Baten Kaitos

Back on topic. Playing through the beginning of Baten Kaitos right now. It's a very interesting game. For anybody not familiar with it, it's basically a card based RPG, where you make a MTG type deck for each of your characters and fight using that. It brings in an element of luck of course..but not as much as you would think. It works, mainly because it has some interesting mechanics that allow you to remove a bit of the luck involved.

Mainly, each deck is composed of several basic types. Attack, Defense and Healing. Some cards even do more than one. The problem occurs when it's time to attack and all you have is defense and healing. What allows you to mitigate that, is that to end off any play, you can basically discard one card. So if you only had two defense, but there was an offense you wanted to get rid of, you can just throw that away. It's not in the instruction book as far as I can tell, and it might not be even soemthing the designers intended, but it works.

And you have to think fast, because you only have til the end of the animation to declare the next card.

It's rather difficult. But fun. Battles are longish, but you level up rather quickly, and don't really fight allt hat much.

The only other bad part is that the game at times is unclear on where you go next. But oh well. That might just be me.