GAME REVIEW: Baten Kaitos -Eternal Wings & the Lost Ocean (2023 remaster)
A nostalgia bomb equally effective 20 years later
Back in my gaming youth, I did have a GameCube but I don’t remember using it very much or playing it very often, except perhaps for the occasional Gameboy Game that I threw on with the adapter. However, if there is one game of which I have very distinct memories (hazy as they may be after all this time), it was Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings & the Lost Ocean, which originally came out in December 2003 via Monolith Soft, Tri-Crescendo, and NAMCO. The game left its mark for having an extremely innovative card-based battle system that fully bled into the game’s overarching world, as well as for having some of the most epic story twists that I can remember in all of my years of gaming. Since we got a Nintendo Switch last year, I decided to have a look to see if this game was available in their store and lo and behold, they did a remaster last year of Baten Kaitos and its 2006 prequel, Origins, which I do have a copy of but never ended up playing. Since I’m trying to revisit things that brought me joy in my youth, I decided that my next big endeavor in Switch gaming would be to replay this game and… whew I hardly know where to get started, so let’s go!
The first thing that stood out to me on opening up this game and getting going, is exactly why I feel like JRPGs have run their course with me, generally. First of all, this game clearly took a lot, if not a little too much influence from Final Fantasy X. For one, a lot of the characters are practically carbon copies of the FFX characters: Gibari is Wakka, Savyna is Lulu, Kalas is Tidus, Xehla is Yuna… even King Ladekahn looks an awful lot like Seymour. The overall style is very Japanese, but it does feel like it maybe derived a bit too much from FFX, which was released 2 years prior.
There are also things about JRPGs that I kind of just generally hate these days, which I’m going to get out of the way up-front so I can spend more time talking about what’s great about this game. Foremost amongst these, is the overly-naïve characters doing really stupid things for the sake of moving the plot along. This is a trope in JRPGs at this point, but as I’ve grown up and started caring more about storytelling, to have a group of characters see really suspicious stuff happening and just brush it off, or to have tension in the group and just decide to ignore it and trust each other no matter what… it’s like watching horror movies. You know, those scenes when a character goes to see what’s happening in a murder room and gets murdered. It makes me want to scream at the TV, “USE YOUR BRAINS, YOU IDIOTS!” I do know that it’s a part of Japanese culture, to be kind and trusting all the time, but I have always found it quite frustrating when it feels like such an obviously bad move. I just really don’t like goody-goody characters either. In this game, Xelha and Gibari are just way too trusting or willing to let things go and move past them.
Also, some of these characters are pretty obvious tropes from Japanese storytelling: Kalas is your semi-whiny and obnoxious, yet (apparently) really charming and likeable main character (AKA literally every Final Fantasy or shonen anime protagonist ever); Xelha is the girl-next-door main female character/love interest for the main character who’s just too sweet for this hard world; Gibari is the helpful solid guy who’s just so good-natured and reliable; Savyna is the cold-hearted and strong badass female character who doesn’t speak much; Lyude is the moral character who suffered for questioning his orders; and Mizuti is the freaky weirdo character that you will love or hate. They’re a little bit cookie-cutter, but I actually ended up rather liking most of the characters anyway, because they all have interesting stories and they roll out pretty smoothly throughout the game. So while it is annoying that I can recognize the tropes up-front, rather obnoxiously, they do actually manage to utilize those tropes really well in the frame of the interesting story being told.
Okay, so things that annoy me about Japanese storytelling and gaming in general are now dealt with, so let’s get into it properly…
Gameplay
Baten Kaitos has a card-based battle system, so a lot of the game involves collecting cards and optimizing your deck. Beyond that, it’s a linear roleplaying game with a nice selection of map locations that have diverse settings to explore.
The game has an unfortunate habit of oversaturating itself, which is common again in JRPGs (looking at you, Final Fantasy X-2—a game I recently tried to replay in 2022 but abandoned because there were way too many tedious minigames). If you like to grind and collect things, I think you’ll have a boatload of fun with this game, but there’s a lot of stuff to collect. One gripe on this front is that there are over 1000 cards in the game and very few of them are actually weapons, armor, or healing items. I’ll get into that in a bit though.
