draft, perhaps.
- Connected to the above discussion: too much of the ending fight is placed squarely on Kalas's shoulders. The climactic scenes are all about how he has to be the one to counter Malpercio, how he's the last hope for the world; there're a couple scenes where he orders the party around in a cavalier manner that seem to be meant to establish him firmly as the commander and undisputed leader; his personality takes a turn for the Lawful Good boy-scout archetypical RPG hero that doesn't square with how he acts earlier in the game. It's unconvincing, particularly in light of how his face turn in general is poorly sold, and it's frustrating due both to how the heroes work much better as an ensemble than as just backup to a single superstar and how Xelha is built up as the true protagonist in much of the latter half of the game.
- Yeah, the voice acting for ancillary characters is really lacking. There's a pretty clear direct proportion of a character's voice-acting quality to their importance to plot.
- The villains in general are kind of cartoony and uninteresting when they're being villains. That's a rarity for JRPGs - the former point, I mean; most of the time, the villains are the most intriguing cast members. The bad guys become more interesting, in fact, when they cease their villainous behavior. This is probably part of the game trying to make its point, but it's a problem when events are ongoing.
- Everyone says it's obvious how much they're in love, but the game didn't really sell the romance between Kalas and Xelha. Xelha seems quite into Kalas (though, as mentioned in one of my first posts, she falls for him while he's looting the corpses of her knights, so exactly what about him she found attractive is a mystery), but Kalas never seems to return her affection much. (Even at the end, when he's mourning her apparent death, he could be a little more...stricken.)
- The dungeons don't have much of a labyrinth thing going for them, though this might be old-school me talking. Do RPGs even have labyrinths anymore? The game's self-styled "labyrinth" is cake if you map, though I think I'm the only one who thought of bringing graph paper to that hoedown.
- It's kind of difficult to explore what you can make with various healing/support/"useless" magnuses, since doing so knocks one character effectively out of the action (to make a successful combination, you can't use any magnus except the ones in the recipe on a given turn). Plus, since you get so many magnus in your hand by the end (60 total), it's tough for the "right" magnus you wanna try to come along unless, as the V-Jump strat guide suggests, you completely pack one character's hand with "test" magnus. Yet I know making it easy for certain Magnus to pop up in your hand would break the game. I don't have an answer for this.
MISC.:
- The music is good but has a few too many twee tunes. It works the same groove a bit too much. Of course, there're plenty of tunes, particularly town themes, that're excellent (the Komo Mai theme, for instance), but my estimation of them suffers simply by dint of having heard them one too many times by now. Particularly notable tracks: Mintaka, with how sublty and elegantly it establishes oppressive menace and rigid order; the end dungeon's RPG overload; the overworld theme's gossamer fairy tale, which develops in interesting ways you might not hear just through listens on the map screen; "Chaotic Dance," for being so damn weird. I appreciate that the game has a wealth of different boss-battle themes that're selected more based on mood than character or any other factor.
- There's a version of the opening movie with alternate English VAs (it's under the "lyude" tag on Tumblr; I can't link it), and I've seen the idea floated that the alt actor should've gotten Lyude's part, because the guy who actually voiced Lyude made him sound stiff, awkward, and dweeby, to which I can only say, well, guess what, people. The alt VA is objectively "better", but he has just a generic naive voice; despite occasional missteps, Lyude's in-game voice continually underlines many aspects of the character - his overearnestness; his lack of self-confidence - even if they're not being actively addressed in the current dialogue.
- There was this cartoon in the '50's my mother watched as a kid named Winky Dink & You where you'd draw on a plastic sheet on a TV screen to get Winky Dink out of various jams: a lion would be chasing Winky Dink, and you'd draw a cage to trap it, etc. Well, one day, my mother hadn't gotten her plastic screen when Winky Dink needed her to draw a bridge across a chasm, and by the time she'd retrieved it, she discovered that he had gotten across without her help, which she found most dispiriting. What I'm saying is that I know that the whole Baten Kaitos "Guardian Spirit" thing is just a sophisticated version of Winky Dink, but, like my mother, I still got emotionally caught up in it.
