There are a lot of flaws in Baten Kaitos. So many, in fact, that I had a hard time getting this review in because I just couldn’t finish the game due to one such flaw. Despite all of that Baten Kaitos proves to be one of the most enjoyable RPGs this generation. That’s saying a lot from a seasoned veteran such as myself. It’s not amazing because of the story or the battle system, both of which have their highs and lows, but because of the atmosphere. BK has one of the most richly fulfilling worlds I can remember. You’d be forgiven for immediately comparing Baten Kaitos to the love-it-or-hate-it PS1 RPG, Chrono Cross. The same team is responsible for both games. There is also a notable lack of Yasunori Mitsuda, the seminal composer for Chrono Cross and co-wrote the score for Chrono Trigger. He is aptly replaced by Motoi Sakuraba, known for works such as Star Ocean: Till The End of Time, Mario Power Tennis, and Tales of Symphonia. It’s important to note that music is one of Baten Kaitos’ strongest points. Every single track has its place and is beautifully written and performed. There’s a wide variety of music, from intense battle themes, to calm villages, to jazzy hip-hop, to rock guitar. Not once does the music ever feel out of place. I will mention that the village themes are usually re-used and then it does become repetitive. It’s easy to ignore and tends to stop by the second disc. The game is atmospherically similar to the above-mentioned Chrono Cross, but the story is not. The majority of the first disc is spent on a quest to find and unlock the End Magnus before the Empire does. It’s a clichéd fetch-quest, but the first disc is (regrettably) just a set-up for the massive second disc. The game becomes a lot more story-oriented at that point and a hell of a lot more fast-paced. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that the second disc has one of the single greatest and most unexpected plot twists I’ve witnessed in my experience as a gamer. It manages to surprise without sacrificing sense to do it. It saved the entire story in my eyes. The battle system can either be really fun or really frustrating depending your understanding of it and pure dumb luck. Basically, you’re given a hand of cards that are in your character’s deck. The cards given to you are in a random order and have “Spirit Numbers” in the corners. When it’s your attack turn, you choose attack cards (the number of cards you can use depends on the character’s rank) and a finishing move, if applicable. When the enemy attacks, you use any defense cards you have in that same hand to defend as best as possible. The thing is, the game gives you a set time to choose these attacks. After the first attack, you only have until the character makes his movement to choose the next one. With fast characters like Savyana, this can really, really keep you on your toes. It also hurts the strategy of using numbers to get straights and pairs. Most characters, however, have normal speed on their attacks, so it’s not that bad. The biggest reason that the battle system can be frustrating is that you can occasionally get cards that completely don’t fit the situation at the worst possible time. When you’re being attacked, you might not get any defense cards for a long while, making you take some massive damage. Or, when it’s your turn to attack, you might not have any usable attack cards, causing a wasted turn. The enemy A.I. seemingly peeks at your deck, as well, and tends to target the people who don’t have any defense cards up, instead of the person that has defense cards and needs to burn them. These crappy hands can prolong boss battles to exorbitant amounts of time. Battles never get boring, though, so that’s a good thing. Graphically, the game is a mixed bag, but tends to lean more towards “beautiful” than “awkward.” The out-of-battle character models are pretty bad and seem awfully PS1-ish. I cringed the first time I saw Kalas run. In battle, however, the models are fine and move fluidly. The true beauty of the game comes out in the wonderfully designed environments. No two places look or even feel similar. From the Sacred Spring to the Dimensional Rift to the Imperial City, everything looks amazing. The character design, while distinctive and a good job of making the characters look different from each other, just didn’t appeal to me. Gibari is Wakka in almost every sense, though. They even sound similar. Six months ago, gamers received a Baten Kaitos trailer with amazing voice acting – some of the best we’ve ever heard in a game, in fact. However, the actual game comes with some of the absolute worst voice acting I’ve ever heard. Sound quality, appropriate voice casting, line delivery are all terrible. The game is unplayable with the non-battle voice acting on. Every single voice sounds tinny, like the characters are underwater and talking through a cardboard tube. It was seriously so bad that I thought something was wrong with my TV. Changing the sound options fixes this problem, but it can’t do anything about the ridiculous line delivery. Lines such as “Hahahahaha” are read exactly as they sound, completely devoid of emotion or acting talent. It’s not been since Mega Man 8 that I’ve seen a game with such horrible, horrible dubbing. If it weren’t for the decent battle voices (excepting Lyude, who’s terrible in and out of battle), this game would easily be worse than MM8. Yes, it’s seriously that bad. It had me begging for Tales of Symphonia’s voices. Experience and money are handled strangely in this game. Basically, every time you fight an enemy, experience is accumulated, but it has to be “awakened” at a Blue Flower Save Point which are usually in villages. You don’t earn money in battles, but you take pictures of monsters using Camera cards and sell them at shops. The quality of the image depends on your balance of light and dark attacks and how long you let the image develop. The money system isn’t that bad, since I never ran out of money, but the experience system can be extremely annoying. It seems different just for the sake of being different. There’s one point in the game where you’re faced with three of the hardest bosses in the game - at once. The problem is, there’s no way to cash in your experience anywhere. There’s a flower that allows you only to save, but not to level up. As such, if you’re too weak to beat the bosses, you are essentially screwed. There are message boards filled with frustrated gamers who have had to restart their games because of this little “quirk.” It took me, someone who had no problem with any of the bosses up until this point, almost a month of working with my deck to figure out the best possible way to beat them. I ended up beating them with Kalas the only one left alive at the end of the battle, one hit away from death. This was sloppy development. Quite frankly, I don’t know what I should give the game. The flaws, by all rights, should bring the score down quite a bit. I thoroughly enjoyed the battle system, story, graphics, and sound. All of those factors are far from perfect, however. Baten Kaitos seems to be a great start at what could, with polish, be an even better game. Even with all the flaws, however, the game’s amazing in a lot of ways. I’d encourage you to rent it and beat the game, if nothing else than for the amazing second disc. Just make sure you keep a separate save file for emergencies. 3 out 5. It’s a game that very much should be taken as a whole instead of the sum of its parts. As it stands, though, I can’t forget that near-month that the flaws kept me from enjoying the game. Rent it, enjoy it, but be prepared for some frustrations.