IvanF's Cut and Paste, No-Name, Nintendo Gamecube Review of Nintendo's Baten Kaitos Origins 2006...

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IvanF's Cut and Paste, No-Name, Nintendo Gamecube Review of
Nintendo's Baten Kaitos Origins 2006

To be honest, there were quite a few Nintendo Gamecube reviews that I never got the chance to write reviews for. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Chibi Robo and Tomb Raider: Legend immediately spring to mind. And then of course there was Baten Kaitos Origins, the long lost forgotten game that unlike most RPGs, seems to age over time for me like a fine wine...

On the Gamecube, there were only a few decent RPGs to speak of. Tales of Symphonia was great at first, but the novelty of the Tales battle system soon wore off once I tried to trudge through Tales of Legendia, The Abyss and now Tales of Vesperia. I loved Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on the Gamecube, but some of its shine was lost by how disappointing parts of its sequel were. Out of the previous generation of gaming on a whole, there were only a select few RPGs that I remember with nostalgia. On the Xbox, there was Star Wars: Knights of the Republic and Shenmue 2. On the PS2, there was total shit as there was not a single RPG that I could truly get into (my eternal bias may have affected things there though...). And on the Gamecube? There was Skies of Arcadia Legends and then came along Baten Kaitos Origins...

Short story short, I felt like Origins improved upon the Baten Kaitos formula in almost every single way. My only real gripe with the sequel (or prequel) was that it started off so slowly, as I never really understood the game until I finally got all three main characters. After that point, the card combo system was absolutely perfect as I have never experienced such a fun and engaging system of attacking the enemy. Milly's combos are, dare I say it, more beautiful than Square Enix tries to make the goddam women in their CG sequences. Sure, some of the dungeons felt like a chore to play through, but it was all helped by the fact that the three main protagonists became such well defined, developed and entertaining characters (in both plot and combat) that I really started to relate to their experiences.

Of course, Baitos Kaitos Origins was not perfect. The music was good, but nowhere as great as it was in the original. And obviously, there was some lazy programming involved as the developers knew they could get away with some nostalgia in simply copying and pasting old sequences from the original game. Still, out of the few RPGs I did love in the previous generation of gaming, Baten Kaitos Origins continues to be one of the few that I still feel the itch to return to one of these days. It has that nostalgic, epic feel that I got from Shenmue 2 and Knights of the Old Republic by creating an epic world filled with likable characters that you really start to feel for. Plus, the voice acting didn't rip apart my ear drums like the first game and the goddam fruit never actually spoiled, so really, how can I complain?...

Besides that though, my only real regret was not writing a full review for this game the first time I finished it. Then again, if it wasn't for the passage of time, I don't know if I would have felt as warm towards Baten Kaitos Origins back then as I certainly do now...