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| Baten Kaitos Origins | 
 enlarge | From: Nintendo
Category: Video Games
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $16.45
You Save: $3.54 (18%)
Buy New/Used from $10.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  (11 reviews)
Sales Rank: 5100
Platform: Gamecube
ESRB: Teen
Media: Video Game
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Age: 12 - 20 years
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 0.1 x 0.1 x 0
MPN: bg045496963484
Model: 045496963484
UPC: 045496963484
EAN: 0045496963484
ASIN: B000GIPJ8E
Release Date: September 25, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | Players explore a massive world filled with memorable characters and bizarre creatures | | • | From the high-tech high-rises of the empire to a rustic farming hamlets, the level and character design in Baten Kaitos Origins is wildly innovative | | • | With a twisting, turning storyline, dozens of side quests and thousands of lines of voice-acted dialogue, they will easily spend 80+ hours in this world | | • | With hundreds of weapons, armor pieces and items at their disposal, even fights against the smallest monsters will be a fun and frantic experience |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Baten Kaitos Origins is a prequel to Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean, a Nintendo GameCube exclusive. The plot revolves around a group of characters that are struggling to discover the source of frightening changes (both natural and political) that are occurring in their world. During their journey, they will learn many details that help flesh out the first game, including how the despotic Empire government came to be.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 great rpg for game cube March 30, 2008
this is the second game of the baten kaitos saga but the history takes place 30 years prior to the events of the first game.This game is very good, the combat system is difefernt now and harder to use but that make the game more challenging.This game is much better thant the first because it has a lot of things that the firt didnt have like "New Game+"where you keep all your magnus in gathering(thank god), secret bosses and more submissions.If you play the first game you may want to play this too because it explains the background of what happened in lost ocean
Good but not that good March 29, 2008
I think that this game is ok but its not good enough when you compare it with the firts one.
 A worthy installment March 17, 2008
I was so happy when I saw this in the store, I had no idea they made a prequel! But yeah, you might want to play this first before going to the second one, just so you have a better background on the legends and how the lands came to the sky.
But this one is HARDER and more FRUSTRATING!!! You might need a guide for this if you get stuck...especially at the beginning of the second disc. But this game really is awesome, with humorous characters, even younger supporting characters and great new cards to use! Its not quite perfect as the next one, since the next characters are a little more likeable, but this is still a worthy installment! I hope they make another at least, these games are addictive!!!
 When bad decisions happen to good games February 21, 2007
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
Top Line: Origins is a solid game, but suffers from a number of poor design decisions that ultimately detract from the experience. Fans of the original may find changes to the combat system disheartening; newcomers may find the game to be simply inscrutable. All players are likely to find some of the design decisions frustrating.
Gameplay: Good
The original Baten Kaitos operated on an unusual combat system that made use of "Magnus Cards" that were drawn from an individual character's 'battle deck' and 'played' to achieve combat actions. In Origins, this formula is altered in three main ways. Firstly, the combat cards are no longer weapons, spells, or pieces of armor but attacks. Secondly, the battle system has shifted from turn-based to round-based. Thirdly, all the characters share a single combat deck. While some of these changes might have been good ideas, the execution was off, and as a result the combat is significantly less fun than in the original.
The first aspect of change was the shift to attacks. While weapon and armor cards are still around, they are now played to change a character's static equipment and modulate attack or defense. A character can only use one piece of equipment at a time, meaning one cannot simultaneously wear a weapon and a piece of armor. Attack cards basically come in two flavors, and the multiplicity of magnus numbers from the first game has been reduced to just one. Based on its strength, an attack card will have a number 1-7; these must be played in ascending order. Attack cards with numbers higher than 3 will also cost MP, which are earned by playing sequences of magnus cards or using equipment. In a way, this makes more sense than the old system, but it suffers from the fact that the number of available attacks is quite limited, and that only Milly has any custom attacks in the lower numbers. Having a broader range of introductory attacks, and keeping the old magnus number system, would have made combat much more enjoyable.