A medium-sized issue for me is that they did not have a default order for cards in which they could be organized. I feel like I remember this from the first time I played it too, in hindsight. You can sort the decks via a few criteria, yes, which is useful if you want to find all of the items in your deck of a certain type (weapon vs armor, etc.) or element (dark vs light, etc.), for example. But they didn’t have any sort of base-level way of grouping the exact same items together; they could only be grouped by the type of item, not the item itself. If I compare to Final Fantasy IX, which is a game wherein I always know where to find everything, the item menu gives you the choice to sort your inventory automatically or manually. If I use the automatic sort function, it puts everything in order: items (in order of strength and relevance), weapons (loosely in the order of what characters use them, as they appear, so swords first, staffs second, and so on, with the forks and poison knuckles coming last), armor (organized in the same way as weapons), and so on. However, in Baten Kaitos, if Kalas has, let’s say four different types of sword cards with the dark element, I have no easy way to group each of those different swords together, because they’re all just lumped under the “dark weapon” category. It was very frustrating, especially with all of the junk items in the inventory that you inevitably end up with. If you could group them together, you could delete them more easily as they go bad and lose usefulness, thus keeping your deck tidy. As it was, I had to remove all of the cards from my deck and then manually put the same cards together. Endlessly annoying.
Card-Based Gameplay
Besides my gripes about organizing my deck, I think the card-based system is actually really innovative and remains one of the simplest and best that I’ve ever played (there are very few card games that I enjoy). Back in the day, the game wanted to do something to make sense of how RPG player characters could carry around 99 potions, 99 high potions, 99 super potions, 99 phoenix downs… you get the picture. How do your characters have all of this stuff on them at all times? Well, these guys decided that everything in their world has a life essence (even man-made objects) that can be captured by a card, or magnus. These magnus are used both in battle, as well as on the map, in a very cool way: you make use of numbers on the cards to make straights and of-a-kind pairings to get boosts; the longer the straight or the more cards of the same number, the bigger the bonus boost is. This is an awesome system and if this was all there was to the battle system in the game, I’d have no complaints.
SP Combos
Where I find the card system bloated is that there is also a crafting system in-game (SP combos), but it’s only doable in active battle. This system is bonkers too, because the game gives you a ton of these cards that, on the surface, are totally useless in battle, but if you combine them with another card (in the correct order and with no other cards used that turn), you’ll get a new card as a potential reward at the end of battle, some of which can only be obtained via this crafting system. Some of this is intuitive, like using different pens with notebooks; some of them are wild but reasonable, like using a helm, uncooked rice, water, and fire to make rice; and then some of them are just batshit insane, where you mix totally random things to get completely nonsensical and unrelated items, like using two different pens to get a holy grail. I think some of those are discoverable without outside assistance via the Secret Recipes that you can find in the world, but just trying to imagine figuring out all 141 or so SP combos without using a guide is bonkers. Furthermore, having to do this in battle makes this whole thing a bit of a side-quest, because you kind of need to go out of your way to try out these combos, and you certainly don’t want to do it in a hard area, because you want your card deck optimized, and you definitely don’t want to do it during bosses because you’re probably trying to take pictures of the bosses and you only get to choose one extra card as a reward, so it’ll likely be your boss photo. Furthermore, there are a lot of cards in there that don’t have any use in battle, nor do they combine for SP combos, so it’s just a total madhouse. It’s not bad, but I think the system could have used some refining.
All that said, it was also fun sometimes to go into battle and use SP combos as an opportunity to grind, so even though I think there were too many cards, the SP combo system was a fun way to make leveling up less boring, so props for that! While it’s more sensible to do as many SP combos as you can when your deck is smaller, it was still fun in the end-game to try to make SP combos when grinding and collecting card upgrades.
Leveling Up
They also changed the standard level-up system so that you can only level up at select save points by entering a giant flower and visiting a cosmic space church (weird, but okay!). This is fine, it creates a bit more difficulty, which the game also balances out by healing your characters in between big battles when you get slammed with more than one boss in a row (which is not common in RPGs, so thanks for that!). What’s even stranger about this system though, is that you get bigger level-up bonuses if you save up levels, up to 10 in one go. Towards the end of the game, I was pushing eight to ten levels in one upgrade for some crazy bonuses, which was very fun.
