Back when I was just hitting the stride of my fascination with JRPGs and Baten Kaitos was announced, I was excited. I mean really excited. Here was a turn-based game coming to the Gamecube, the one modern system I owned (at the time), that was absolutely gorgeous, was going to sport an original battle system and story, and promised to be very, very long. I had just played through Tales of Symphonia and
thoroughly enjoyed it (an experience that would later turn a little sour for me) but I was itching for something more traditional, and Baten Kaitos was looking to provide just was I was looking for. I remember receiving it as a Christmas gift the year it released in North America, promptly throwing it in my Gamecube, and preparing to be dazzled.

The game wasted no time in bringing my expectations down: I was not only presented with less-than-average voice acting but voice acting that sounded like it was being recorded from a tin can, something almost everyone complains about immediately when they first play it. The game only disappointed me further from there: every time I met a new, promising character, my high expectancy for the game was grounded by mediocrity. The battle system was unique, sure, but it did not hold my attention very well. The story quickly devolved into territory I'd seen plenty of times before, the characters grated on my nerves, and while the game was certainly pretty, it lost my attention quickly. I didn't want to play this game on looks alone.

If anything represents how this game feels when playing it, it's the opening cinematic. http://www.youtube.com/embed/6HMczCElPaI

Baten Kaitos quickly joined The Notorious Gamecube Three alongside Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Star Fox Adventures in games that I was terribly disappointed in but was determined to beat, but I wasn't so much angry at Baten Kaitos as I was let down. There were moments where I enjoyed the game, but they were always outweighed by just how forgettable the rest of the game felt. (FF:CC is a game I appreciate long after playing it, but I was only disappointed in it because I solo'd the whole game and wanted much more out of it. Star Fox Adventures, however, is just dreadful and I do not like it at all.)

But nothing turned me off of the game faster than the ending, which involved the death of a major character due to a plot device previously unmentioned, only to turn around and revive her using another plot device in what was probably the cheapest attempt at drawing emotion out of me I had seen out of a video game yet, and not before sitting through an hour-long epilogue. I felt cheated out of what was supposed to be an eighty-hour long grand adventure. I didn't want anything to do with the game anymore, and I immediately forgot about the game except to advise people to play the much better and more fun Paper Mario 2.

Years pass, and after growing up and really jumping into the better JRPGs out there, I decided to go back and take another look at Baten Kaitos in hopes of pinpointing exactly what it was that disappointed
me so much. I had since run into several people who were diehard fans of the apparently short-lived series, and those who would defend it always did so with well thought-out arguments. Had I judged the game too harshly? Did it deserve another playthrough? I decided to try playing it again, at least for a little bit, to see how it would hold up.

Right from the start I hit the same problem I did years ago: the voice acting. Tinny voices aside, it was just... bad. The voices didn't sound professional so much as they sounded like a group of aspiring voice acting students dubbed the game as a class project. There's different kinds of bad voice acting, but this was the kind that couldn't be overlooked, that was so ineffective that it took away from the game. It's not the kind of voice acting that is laughably bad, it's just completely void of memorability.

The music bugged me too, but this was a more personal gripe. Without a doubt the Baten Kaitos series sports Namco composer Motoi Sakuraba's finest work, but even this wasn't as good as I would've liked it to be. The music itself was fine: a lot of the more passive themes in the game were very forgettable, but the battle themes are all great. There's just something about the way Sakuraba uses instruments that I
can never seem to appreciate as much as other people do.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/O4FdfaRX8EM
http://www.youtube.com/embed/bv8SydHgYCM
It's not exactly bad, but none of the tracks do anything for me. They feel hollow, and I wish I could enjoy it more than I do. It's certainly miles better than anything he's done in the Tales Of series, but that isn't saying much.

But what else bugged me about this game? I hadn't thought to turn the voices off entirely on my first playthrough, and I found that doing so dramatically increased how much I enjoyed the story and
characters. But that couldn't be it, could it? The battle system was a mix of turn-based combat and card games and was just original enough to stand out on its own. It wasn't the best in the world but it worked, and it had neat ideas, much like the rest of the game. Environments were spectacular and creative
direction was about as solid as they come. The dungeons were all unique and a joy to play through. Even the story, while not as strong as it could've been, pulled a neat plot twist that I haven't seen many games have the courage to do (a twist that I had somehow forgotten entirely about).

I realized, looking over this previously disappointing game, that the sound was entirely what bothered me. Motoi Sakuraba's score I couldn't change, but just muting the voices fixed the game enough to be enjoyed on at least some level. It felt picky and unfair, but I could at least finally settle my differences with the game: Baten Kaitos was good.

The ending is still horrible, though.

This experience (and long writeup) taught me something that, at least in RPGs, I'll never forget: voice acting is a very delicate field. In the rush to make video games as realistic as possible, we've all
subconsciously decided that a game can only benefit from voice acting, to add to the life the characters bring to the screen. And this works if your game is going for realism and you're willing to foot the
bill to hire talented voices.

But with JRPGs it's different. JRPGs are a genre rooted in tradition, and adding mediocre voice acting has damaged more than one game. RPGs, especially, are dialogue-heavy, and all it takes is one skewered line to ruin all your voicework's reputation (see: HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW). There are games that have the resources to pull off an entire game's worth of voice acting without too many mishaps but not every game has those resources. But a lot of people seem to underestimate the effectiveness of text-based dialogue. JRPGs certainly did fine with it before. It leaves room for each individual player to hear their own versions of the characters and leaves little room for the player to be turned off by the story unless your writing is rubbish. Obviously this doesn't work for every game (the later Final Fantasys come to mind) but if you're going the more traditional route, especially if you're using sprites, you might want to reconsider using voices in the first place, if at all.

(There are some JRPGs that decided to add voices that somehow pull off having bad voice acting and still manage to be really, really great anyway, and I'll be talking about one such game in my next post, but if you want the perfect example of what I'm talking about, Radiant Historia is pretty much the perfect example of any well-executed tradition JRPGs have either executed or ignored. That's another post entirely, however.)

Adding voices to a story-heavy game works if the voices you have in mind are exactly what you want the audience to hear. But, much like the relationship fiction authors and readers have with one another, you can leave voices to the imagination. Oftentimes I find I prefer to just sit and read the dialogue instead of having it read to me.

Hello Destructoid! I go by Bootaide most of the time. I've had an account here for a while but never really did anything with it. Then I ran into a couple of Destructoid staffers at MAGfest before a One-Ups concert and they convinced me to start posting, so hey, guess it couldn't hurt.

I primarily want to use this to get me writing more. I occasionally have enough thoughts about a certain event in a specific video game that I want to write about it, but normally I put it off too long/never really get around to it for it to matter much. Maybe posting publicly here (as well as having a couple of friends keep me in check) will get me writing some of these down more.

I'm a really big fan of traditional JRPGs, and I more often than not have a lot to say about them. I'm also into action/adventure titles, and though I'm completely terrible at them, I'm a total sucker for learning fighting games and getting to know their casts. I also have a lot to say about video game music, but not much that hasn't already been said.

Anyway, with luck I'll be posting here from time to time.