The second game: is not grabbing me, really. Hey, you know that breathtaking world design and use of color that so differentiated the first game? Let's get rid of that! The palette is muted, and the locales seem relatively drab when they're not being directly recycled. It promises to be the story of how the Emperor rose to power, but I don't think that's a big mystery: he was an accomplished backstabber in a culture that rewarded that type of behavior. Taking a fleeting look at its plot, most of the things I've seen it explain didn't really need explanation or would've better explained with just a little more dialogue in the first game.
(Actually, I wanted to comment on one particular plot point: The second game proposes thatGibari actually left the Diadem knights when he was fourteen, after his father died in the king's service and the then-12-year-old Ladekahn dismissed Gibari to protect him from further harm. This doesn't work: the knights at the time of the first game still look to Gibari for leadership when he returns to Diadem at a time of crisis and say how he'd have made a wonderful Head Knight, and even those back in his village note how he was a knight "of some renown." That, combined with Gibari's proficiency with weapons and armor and good-natured but level-headed, take-charge attitude in crises that doesn't have to but kinda does point to at least some good period of time in military service, denotes that he got further into his career as a knight than just dead-ending as a fourteen-year-old initiate. It also suggests that they're trying to cram into the time frame of the sequel all the significant events in the backstories of the characters from the first game who'd be alive then, however implausible such an arrangement may be. I mean, Giacomo's apparently a boss again, and he's, like, 12? What?)
(Also: looking at that Alfard mage's costume design and her name, and taking the time frame into account, she's Melodia's mother, isn't she? Or a reincarnation or something?)
Anyhow, all that, and no dweeb. I'll probably play it eventually; just not anytime soon.
Well, that about wraps it up! One of the best RPG experiences I've had in recent years, shortcomings notwithstanding. But let's not be sad. There's only one way to close this out.
.
GOOD:
- The settings and world design, no question. The basic concept of a floating archipelago with inhabitants blessed with different types of wings is a fertile one, and the individual continents are rendered with such imagination: Diadem's cloud castles and rivers of stars? A mechanistic culture whose machinery is modeled on brass instruments? A intradimensional kaleidoscopic realm scintillating with light, rife with psychedelic imagery (that isn't framed as a cheap joke)? There're so many unique ideas just so lovingly rendered. This is one of the most beautiful games ever made, a road trip through natural and cultural beauty of a quality only the Mana series has reached.
- Lyude and his neverending barrel of emotional drama and trumpet guns and platters commemorating the ends of immoral relationships and "This will cleanse the evil out of you!"s and parasitic mind worms and angelic gun turrets made of light and stories about not being able to eat candy because his nurse told him his teeth would rot. God bless you, sir.
- I really liked this party overall. Xelha is an excellent example of how to do a "pure," cute, "girly" heroine who isn't a damsel and doesn't skimp on intelligence, will, or wit (FF4, take note); she has the strength, charm, determination, and complexity to make a better leader and protagonist than the sword-swinging sorta-nominal lead. Savyna's perhaps the best the tough-chick archetype has ever been done - no machismo or bluster, all cool, competent business. Gibari is a great marriage of voice and gregarious attitude, and Lyude, of course, is in a class all his own. (Even Mizuti has a good, solid character underneath her mask and goofiness, and Kalas the Reluctant Party Member is funny with his grumping about "more charity work" and exhortations to the rest of the party to stop giving him "the look.") Conversations between the party are usually really well-done in the back-and-forth dialogue department, particularly in the first half of the game. I just really liked these folks.
- I found the card-based battle system really fun; it's fast-paced, keeps you on your toes, and introduces enough of a random element where battles aren't determined disproportionately by luck but where you have to think on your feet and deal with situations as they come instead of falling back into preset attack patterns. I liked that there were no dedicated healers, that you had to balance attack items with defense and healing items in each character's deck and that the proportions of each were entirely up to you, and I liked, in a way, healing being this precarious thing where your items would decay unless you found or made more. And the idea of attacking with cards with antipodal elements in the same turn having the effect of actually cancelling those attacks out sounds aggravating but actually becomes a big element of your deck-building strategy and round-to-round tactics. When you're first thrown into the battle system, it's all WHAT DO I DO WHOA WHOA WHOA, but it's kind of amazing how much information you become accustomed to processing in such a short period of time.
