Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean [GC]

Devoted Gamecube owners, justifiably nervous these days about the fate of their console, can breathe a little easier for a while. Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and The Lost Ocean offers a roomy fantasy world in which to stretch your gaming legs -- and a beautifully realized one to boot. Many have been quick to categorize it as simply one more card-based battle game, but that's selling Baten Kaitos short. It's a gorgeous-looking, mostly well-written RPG, set in magnificent environments that grab the eyes and the imagination.

Baten Kaitos' card-based system serves simultaneous duty in inventory and combat. Avoiding the classic, cluttered RPG mess of nested combat options, the game lets players build a growing card deck which replaces the function of menus. Individual cards serve as commands for attack, defense, magic spells, and general support. It speeds up fighting immensely, as you're not messing around with endless sub-options and other typical interface clutter -- just lay out your currently available cards, and watch the relatively brief animations of the results. It's a refreshingly breezy system that brings unique life to RPG combat.

It also introduces an element of not-quite-controllable chaos to the fighting, which is something of a double-edged sword. You're still constantly making and re-making your deck to suit your current circumstances (in much the same way that Magic: The Gathering players do), drawing cards at random during the course of each clash. You're able to constantly reshape and fine-tune your deck, even to adapt to the particular breed of expected baddies in each individual dungeon (not really required, but an option for those adventurers who want to get, you know, serious).

The good news is that this very randomness can render two or more successive battles -- even against the exact same foes, or types of foes -- as fairly fresh experiences. The (potential) bad news is that you have even less "control" over the outcome of a fight than is typical in fantasy role-playing games. Cruel little twists of card-fate aside, we still find the whole scheme breathes new life into a sometimes-plodding, repetitive, predictable genre of games ("The Spider hits you!").

Thankfully, the game world is beautiful to behold -- a constellation of floating masses of land, all with really striking visuals -- and the design of the individual environments are complex enough to be engaging without rudely bottlenecking you into endless unwanted "encounters." You can usually avoid foes on the field map if you really want to, but this is a game about building up a versatile deck for each character, after all, and the more enemies you defeat, the more cards you'll be rewarded with.

The side quests are not only inventive, but actually span the entire game, each introducing their own sub-sub-quests along the way -- good thing too, because the main narrative takes a good while to get moving, and relies on crusty old RPG tropes that you've encountered before. While the plot lacks a certain torque-off-the-line, it doesn't mar the ultimate enjoyment. The writing in the game constantly saves the day, giving the characters real depth and personality.

One thing that does come close to marring the experience, however, is the voice-acting. It's not gouge-out-your-ears atrocious, but it definitely isn't the equal of the game's other aspects, blunting emotion where it should flourish and injecting hyper-drama where it shouldn't. Thankfully, you can turn it off if you find it giving you hives or nervous tics.

Baten Kaitos offers a lengthy adventure, a compelling, gorgeous world, and more than a dash of chaos to the order of conventional fantasy role-playing games. It's definitely one to recommend for anybody's Gamecube shelf.