So today I finished Baten Kaidos. The game itself is pretty fun. I really enjoyed the card based battle system. This was the first time I've ever played a game where you fight with cards. Definitly interesting, not to mention fusterating. I can't count how many times I growled, "Another shitty hand?"
The opening CG movie is awesome--and by opening I mean the one that you watch before you even enter 'new game'. That's the only CG scene in the entire game, which I thought really sucked. Don't get me wrong, the graphics and animation are really well done, but the lack of cool cut scenes sort of puts a damper on all of that. There's not even one at the end, so don't hold your breath.
I need to point out that the voice acting and script in this game is HORRIBLE. The story is really good, but the--I don't even know how to describe the voice acting, but bad doesn't sum it up at all. I don't think there's a word that does. The script is full of cheesy lines, which I assume were thrown in because the translation from Japanese to English doesn't always cross over. With the B A D acting, it just makes it all the worse.
Character wise, they were all pretty flat and uninteresting. Yes, I know I said the game was fun, and it was, but mainly for the battle system and mediocre storyline. I really didn't give a rats ass about any of the characters. I did learn to hate the main bad guy, only for the annoying, horrid voice acting of the character. It made me really want to kill him/her.
I think the major pull to this game is the sidequests, which I spent hours on. They weren't that hard, but there's a lot of little things that need to be done to complete them. Running all over the map requires patience, I suppose.
This game has a lot of pitfalls, but somehow still manages to be entertaining. I'm not sure if the 'badness' of this game is just because of poor translation from Japanese to English, but to me that seems to be the case. Poor rewrite of the script, beyond awful voice acting--characters that have potential to be interesting become annoying and uninteresting. *shrug* If you can put aside that, the game is fun. Infact, I'm actually looking forward to the , which is apparently in the works by Tri-Crescendo (break off group of Tri-Ace *Star Ocean fans know who this is*).
Hopefully, if/when this is brought the to the US, they'll do a better job with the scripting and acting.
Posted by Zoso at December 13, 2005 01:37 PM