21st Century Digital Boy

Back to your regular programming: Baten Kaitos is pretty damn awesome. It has the gorgeous of Chrono Cross, but a far simpler battle system. I’d never have thought I might say this of a card-based battle system one day, but it’s one of the best turn-based combat systems I’ve seen.

Every character can be assigned a certain number of cards based on his or her level (20 at the start of the game). These cards are shuffled, and a certain number are drawn in the first battle. Every character has several “attacks” per turn, which are executed by playing several cards after each other; every played card is replaced by the topmost one from the character’s deck. If your deck runs out, the character pauses for a turn while his deck is being reshuffled. The trick is that you only have until one card’s battle animation has finished playing to choose the next one. If you’re too slow, your chain of attacks ends early.

There are no separate “commands” as in other battle systems, but different types of cards. Attack cards, Defense cards, Recovery cards. Some have more than one property (ie. most swords have Attack and Defense) and can be played in more than one situation. If an enemy attacks a character, the procedure is the same as with you attacking - if you don’t play a card until the attack animation finishes hitting the character, he’s hit without any defense. If you play quickly enough, the card’s Defense value is subtracted from the attacker’s card’s Attack value after all his attacks are done and damage for the chain of attacks is evaluated for the turn.

To add even more complexity to it all, certain combos of cards will result in the final card of the combo “transforming”, conjuring a different effect than normally (über extra damage and the like).

The whole “play quickly or die” concept makes the battle system more fast-paced than just about any other turn-based system I’ve seen before, and the fact you’re issuing commands to the characters via decks of cards adds both strategy (setting up the decks for the characters) and an element of randomness. I like.

Other than that, Baten Kaitos permanently breaks the fourth wall by adding the player as a “guardian spirit” who’s engaged in a spiritual bond with the main character Kallas. This is only occasionally actually noticeable though, mainly when Kallas turns to the camera and asks the player what he thinks they should do. From what the game told me so far, Kallas have his own ideas about what’s right though, and the relationship between him and the player influences battle performance among other things. Pretty interesting stuff.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28th, 2005 at 17:51 and is filed under braindump, gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.