Money & Cameras
Another quirk from Baten Kaitos is that there’s no monetary reward for anything you do in the game. If you want money to use at shops, you take pictures of enemies and then sell them for nonsensical amounts of money. This was a fun system for money, but also bloated: I loved that you could take pictures of your characters and there was a common and rare version of all the PCs. However, there was a whole system in the game related to the camera quality and the lighting and all of that, wherein you can adjust your camera settings and whatnot, which was just so far over my head that I ignored it completely. And it didn’t make any difference to the gameplay one way or another, so I really think that they over-thought that system a fair bit.
Side-Quests
This game is a completionist’s nightmare, which you can take as a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how much time and energy you like to put into games. Okay, it’s nowhere near on the level of Final Fantasy X-2, which is the worst game I’ve played for bloated un-fun side-quests. Actually, I’d say this game’s actually pretty good on that front. There are a lot of collectibles, but it probably does require two playthroughs for 100% completion, considering it’s really hard to get pictures of every single enemy all the time, especially in places where battle options are limited, like in the Trail of Souls. Amongst the things you can collect are the full set of cards and moves, the full set of photographs, the full set of SP combos, the full constellation map… there might be a few more too, but offhand, that’s a lot of things to collect, so prepare yourself for having a lot to do if you want to.
Imbalances
There were also some weird imbalances between the playable characters and elements, which was bothersome at times. For example, the time given to make attack/defense choices for the PCs was not equal. Xelha and Mizuti were very easy to play because every move they make has a long animation, but I messed up Savyna’s moves a ton of times because her attack animations are considerably shorter than anyone else’s, meaning she was by far the hardest character to play. It seemed a bit strange to me that it wasn’t consistent.
Then, there were also inconsistencies in the decks, and keep in mind that it’s extremely inadvisable to have conflicting elements in your deck (light/dark, ice/fire, chronos/wind). The two magic users (Xelha and Mizuti) are easy to use because they can use all six elements and it was very easy to make decks for both of them. But everyone else was a bit wonky and the elements in general were not balanced in the game. Light and dark were the most common, which were usable by everyone except Savyna, who was limited to fire and ice. Lyude was, objectively, the worst character because he only had light and dark weapons and nothing else. Furthermore, his cards were the hardest to get in the end-game, so ultimately, he was really difficult to use, because his deck was so much harder to fill with useful items. Then, Kalas had a good balance of light and dark, and a decent balance of ice and fire (though his fire swords would extinguish in the early game, making him much more useful with ice in the first half), and then some select cards that were harder to come by in chronos and wind. Gibari had a strong balance between dark and light but was mostly focused on ice and wind, being a fisherman. So ultimately, chronos was severely under-represented in everyone’s decks, while there was a bit too much focus on light and dark (though that’s justifiable, story-wise, at least). These imbalances were a bit irritating, I won’t lie. I would’ve liked to use Lyude more, for example, and I would have wanted more chronos in general.
Class Leveling
During the building of the decks too, you find unique items that can be used in the cosmic level-up church that will increase your deck capacity by classing the character up, but I actually avoided using them right away a lot of the time per the recommendation of a guidebook, because they would increase the deck capacity, but the game hadn’t given me enough valuable cards to make me want to add to my deck at the time of getting the items. If I only have 40 cards that are good in battle, I don’t want space for 50 because then I would need to pad the deck with useless stuff. Pacing aside, this was a nice system.
Mechanics Overall
I’m sure there were some other annoyances in the mechanics here and there, but on the whole, there was nothing that made the game too frustrating. Beyond the fact that I’m a really impatient gamer and I got very tired of watching all the attack animations after a while, I really thoroughly enjoyed re-learning the battle system and revisiting something right about as innovative and fun as I remember it being 20 years ago. I love that it’s a fairly simple system but it’s not overly simple to execute, as different status effects could interfere with your ability to choose the numbers on the cards. For someone who’s a tactical dummy like me, I liked how intuitive it was to pick up. I also liked that it had a time limit, so it made me think both tactically and extremely quickly a lot of the time (no more so than when playing with Savyna, as I said… good grief she was fast).
