The Xenoblade games both do an excellent job of pushing the graphical limits of their respective consoles, and I think Origins does the same with GameCube. Was I living in a haze of wishful remembrance, or was it as good as I thought? Two things I really paid attention to this time around were graphics and sound. I’ve long considered this to be the best RPG on GameCube, but it had also been a long time since I’d played it. One of them was the endgame, which felt a little forced in the past but came out somewhat better this time around. Even some of the areas I thought in the past that were weaknesses graded out better on this playthrough.
From start to finish it’s a polished, well-paced, gripping adventure, marked by great characters, even better settings, and some spectacular plot twists. The Prequel - Baten Kaitos Originsįirst off, my 60-hour playthrough of Baten Kaitos Origins did nothing to change my conviction that it is the best RPG on GameCube. In other words, the games are at once novel but also familiar. As a result, the protagonist will often break the fourth wall and address the player.īeyond those differences, most of the games are usual JRPG turf: teenage protagonists, sidequests, inventory, weird animals, you name it.
Instead, the player assumes the role of a guardian spirit that advises the main character. Eternal Wings and Origins differ somewhat in how they implement the card mechanic: the former uses individual character decks and highly variable cards, while Origins uses a single common deck and a more streamlined card experience.Īnother major wrinkle of both games: the player does not play as a character. Rather, numbered cards are played out in a real-time fashion, a little bit like War or Speed. By “card-based,” I don’t mean Magic: The Gathering. The cards, called magnus, are used for inventory, for weapons, for just about everything. What They WereĮternal Wings and Origins are card-based JRPGs. Decade-old game or not, I’ve tried to keep spoilers to a minimum. It was clear that the developers were not against playing the games in this way the last words on Origins read: “The story continues in BATEN KAITOS.” This is a bit like watching Star Wars: Episode III before watching Episode IV there is definitely a chronological connection, but it is a rough one, sometimes lacking in completely smooth continuity. This time, however, I decided to play them in a different order: chronological order, with the newer game ( Origins) first, followed by the older one ( Eternal Wings). I pulled them up and was astonished to discover that I hadn’t touched either of them since the spring of 2007, playing them in the order of publication: Eternal Wings followed by Origins. The first, Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean, released in 2004 the second, a prequel called Baten Kaitos Origins, released at the end of GameCube’s life cycle, just a few months before the debut of Wii.Įarlier this fall, after hearing about developer comments over the future of Baten Kaitos, I decided to replay both games. A decade ago, Monolith delivered two fantasy role-playing epics to GameCube. While X is (apparently) set in a different location from its Wii predecessor, it nonetheless carries on a lot of the ideas that made the first Xenoblade so awesome.īut this is not the first duology Monolith Soft has brought to a Nintendo console. Next week Xenoblade Chronicles X lands on Wii U.
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