Baten Kaitos Origins Review

Baten Kaitos Origins is one of the first Gamecube games I ever owned. Long story about that but it’s one of the better game purchases I ever made with zero information going into it. I bought this game 100% off the cover and back of the box.

BKO is the second game in the series as is the prequel to Eternal Wings and The Lost Ocean and it takes place about twenty years before the events of Eternal Wings. The game follows Sagi, a young new recruit to what is essentially the CIA in this world. His first mission is as assassination of the emperor of the largest and most powerful nation in the world.

Things go, of course, wrong. We wouldn’t have a game if they didn’t. Sagi and his paramachina (essentially a robot sidekick) Guilo decide they need to go and hide out till the heat dies down. While they’re breaking out they run into a, let’s call her energetic, young woman named Millie. The three are going to be the part we deal with for the game. This is out party. Sagi is kinda of the leader and a balanced fighter, Guilo is great with magic, Millie is pure physical damage.

Eventually the three get swept up into the political machinations of a new election for emperor and begin working for Quaestor Verus, one of the two candidates. The other candidate, Baelheit, is in favor of promachination of the entire world. Promachination is, basically, a 100% science position. Folks in this world are still very tired to magic, in one form or another. Two of those forms being the “Wings Of The Heart” and magnus.

The wings are the physical manifestation of a person’s soul. They allow that person to fly… kind of… Basically in this game it’s a dash button and allows you to jump and get around the map. It’s not really an important thing for the gameplay but it’s plot important.

What is important for the gameplay is the magnus. The essence of any object and some living things can be condensed into magnus and placed into cards. The cards are both what we use in battle and for quests outside of battle.

That’s a lot of information here but the idea here is that Baelheit wants to get rid of wings of the heart and anything that is related to them. Verus doesn’t want to mess with much.

Verus sends the trio around the world to try and stop Baelheit from, essentially, destroying the spirit of the world.

Sagi, Verus, and Baelheit, are all spiriters. A spiriter is someone who has a spirit bound to their heart. Kalas from Eternal Wings was also a spiritier. We, the player, are the spirit. We direct the decisions of the person we’re tied to. We talk to them about things, they ask us questions, we lend them our power in battle. Stuff like that. It’s a rare thing and spiriters are kind of held in high regard but also with suspicion.

One of the things we, the spirit, do is make all the combat decisions. The game is a basic role playing game. We travel from area to area, meet people, solve problems, shop, get involved with subquests and such. Combat is where the game gets interesting.

The game uses a similar combat system to Eternal Wings. Battles are all done with cards, but in real time. Eternal Wings gives each party member a deck you build for them and they use their own deck in battle. BKO has one deck that all characters pull from.

At the beginning of a battle, a hand is dealt from the deck and you have to use the cards which will best fit the situation. There are attack cards, weapon cards, armor cards, ability cards, finishing moves, status cards… there’s a lot. But essentially you want to combo attack from low strength up to high strength. This fills up an MP bar. Finishers and some of the ability cards cost MP to use. When you fill up that bar to a certain level you can then use the finishers.

You can build combos with attacks and finishers. One combo can have multiple finishers. And you can do what’s called a Relay Combo in which a second, and possibly third, character can carry on the combo that began with the first character. These allow for major damage if you can build them properly.

It gives a sense of urgency and action to the combat which is normally pretty “point and click” in terms of RPGs. Thing about your older Final Fantasy or Breath Of Fire or Dragon Quest. Those aren’t exactly high pressure battles in the same way that the BK games are. It’s a lot of fun and it’s very expansive. You build these combos using a weapon, attack cards, finishers, and the combo into another character. It’s really kind of amazing.

That’s a lot. This might be a lot.

Graphically I have always said that both BKO and Eternal Wings are gorgeous games. They still are. The character design is great, the enemy designs are interesting, the backgrounds are gorgeous. The character models are a little stiff compared to what we have today but I think the game still looks great. I love the world that the designers have created here.

The music in the game is also fantastic, there are some really good tracks. One of which I put up on the same level as “The Star Stealing Girl” from Chrono Cross. It’s really good stuff.

I will say a lot of assets from Eternal Wings are also used here in BKO. Character designs, enemy designs, backgrounds, some of the music. That’s kind of lazy, some might say, but since these two games take place in the same world so close together in time it would be weird if things were too different.

The game, thankfully, doesn’t have one problem that Eternal Wings has, and that’s with the voice acting. BKO has some really damned good VA. Eternal Wings was made by the folks at TriAce and Monolith, who you might know from Star Ocean. Good games but pretty poor sound mixing at the end of the day.

This game was made by Namco and Nintendo and they fixed that. The VA is MUCH better and the sound mixing is much better. You can actually hear what people are saying and it’s not so goofy that you can’t take it seriously.

BKO does everything I was in a good sequel. It keeps everything the first game did well and improves on everything the first game did poorly.

I love this game. I think it’s great. I’m really glad I picked it up on a whim when I bought my Wii ages ago. I’m glad I played it. I’m glad I finally, after all these years, finished the game.