- On that note: I liked seeing how the Magnus evolved and decayed in often-clever ways. With time, a Small Fire becomes a Large Fire becomes Insurance Money; a succession of unanswered Love Letters eventually devolves into a Stalker's Letter (a weapon with a 60% chance of death).
- They did a really good job of differentiating the characters functionally in battle in an original way. Kalas has access to every element but is the master of none; he's flexible, but his decks are such a jumble that you have to watch having elements cancel each other out. Gibari is a bit stronger but has a slight concentration in Water and the less-useful Wind; he's quicker to strike, so you have to choose his cards relatively quickly. The mages are great at exploiting elemental weaknesses and can pack a big punch offensively but have very few (Mizuti) or no (Xelha) neutral cards, so you always have to watch out for elemental clashing, and you're not gonna have enough cards of a single type for a mage to specialize in just one or even two elements. Savyna's strongest attack cards are almost all Fire and Water, but those elements aren't as useful in Baten Kaitos as they are in other games; she delivers lots of hits but has a very short window for choosing her cards, so you have to be on your toes. Lyude, like Savyna, specializes in two elements only, one of them being the not-very-useful Dark but the other being Light, which can almost-always be parlayed into extra damage; his average base attack ranges from great (earlier on) to less compared with the others (endgame), but he does, unlike Savyna, have higher-end neutral weapons available. Then there's stuff like how Gibari and Kalas (and, to a lesser extent, Savyna) have weapons that can double as armor by parrying enemy blows, so you don't have to spend as much deck space on armor cards for them as you do the mages or Lyude, or how Xelha's turn almost always comes up first while Gibari's almost always comes up last of your heroes, or how Xelha has a lot of light-based specials... There's a lot more character depth than the typical RPG "weak mage; strong knight" staples.
- The spell and special attack graphics looked really impressive, imaginative, and dynamic without taking forever to unfold. Spell graphics seem to have become a fashionable area on which to skimp in RPGs (I'm looking at you, Lunar: Harmony of Silver Star), and while I know Baten Kaitos isn't a recent title in any frame of reference but that of my own permanently-stuck-in-16-bit self, it's nice to see a relatively modern title handle them right.
- The bit about you being a character in the game was actually pretty well-implemented. It was smart how writers used it to skew your perspective on the proceedings, make you take for granted how the "main" character is your eyes and ears, your spiritual ally, and therefore unimpeachable and undivorceable from you, and thereby sandbag you with a good plot twist. Being quite often addressed by the party members and asked for my input and advice made me, at least, feel more a part of the proceedings, closer to the cast of characters, and more responsible for their well-being, and the way the very ending was framed around this gimmick, with the characters all lining up to say your goodbyes to you and Kalas asking you in a rather meta way what you were looking for when you came to this world, made it really affecting.
- Twists. Most of the plot twists were at least in part genuinely surprising, and the big ones were game-changing. *The* big plot-twist scene is a real gut punch in both concept and execution.
- I like how the game pokes fun at and subverts genre conventions without delving into stoo-pid territory. Like when Kalas is making-believe that someone stole the End Magnus from him and, in the middle of an argument about how it was lost, he rails, "Why do I gotta be in charge of all our stuff?!" Or when you first visit the Moving Block Tower from Hell and its guardian gives you the basics of how it works - lighting a lantern activates the blocks on each level and makes them moveable; the blocks go back to their original positions when the flame is doused - and then adds, "Don't ask me. I don't know, either." Everyone wants to be Working Designs these days, and there's a lot of inelegant lampshade-hanging as a result, so I appreciated how Baten Kaitos was gentle and wry (and not overly frequent) about needling RPG cliches or smartly stood them on their head instead of being all flatly "LOL this is so dumb" about it.
