Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean

I got this game for 6 bucks for the sake of finishing up my GCN collection. I just got to disc 2, and I'm quite impressed so far.


The battle system is very unique. You fight with a deck of cards and get bonus damage for stringing together straights and pairs/ect, with some of the latter cards having multiple numbers to pick from (via c-stick). Both offense and defense are done via the cards, so having a balanced deck is important, too many attacks and you get owned on the defense, but too many defensive cards and your hand is very hard to work with on offense. While the battles are turn based, there is a timer on your turns (a raw timer for offense, the enemys attack animations for defense) that gets smaller and smaller as you use the items that increase your hand size/number of cards you can play in a turn, and encourages quick thinking and planing ahead better than any reflex test. It has proven to be very easy so far though, I haven't had anyone die yet. I should also mention that there is no money given for winning fights, instead you have to take photos (cameras are one of the cards you put in your deck) of monsters, with connecting attacks (light/dark use, how close you are to the enemy, if the attack was blocked, if the enemy is forced to stay still from a stats condition) improving photo quality. It manages to avoid being annoying by making halfway decent photos sell for enough that just normal behavior will result in clearing out stores (which have limited, but slowly respawning, inventory) when you reach them.

The setting is also nice, and one of the few games out there that is actually fantastic. While the tutorial continent is a simple farming village and castle town, the rest are very unique, the worlds genuinely do have hints they developed on floating chunks of earth. I don't think I encountered any monsters that are "standard" goblins and orc style shit either (the tutorial boss dragon thingy and vaguely batish flying monsters are the nearest there is to something familiar)

Sakuraba's music is as always neat. Who knew violin and electric guitar went so well together?

The game uses enemies visable on map that throw you into a fight instead of random encounters.

On the negative side:

The voices are bad. While the main characters are bearable, most side characters given signs of the VA not caring. Fans of Metal Wolf Chaos will recognize the voices as belonging to the same set of Japanese based VAs who can speak perfect unaccented English, but not act very well. Thankfully the voices aren't of the painful to listen to variety, just the "can't act" (and thankfully for that, the laughably bad type) one. ALSO: By default everyone speaks through a cardboard tube filter, but this is removed simply by turning on surround sound instead of stereo.


The sheer amount of lost forever stuff is crazy and annoying. Thankfully there isn't anything for actually getting everything, but it is annoying for a completionist.

So far the plot is rather predictable: Evil Emperor wants to take over the world and is trying to revive a great evil to do it. I'm only at the start of disc 2, so there are likely some epic level twists coming.


Overall if you have a GCN/Wii and can find this game (or it works well on Dolphin) buy it! Monolith Soft did a great job here.


Now I have to find the sequel and Lost Kingdoms 2 (and the first if that is actually decent, I heard it wasn't too good) to finish playing the interesting GCN exclusives (beyond Twin Snakes, but I wasn't a fan of MGS3).



NoA is refusing to release Monolith's next game in the US, despite the Wii having a grand total of 2 real games in 2011 and NoE alreddy having translated the game

 

Ignore what I said about the difficulty, it increases sharply as soon as the 2nd disc starts.

Also the plot manages to pull of something AMAZING there too. The game is worth it just for that.

 

Nice, thanks for the heads up, gonna try emulating it...hope my Xbwaks controller can adapt well to GC gameplay.

 

Dolphin has support for the 360 pad built in at last check.

 

Hrm, I don't own a GameCube, but interesting. I remember Resident Evil 0, my first survival horror game, which kept me up nights with that train level.

Eternal Darkness was great!

Only game I remember...

Too bad RAM prohibits excessive exploration in massive maps...

I love CCG's, so this is me. YUM!

 

I suppose Lost Kingdoms is kinda shitty, but I like the way you really depend on your summoned bros. Pretty hard, too.

http://101videogames.wordpress.com/2011 ... -kingdoms/

 

AFAIK all games from Baten Kaitos and Lost Kingdoms series work fine on current Dolphin builds - tested them some time ago.

And Eternal Darkness is indeed awesome - finished recently.

Same thing with Resident Evil 0 and 1 Remake - highly recommended, but i've completed them long time ago ~Rev. 2xxx of Dolphin.