By far the biggest difference in BK and the normal RPG is the game's use of cards as a major gameplay element. These cards, or Magnus, do a couple of different things. First, and least important, is that they allow for a different style of interfacing compared to the standard RPG menu systems. Can't say it's better, but it's different and I do like companies trying different. But the big deal about Magnus is that they can store the “manga essence” of just about everything. This includes weapons, armor, and food. What happens is say that you find a sword, you can store the swords “essence” in the Magnus and then use it later. Same with food and just about everything else. And the cool thing is that some items will changed over time while in the card. For example, if you capture some banana essence you can watch the bananas age over time from being green, to yellow, to finally brown and rotten. This effect will happen in several different and unexpected ways and that means that you need to keep an eye on your cards to see if they have done anything interesting since the last time you saw them.

Combat Magnus are also the interface for battles. The Battles are turned based, with a tad of real-time thrown in, but not completely controlled by you as some luck and randomness certainly play a part. What I mean by this is that the cards that you can use during combat are dealt randomly to you. The “real-time” aspect is getting these cards in the order you want to use them before the battle starts. So depending on the cards that you are dealt your battle strategy can take on different styles. That certainly keeps the battles interesting and takes away form the monotony of battles. Depending of the sequence you play the cards you can produce special attacks and more powerful results. Not knowing what cards your about to get just means that you have to be quick thinking and have the ability to adjust. One thing that I didn't really like about the random cards is that even with the same deck of cards the same battle can be either really easy or next to impossible...it all just depends on what cards you get dealt from the deck.

As far as the graphics for BK, they are wonderful! This is probably one of the best looking GameCube games I have ever played. The detail in every screen is impressive and it's obvious that the developers spent a lot of quality time perfecting the look of BK. Heck, they even made sure that the lip-syncing was done well. Now if they only made sure what they said was as good as it looked! The music is fairly standard...you get luscious strings to go with the calm sections of the game and you have your rock guitar for the battles.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 85%.  Overall Baten Kaitos is a very, very solid RPG for the Cube. Don't let the card based battle system scare you off if you're not into that sort of thing. It's done very well and adds a nice change of pace from the normal RPGs.

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