- Taking this one step further, when the game flashes back to when you first meet Kalas as a spirit, it suggests - at least, this is what I got on my first viewing - that you might have been in halfway with what Melodia & Kalas were planning only to attempt to back out once they revealed the whole plot and/or demanded that you be stricken with amnesia. Again, I might be wrong to a certain extent about that, but, not completely, I don't think: the game does work the angle of trying to enlist player sympathies to throw in with the hero before they realize the full ramifications of what he's planning - you have Kalas crying over the body of his grandfather and little kid brother in the opening, and vengeance is one of the most common and instantly-relatable motivations for a main character in a JRPG. You unveil a story like a dead father figure and kid, you're instinctively on the hero's side. But then you learn that Kalas basing his life and decisions around being able to hurt another person has actually made him a worse human being, and helping fulfill his wish makes the world worse off, not better. (Had Kalas actually gotten his wish on the Goldoba, when you think you've actually killed Giacomo, Ayme, and Folon, the world would've been completely screwed.) Xelha goes on a bit near the end about how we all want contradictory things (we want adventure, yet we want to be safe; we want to lash out, yet we want to be understood), and it's a nice perspective on the theme of how no one is wholly evil, no one should be dismissed or cut loose from the human tapestry, and one day, you might need forgiveness, too. The reflectiveness is welcome, and it's a kind of more positive spin on the ideas that Shadow of the Colossus and Spec Ops adopt with taking the player to task for blindly taking destructive actions in games or playing them for antisocial reasons, and yet not just giving up on the player and having comdemnation be the be-all end-all - taking the time to show them a better way.
- The game having main character turn and ask the player why she plays games like this in the first place, in an ending that hinges on all the little friends from another world you've made turning to the screen and saying their goodbyes and how much they cherish you. I think you already know why, game.
- The mechanic of getting money not directly through battle but by taking photos of enemies (and all the little ancillary stuff such as playing a Light card before using your camera to improve photo quality and having to choose between collecting your photo or the other battle loot) worked out well. You'd think it would upend the game monetarily, but things were actually pretty balanced right up until endgame, where the money situation in RPGs typically comes unhinged anyhow.
- The detail of the shopkeepers. Seeing how they were animated and dressed and what the interior of their shops was like and just their sheer *size*, for animated characters so elaborately realized, was a treat and a memorable loving touch.
- Having a female main villain was refreshing.
- A minor thing, but I liked the idea that you didn't rise in level automatically as you gained the requisite XP - you have to go to the church to cash the XP in, so to speak. It makes you approach dungeons a bit more carefully: you're not going to be given new abilities or improved stats in the field without backtracking to a town, so you have to think more about how you're going to use what you have when you go in.
- I haven't played The Tower of Druaga or much early Namco stuff or much Namco stuff in general, but I liked the one dungeon that was inspired by it, insipid 8-bit soundtrack and all.
- I'm repeating myself here, but I liked that the game was about forgiveness and "even the wise cannot see all ends" - no life is made to be thrown away, and even alleged evil gods of destruction can have a positive impact on the world. It's a good message, and not one you frequently see to a meaningful degree in gaming.
- On a note seemingly contradictory to the last entry: I forgot to mention in my last playlog entry, but Kalas is not mandatory in the final battle. Thank you, game.
BAD:
- The opening CG movie is pretty bad. The characters are really off-model and rendered in this off-putting shiny, plasticky CG, the editing is at the level of Vay cutscenes, and some of the lines are out-loud laughable ("In this world, there are things that people mustn't touch...WHO CARES?!"). Apparently, there were supposed to be cutscenes throughout the game using these graphics, but the idea got cut due to cost? Good. Was that ever a bullet dodged.
- In fact, the first few hours of the game don't really work, mired in badly-voiced NPCs explaining the most basic RPG concepts to you as if they're brand-new. You're either doing really cliched stuff (rescue kidnapped girl from evil villains) or involved heavily with questionably-rendered low-level NPCs. The story didn't pull together for me until the defense of Diadem Castle.
- The story itself is very doohickey-dependent, and there're too many "this is our absolute last chance" false climaxes thrown in along the way. ("We cannot let the final End Magnus fall into the enemy's hands!"/"Wazn is the only land that might be able to save us!"/"The Ocean Mirror is the only thing that can dispel Malpercio's power!"/"Maybe the Children of the Earth can save us?"/"No, sorry, the Sword of the Heavens is the only thing that can dispel Malpercio's power!"/"Hold on, isn't Xelha's pendant part of that doohickey set, too?"/"Wait, I guess it's broken"/"OK, I guess all five major continents need to do a Sailor Planet Attack against the enemy's doom fortress then.") As I've mentioned before, while dialogue is mostly good, the writing in the overall plot is a bit cartoony (which can sometimes collude with the often-cartoony ancillary voice acting to bad effect, as in the scene just before you enter Cor Hydrae). I wish it'd aspired to more - focused more on its themes than on collecting objects.
