Tag Archives: tri-crescendo

PlayStation Portable, Reviews

Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth [PSP] – Review

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There's hidden depth to this game and perhaps it's my loss for not discovering it soon enough.
There’s hidden depth to this game and perhaps it’s my loss for not discovering it soon enough.

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/03/15/remembering-my-favorite-rpg-valkyrie-profile/

I’m going to approach this article a little differently than I usually do. The above is a link to a Joystiq article by Kat Bailey wherein she discusses her love for Valkyrie Profile. Coincidentally, I had quit playing Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, the PSP remake, only a few days before she posted this article. After spending about thirteen hours with the game, I decided it wasn’t for me. Today, I’m going to riff off her article and try to get the core of what exactly it was about this game that didn’t appeal to me.

What Kat really dives into first is the combat system. She describes it as it is – “fun, fast, and interesting to look at” and I agree, but more so when she considers it serviceable. She doesn’t linger on it long and neither does the game. It’s a combat system that lacks much depth. In my time with the game I kept waiting for combat to expand and it never really did.

Towards the end of my tryst with the game, I began to see promise in the form of new skills. These augmented my roster of characters in many ways, but why didn’t I see more of these in the first third of the game? It would’ve given me more desire to customize my crew and maybe look forward to battles. There were many passive skills that increased stats with many more that seemed to only impact my ranking for sending characters to Asgard – a concept that’s barely discussed. The combat and support skills that began appearing after a dozen hours, I wish, would’ve appeared sooner.

Each face button represented a character in battle.
Each face button represented a character in battle.

As she continues, Kat begins discussing the role of the plot in the game and the dueling narratives. In regards to the overall story of Ragnarok, it’s very straightforward. Lenneth is on a quest to recruit einherjar to defend Asgard in the impending end of days. The subplots of Lenneth’s past and deeper truths of other important concepts in the game are present, and intentionally obtuse. Kat describes this subplot information as “bad game design” as it’s there for the player to experience but the main narrative misleads the player. I highly agree and would add that the game really doesn’t explain much about the subplot.

I do like the concept of the game misleading the player to believe an untruth, but I find it curious that these subplots are present, but there isn’t anyone advocating these paths to the player. I guess the player is expected to stumble upon these encounters, which isn’t guaranteed because of the game’s structure. Granted, in my time spent I only had a few encounters that were related, but they explained nothing! I suppose that’s to be expected in the first third of the game – questions, not answers – but, honestly, barely anything is explained in this game.

This sounds like it could foreshadow a solution to a later puzzle.
This sounds like it could foreshadow a solution to a later puzzle.

Perhaps, the biggest detractor to Valkyrie Profile was its lack of explanations in regards to pretty much anything be it a gameplay mechanic or story beat. That being said, I was dissatisfied with the lack of attention devoted to the, admittedly, large roster of characters. Besides the initial recruitment cutscene, there was little attention paid to them again. I also felt limited by the game’s structure. Divided into chapters and further into periods, entering towns and dungeons became a commodity as I did cost benefit analysis to determine whether or not to take a certain action. After a few hours though, I didn’t really want to explore because towns offered me nothing and dungeons were hardly any better. The combat was unimpressive in the first third of the game as well. So ultimately it was a combination of EVERYTHING that left me ambivalent towards seeing how Ragnarok played out.

First Impressions, GameCube

Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean – First Impressions

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No, Baten Kaitos isn’t a jumble of made up words; it’s Arabic for belly of the sea monster and another name for the star Zeta Ceti.

Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean is a role-playing game released in late 2004 for the GameCube. It was co-developed by Monolith Soft (known for the Xenosaga series and the recently released Xenoblade Chronicles) and tri-Crescendo (Eternal Sonata) and published by Namco. The game is a story of revenge for Kalas, the primary protagonist but it also focuses on his (and his compatriots) quest to save the world. I didn’t find the story or characters interesting, but what’s exceptional about the game is its card-based battle system, which could’ve been its biggest liability.

Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean takes place in a fantastical world, a world where landmasses float in the sky, oceans are a thing of legend, and the human inhabitants have wings. The young adult Kalas is on a mission of revenge as he searches for the murderer of his brother and grandfather. He believes the person responsible is a soldier in the imperialistic Alfard Empire. The game begins as he awakens, confused but not suffering from amnesia, in a remote village. Soon after this point, he meets Xelha, a kind but mysterious girl who believes the Empire is on the verge of unleashing a great evil. Although Kalas believes he has no need for her, they join together as their goals run a similar course.

At the point I finished (about a dozen hours in), I had met a third party member: a rural fisherman named Gibari. He was beefed up and helpful in the rural town I found him in, but he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Beyond those three, I can’t comment on anyone else as I didn’t sink enough time into the game to meet anyone else. After joining up with Xelha, I visited another town or two and trekked through a few enemy-riddled areas, but the main focus was the routine run-ins with the Empire, which helped narrow the protagonists’ motives.

There wasn’t a ton of discussion regarding the character’s wings, and they rarely used them.

I don’t really have an opinion on the general story because I only played it for a dozen or so hours, but in that time span I already knew that I didn’t like Kalas. He was off-putting from the get go with his lack of respect for others and rudeness. Of course, naïve characters are the norm for role-playing games of this ilk; I’m sure that over the course of the estimated sixty hours of gameplay, he would mature and grow as a person. A lot of my opinion of him (and others) was based on the poor voice acting and that didn’t help in forming my opinion. It’s not necessarily that characters over or under act, instead my grievance lies with the quality of the audio – it sounds like I’m listening to people in a sound booth, as if whatever audio mixing that would remove this aura wasn’t done.

On the back of the game’s box is a quote from Nintendo Power: “It’s possibly the most beautiful GCN title ever made,” which I’d have to agree with. The game’s locales are like paintings that you walk around in, or like the PlayStation 1 era Final Fantasy games; they feature a fixed camera perspective with no player control of it. The pre-rendered backgrounds of the towns are intricately detailed and will often have animated bits and pieces, but because I wasn’t able to control the camera, navigating these areas was sometimes less than great; for instance when Kalas would walk into the background and shrink to signify distance from the camera. This isn’t a problem with Baten Kaitos, it’s just a style that I don’t prefer.

As the land masses reside in the sky, clouds were occasionally a nuisance.

What makes Baten Kaitos unique compared to other RPGs is its reliance on Magnus (playing cards) for items, attacks, equipment, and just about anything else. Each character had a deck of cards that they used in battles. As they leveled up, the amount of cards they could put into it, as well as their hand size in battles grew.

Battles revolved around each character’s deck of Magnus. A good deck would contain a mixture of offensive, defensive, and healing cards that were suited to take advantage of enemies’ elemental weaknesses. In battles, characters would have a hand of cards and I’d try my best to link them together to create optimal attacks and defensive maneuvers. I found that if I didn’t suit my deck to each area and continually keep it fresh, I wouldn’t advance.

The Magnus weren’t just used in battles though; they were used in place of items too. Special Magnus could capture the essence of an item, say water, and I could then use that Magnus to solve a puzzle, such as putting out a fire. I had to be careful with Magnus however, as the cards would age and their properties would change. For instance, if I had a Magnus with green bananas on it, as time passed, the bananas would ripen and the card’s effect would change. This aspect of the Magnus kept me on my toes and was in some instances, annoying.

An important aspect of battles and deck building was to try and use cards that had similar numbers. For instance using three cards with the same number yielded bonuses.

Card-battling games have a reputation for being obtuse, complicated, and slow-paced. Of course, they’re also known for requiring strategy, skill, and a little luck. What’s great about Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean is that it takes the best things about card-battling games: strategy in deck building, skillful combinations of cards, and a little luck of the draw, while reducing the negatives by speeding up the battle system and easing players into the extensive number of Magnus. It may not have captured my attention for too long, but damned if I didn’t absolutely enjoy its battle system.