A 2D card battling game? How does that grab you? No, look - come back. Secondly, this may be 2005 and the Cube may have proven itself more than capable of producing graphics on a par with the best the Xbox can throw out, but Baten Kaitos harkens back to an earlier age - combining pre-rendered 2D backdrops with 3D character animations and effects. Yes, recoil in horror every action you take during the game is dictated by a shuffled deck of cards, known as "Magus". Let's get some basics out of the way, so that you can get your prejudices in order before we move on to the meat of the review. They're best known as the people behind the epic space opera Xenosaga, but in between Episodes I and II of that series, they also squeezed out this little contribution to the GameCube's repertoire - which, despite the fact that we Europeans apparently aren't worthy of the rather more famous Xenosaga, is now arriving on our shores. Lift Me Upppppp.īaten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean (or Baten Kaitos and the Ridiculously Long Subtitle as it's known around here) is the second project to emerge from Japanese studio Monolith (not to be confused with the significantly less Japanese studio of the same name which is behind the likes of The Matrix Online and FEAR), a team largely made up of ex-Square developers who jumped ship to work on RPG titles for Namco. Tales of Symphonia easily rates among the top five best RPGs of the current generation, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is a departure from the traditional style but still absolutely excellent, and what do you know? With only a few months to go before the launch of the new Legend of Zelda, one of the most promising action RPGs in a long time, here's a little-known morsel from the Far East to keep JRPG fans nibbling contentedly and keep the dust off the top of those GameCubes. The last few months have turned that around to quite an extent. For a long time, we thought the Cube might suffer the same fate - and indeed, for quite a long time the only decent RPG on the platform was Skies of Arcadia Legends, which was unquestionably excellent, but merely a slightly touched up port of a Dreamcast game.
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Their sprawling scale and love of full motion video and detailed backdrops were far more suited to the CD than to the cartridge, and Nintendo's falling out with Squaresoft was a final hammer blow to the platform's chances of seeing much in the way of RPGs headed its way. After all, if there was one field where the PlayStation thoroughly trounced the N64 (and let's be honest, there were quite a few), it was RPGs. Few would have believed, a scant couple of years ago, that the day would come when a GameCube would be an essential platform for any fan of JRPGs to own.
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