- Speaking of the game's themes: It's inspirational how certain antagonists are able to affect great good in the world once they turn over a new leaf, but their changes of heart are often too sudden and unexplained really to take hold in the narrative or be believable. I still don't know why Kalas swtiched his allegiances back to the party so wholeheartedly - they made it out like it was the Ocean Mirror removing Malpercio's "taint," but the narrative makes it clear that Kalas consciously chose evil for reasons of his own, and we never learn why he abandons that line of thinking. Ditto Melodia: the story wants her to be a tragic villain, but it's very muddled how much her actions are due to the control of evil and how much they're due to her own insecurities...and even then, really, it's tough to understand what would be fueling the latter. Giacomo's turn is perhaps the most believable - he's a bad guy, but not so bad that he wants the world to burn with him, and he genuinely cares for his underlings and wants them to survive him - but there's a lot regarding his motivations in general that's unexplained, and he says all sorts of reconciliatory stuff to Kalas prompted by I don't really know what.
As aforementioned, I think the idea of having the major villains reform over the course of an RPG is laudable, but the story needs to be clear on the motivations for their actions and their changes of heart so the character development is believable and not just easily dismissed as lip service. This problem is connected to:
- That "A to C without going to B" issue that the script has at certain points. Things that needed to be firmly established or shown in the game: Giacomo's exact motivations concerning his own independent schemes, and how exactly he thought what he wanted to happen would happen; what Kalas knew about Melodia's big evil plan (yes, we learn a little bit more on this at the end of the game, but it doesn't make sense that the others wouldn't ask Kalas about this when he rejoined the party); Kalas reacting to Xelha being a queen; the status of Lyude's siblings; Melodia's motivation, or how much of her actions were due to taint and how much were volitional; what exactly made Kalas change his mind about his whole evil transformation; what Fee was doing at the end of the game... It's not that you can't quite make some suppositions, but certain scenes are robbed of their full impact because they don't have the circumstances and stakes adequately established.
To tie the above two entries together: There's a bit in the artbook about how Ayme & Folon hated Kalas's grandfather Georg because he was the one who experimented on them (though he would've left the Empire when they were very young...maybe they knew him as the one who developed these experiments?). That gives them a legitimate grievance against Georg, a reason for vengeance in their own right that nevertheless turns them into monsters, and would've been a good illustration of the "an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind" idea had the writers chosen to emphasize it properly. Furthermore, it's understandable that the only parental figure who actually cared for them dying in pursuit of a hopeless pseudo-vendetta and then exhorting them with his last words to use their power to protect instead of destroy would incite them to reform. From our perspective, at least initially, they're bloodthirsty thugs who've committed a horrible atrocity, killing an older man and his two children; from theirs, they're giving a butcher his just desserts and terminating two of his errant experiments. There's a good story here, but the game doesn't present it well. The script needed one more draft, perhaps.
- Connected to the above discussion: too much of the ending fight is placed squarely on Kalas's shoulders. The climactic scenes are all about how he has to be the one to counter Malpercio, how he's the last hope for the world; there're a couple scenes where he orders the party around in a cavalier manner that seem to be meant to establish him firmly as the commander and undisputed leader; his personality takes a turn for the Lawful Good boy-scout archetypical RPG hero that doesn't square with how he acts earlier in the game. It's unconvincing, particularly in light of how his face turn in general is poorly sold, and it's frustrating due both to how the heroes work much better as an ensemble than as just backup to a single superstar and how Xelha is built up as the true protagonist in much of the latter half of the game.
- Yeah, the voice acting for ancillary characters is really lacking. There's a pretty clear direct proportion of a character's voice-acting quality to their importance to plot.