Art & Music
Regarding art and music, I have very few complaints about this game. The remaster is beautiful—it looks like a fairly modern game per the graphics and I don’t recall having any technical difficulties, even considering the Switch has fairly limited horsepower as a console, and this isn’t a small game. I love the different atmospheres in the biomes, and I liked that they gave me some ability to interact with the world physically (trapping the magnus essence of certain items for later use). Yes, I do think they loaned a little too much stylistically from FFX, but they still made a nice-looking game with a lot of unique places that were fun to explore, so I consider it a beautiful game, despite being a bit derivative.
The music was done by a name that I realized was familiar from the Dark Souls series: Motoi Sakuraba. I really enjoy the music in this game; the only complaint that I have about the music is a semi-common one in games like this: there weren’t enough original tracks. I say this very specifically because of one song, which goes by a few different names but on Spotify you can find it under “Castle in the Sand.” This theme first appears when you go on a psychedelic journey through the Trail of Souls and the music is so simple, yet so trippy and unsettling, that it perfectly fits the vibe of this interdimensional kingdom where everything is indeed a bit trippy and psychedelic (there’s a whole city that looks like a picture book, for goodness sake). Every time the song started playing in the land of Mira, I felt its strangeness in my gut and it really added to the effect of the story and everything that was going on at that point in the game. However, the song was used in so many other places afterward that it kind of lost its effect for me. So, I understand that OSTs are probably not cheap, so I get why there wasn’t more music, but the game would have certainly benefited from a handful more themes.
That said, I think Sakuraba did an awesome job of creating music that really suited the world and atmosphere of the game, so the only issue I had with the soundtrack was that there wasn’t more of it.
One more thing of note on the artwork: I remember the voice acting in the original game not being great, largely because of the big twist scene. While most of the VA was just standard bad Japanese-to-English VA translation, the VA gets so bananas in the big twist that I remember it throwing me completely out of the crazy thing that was happening. However, in the remake, despite me choosing to have the language in English, the VA was still in the original Japanese. This meant that the big twist hit so much harder because it didn’t go heinously over-the-top in the VA.
Story
Then we get to the story, which is where this game really shines. Don’t forget that I was griping before about how generic the characters are and how many overly common tropes the game uses, which are all huge negatives for me personally… so it should say a lot that despite all of that, I still think this game’s story is absolutely brilliant. Without entering the Spoiler Zone, I will just say that one of the reasons I remembered this game so vividly from my teenage years was because of a big major plot twist that happens… around halfway through the game. It was so viscerally surprising for me back in the 2000s that it imprinted this game on me and frankly, I’m not sure I can think of another JRPG that has thrown such an impeccable curveball since. For that alone, this game has and may always stand out.
On the whole, the story is a bit cheesy and goody-two-shoes when it comes to the characters, but I think the concept is actually good enough that it holds up despite certain generic aspects. The greater story about the world as it once was, Malpercio’s backstory, and the disappearance of the ocean and the whale when the islands rose into the sky… all of that was pretty cool and made for a good, dramatic, and intense game plot. The worldbuilding was very fun. It was over-the-top in the way that Japanese stories often go, but without going so far out there that it stopped making any sense, in the way that Japanese stories often do. The overall flow is really fantastic. There’s a huge plot twist that shakes up the entire game about halfway through, which, as I said, is just brilliant, but there are also quite a few other plot twists throughout the game that are nearly as impressive. The slow reveal of information throughout the game is expertly paced, remaining engaging the entire time.
The main romance, however, was not one of the story’s strong points. It felt tacked onto the surface, with no deeper attachment or connection shown as the basis for it. If I hadn’t remembered the romance (for being weak) from the first time playing it, I might have expected it to turn out completely differently, just based on character chemistry.
Summary
I’m sure I’ve missed about a thousand other things that I’d like to say about this game, but I’m not ready for another playthrough just yet. Besides, I have Origins to play eventually too now. But I can say with some enthusiasm that despite inherent annoying qualities, I thoroughly enjoyed my replay of Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings & the Lost Ocean. It was a really pleasant journey down Nostalgia Lane that simultaneously allowed me to enjoy a beautifully made remaster. If you like simple card-based game systems or JRPGs in general, I cannot recommend this game enough!
I may come back and add more to this, if I end up playing it again sometime! I’m very sure that I have more to say than I’ve remembered to write.
Enjoy Bear’s writing? Consider joining her mailing list to keep up-to-date!