The combat system is essentially round-based. While there is a pseudo real-time aspect to the delay between turns that means occasionally you will be choosing attacks for only one character, most of the time all your characters will all be playing their magnus cards simultaneously. This is an essential feature of the game because it allows characters to chain attacks. When a character ends a turn with a special attack, the next character can, under certain conditions, continue a string of attacks uninterrupted for bonus damage. While this is occasionally useful, enemies do not die until a chain is completed, meaning that if an initial string of attacks is successful, the combo ends up wasting a character's turn. Moreover, the round-based system comes with its own set of disadvantages. There are, for instance, some boss battles where being unable to stop attacking, or to change the target mid-round, are serious problems. More significantly, the round-based system causes the player to be disengaged from the combat round. Combat amounts to a frenzy of card assignment followed by a long (with some enemies who have lengthy attack animations, VERY long) wait. As the game progresses, this tends to make combat a little boring and/or frustrating, in stark contrast to the original's combat system, which kept the player engaged not only during his selection of his own attacks, but also during the enemy's.
The final difference is that only one deck is used for the whole party. This was a terrible idea. While it does introduce some interesting dilemmas of strategic deck design, the restrictive number of cards allowed per deck significantly limits the possibilities that are actually reasonable. In particular, cards that affect status ailments other than death are essentially useless; they take up too much deck space to be worthwhile. Even a few battles will convince you that it's easier to wait status effects out using healing items than to waste deck space with items that cure poison or sleep. While the new discard feature is welcome, it quickly becomes clear that it's absolutely necessary in order for this system to work at all. While the basic attack cards are not character-specific, high-level attacks and essentially all equipment cards are (and only one of these can be played per turn). As a result, the appearance of a full hand of cards that are of no use, or can only be used by a single character, is depressingly frequent.
'Camp magnus' from the first game have been excised entirely; characters always start combat with a full health gauge, and all status effects end immediately after a battle. Quest Magnus return, along with useful "magnus mixers" that can be used similarly to the magnus combos of the previous game. Those combos, however, are gone, as also is the wondrous variety that went with them. The numerous food magnus and their kin are essentially gone, replaced by nondescript potions and bandages.
The game manages to be well-balanced in stretches, but there is a tremendous step up in difficulty at the beginning of the second disk, starting with an enormously long and difficult boss fight and only getting worse from there for a dungeon or two. While the game eventually settles into a steady progression again, the experience yields never truly catch up with the difficulty of the battles or the need for leveling. Even if the yields were better, leveling up doesn't do all that much good; characters simply do not gain enough strength per level to make their progress seem rewarding.
Dungeon designs are passable, but never truly interesting, and do not possess any puzzles of notable difficulty. It's very easy to just bull through most areas, though you will spend a lot of time in combat.
Additionally, the game has an absolutely insulting number of unwinnable battles. I accept the need for the main character in an RPG to sometimes be defeated. This does not imply that it is necessary to force me to fight that battle that I will automatically lose, or that it makes any sense at all to hand me a "Game Over" for dying too soon in said battle.
Overall, the gameplay mechanics are solid, but some bad decisions were made that significantly detracted from my enjoyment of the game.
Story: Good
The story here is actually two stories: one about a boy named Sagi a few decades before the events of the original Baten Kaitos, and another about a family trying to save the world during the Time of the Gods. The tale of Malpercio, presented in several different versions in the original game, mutates yet again. There is some interesting stuff here and there plot-wise, but it never really hangs together. There's a lot of mishmosh about people's hearts being too strong or not strong enough, and a pair of maniacal villains bent on destroying the world and burning down trees and stuff, but in the end it amounts to being just a generic mess, with stock Luddite ramblings about the evils of technology. Some of the twists along the way are interesting, but others are downright stupid (especially the final act of betrayal), and despite the name, the origins of the world Kalas and Xelha enter in the original are not really made any clearer.
The character interaction between Sagi, Milly, Guillo, and the player (again the player is himself a character in the world as a spirit) is pretty good, and there are many nice character moments, which bring my opinion up, but the characters don't do much evolving. Sagi is pretty much the same person at the end of the game as he was at the beginning, a story weakness made even more glaring by comparison with the tremendous evolution Kalas and Xelha undergo in the original. Most of the truly interesting character angles and ideas never really get much play, although there could have been more solid ruminations on what constitutes good and evil and about the nature of betrayal. Almost all of the NPCs are two-dimensional and not really worth the trouble. For a video game, this is all right, but nothing to write home about.