- The villains in general are kind of cartoony and uninteresting when they're being villains. That's a rarity for JRPGs - the former point, I mean; most of the time, the villains are the most intriguing cast members. The bad guys become more interesting, in fact, when they cease their villainous behavior. This is probably part of the game trying to make its point, but it's a problem when events are ongoing.
- Everyone says it's obvious how much they're in love, but the game didn't really sell the romance between Kalas and Xelha. Xelha seems quite into Kalas (though, as mentioned in one of my first posts, she falls for him while he's looting the corpses of her knights, so exactly what about him she found attractive is a mystery), but Kalas never seems to return her affection much. (Even at the end, when he's mourning her apparent death, he could be a little more...stricken.)
- The dungeons don't have much of a labyrinth thing going for them, though this might be old-school me talking. Do RPGs even have labyrinths anymore? The game's self-styled "labyrinth" is cake if you map, though I think I'm the only one who thought of bringing graph paper to that hoedown.
- It's kind of difficult to explore what you can make with various healing/support/"useless" magnuses, since doing so knocks one character effectively out of the action (to make a successful combination, you can't use any magnus except the ones in the recipe on a given turn). Plus, since you get so many magnus in your hand by the end (60 total), it's tough for the "right" magnus you wanna try to come along unless, as the V-Jump strat guide suggests, you completely pack one character's hand with "test" magnus. Yet I know making it easy for certain Magnus to pop up in your hand would break the game. I don't have an answer for this.
MISC.:
- The music is good but has a few too many twee tunes. It works the same groove a bit too much. Of course, there're plenty of tunes, particularly town themes, that're excellent (the Komo Mai theme, for instance), but my estimation of them suffers simply by dint of having heard them one too many times by now. Particularly notable tracks: Mintaka, with how sublty and elegantly it establishes oppressive menace and rigid order; the end dungeon's RPG overload; the overworld theme's gossamer fairy tale, which develops in interesting ways you might not hear just through listens on the map screen; "Chaotic Dance," for being so damn weird. I appreciate that the game has a wealth of different boss-battle themes that're selected more based on mood than character or any other factor.
- There's a version of the opening movie with alternate English VAs (it's under the "lyude" tag on Tumblr; I can't link it), and I've seen the idea floated that the alt actor should've gotten Lyude's part, because the guy who actually voiced Lyude made him sound stiff, awkward, and dweeby, to which I can only say, well, guess what, people. The alt VA is objectively "better", but he has just a generic naive voice; despite occasional missteps, Lyude's in-game voice continually underlines many aspects of the character - his overearnestness; his lack of self-confidence - even if they're not being actively addressed in the current dialogue.
- There was this cartoon in the '50's my mother watched as a kid named Winky Dink & You where you'd draw on a plastic sheet on a TV screen to get Winky Dink out of various jams: a lion would be chasing Winky Dink, and you'd draw a cage to trap it, etc. Well, one day, my mother hadn't gotten her plastic screen when Winky Dink needed her to draw a bridge across a chasm, and by the time she'd retrieved it, she discovered that he had gotten across without her help, which she found most dispiriting. What I'm saying is that I know that the whole Baten Kaitos "Guardian Spirit" thing is just a sophisticated version of Winky Dink, but, like my mother, I still got emotionally caught up in it.
The second game: is not grabbing me, really. Hey, you know that breathtaking world design and use of color that so differentiated the first game? Let's get rid of that! The palette is muted, and the locales seem relatively drab when they're not being directly recycled. It promises to be the story of how the Emperor rose to power, but I don't think that's a big mystery: he was an accomplished backstabber in a culture that rewarded that type of behavior. Taking a fleeting look at its plot, most of the things I've seen it explain didn't really need explanation or would've better explained with just a little more dialogue in the first game.
(Actually, I wanted to comment on one particular plot point: The second game proposes that
(Also: looking at that Alfard mage's costume design and her name, and taking the time frame into account, she's Melodia's mother, isn't she? Or a reincarnation or something?)
Anyhow, all that, and no dweeb. I'll probably play it eventually; just not anytime soon.
Well, that about wraps it up! One of the best RPG experiences I've had in recent years, shortcomings notwithstanding. But let's not be sad. There's only one way to close this out.
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