Audio: Good
The music in Origins is not as grand as in the original, but still quite passable. Many of the pieces are rearrangements or variations on the existing BK soundtrack, which is perfectly appropriate and works out quite well in a few of the battles. The voice acting, thank god, is solid, a huge improvement over the original. However, I found many of the sound effects accompanying combat actions to be unpleasant.
Visuals: Good
This score would be higher, were more of the areas original artwork. A simply depressing quantity of the world, however, is composed of recycled screens from the original Baten Kaitos. The new areas are equally pretty, for the most part, but nothing is so stunning that you will be longing to see the artwork again. Additionally, the perspective is sometimes confusing, making it difficult to figure out how to move around some screens. The opening and final cinematics are presented in a watercolor cutout style that is interesting, but not particularly appealing. All other cutscenes are rendered using the game engine, which is reasonably good at conveying action, but lacks facial detail. All dialogue in the game appears onscreen with a headshot; these are likely meant to compensate for the player's inability to really see a character's face. Sometimes this works, sometimes it's not enough. The art on the magnus cards is nice, but again much is recycled. Overall, the artwork is of high quality, but enough of it is recycled for me to withhold some points.
Replayability: Average
There is a new game+ mode, and as before there are a lot of sidequests you could explore. However, I didn't really feel an urge to do so. Origins isn't actually that long, but it feels like a real slog towards the end, and you'll likely want to leave it on the shelf for several months before having a go at it again.
Overall: Enjoyable (77%)
I've probably come off a bit harsh here, but Origins isn't really a bad game, and if you're willing to put up with some of the frustrating design decisions it's actually quite a good one. However, caveat emptor! Fans of the original are likely to find the new combat system underwhelming, and the round-based combat can be a drag for anyone. The story is something of a mess, and hard to buy even on its own terms, although there are some interesting aspects that could have been drawn out more. Audio and visuals are enjoyable, and many will be familiar to those who played the first game (perhaps too familiar). Overall, I felt this game was a passable effort that, with some more careful thought and a little extra effort, could have been much better.
Good Story and Characters, but the Difficulty can be Merciless. January 31, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The story of Baten Kaitos Origins follows Sagi, his unorthadox looking companion Guilo, and a young girl named Milliarde as they discover ancient mysteries of the being known as Malpercio, his afterlings, and an empire that must be stopped. It is a good story and each of the characters, as the player plays deeper into the game, becomes three dimensional and full of depth and personality. One of the things the empire fights for is "promachination" which staunchly supports human technology and invention and belittles the "wings of the heart". The empire represents the cold, industrial, technology-filled world while Sagi, his mother Gena, and many others represent the bond to the heart and the power and warmth within that attachment. Gena's wings of the heart are particularly beautiful as they are a reflection of her soul, and her inner beauty.
There is some silly back-and-forth banter between Guilo and Milliarde, but behind it all there is compassion for one another. Certain characters, although they may only play minor roles such as Sagi's mother Gena, are memorable and make Sagi's character stronger. The mother-son relationship is done very well.
Majority of the locations explored within Origins will be immediately recognized by those who have played Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean. Each of the locations are very beautiful. The art design in the Baten Kaitos games is one of my favorites in RPG's today.
The music and voice acting are solid overall. The voice acting really helps to provide a layer of depth and insight into the characters attitudes and personalities. It only helps to have them speaking to be able to relate more to them.
If there is one thing that hurts this game, it's that some of the boss battles can be overly challenging. I think a challenge is a good thing, but in Origins it can cause the flow of the story to be stunted for the sake of giving the player a road block to maneuver past. Also, the battle system is based on a random selection of cards from a deck that you customize. You have to play close to perfect against some bosses and have a bit of luck on your side as well.
In all, I found Baten Kaitos Origins to be a solid RPG, but I personally think Eternal Wings is a more enjoyable game. If you liked Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings, then it's safe to say you will find Origins to be worth your time. However, for those of you who never played Eternal Wings, starting with this game would work because this is a prequel to Eternal Wings and not a sequel. If you crave a cast of characters worth caring about, a good story, and some intensely challenging bosses, then this game is for you.
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