It's so cool this game finally got released in europe! Origins is a wonderful side companion and prequel to Eternal Wings that stands firm with its own story, while building more on the baten kaitos universe. The chemistry between the trio main characters as well as all the different characters you meet during the journey are very well done aided by solid script while the plot veers right to left with cool twists.
Stripping away some of the complexities of its brethren game, Origins sets its own rules and the right dosage of depth with a hectic, challenging and super flashy combat system, that requires you to always stay on your toes, even for normal encounters, but it's still always fair game veering on the sweetspot between just right and tough.
Magnus cards still have a presence blending deck managing for combat and collectable cards for puzzle-solving together with the standard jrpg formula. The cards adds flavour of novelty and innovation, but also not anything that is less intruding than whatever else you would use for gear optimising or menu items in any other jrpg.
While Origins has a strong narrative with inventive turns and twists, the plot takes its sweet time to get going in the earlier hours in addition to a few other segments where you're either forced to do fetch questing or talking to a multitude of random npcs to trigger the story, while this is a less occuring issue, it makes for an annoying presence the times it does.
Origins recycles a lot of assets and areas from Eternal Wings as they both share the same universe, While you don't get to see any new island aside from one, there are fun alterations and differences portraying the cultural growth and diminish 20 years prior to Eternal Wings.
What is fresh though are the neatly designed dungeons all having some sort of unique gimmick or majour puzzle setting them apart.
Thankfully the remaster of origins is mostly stable, occasionally staggering between 30-60 but it didn't get nearly as bad as Eternal Wings did. There is a weird Magnus card dupe exploit with the npc traders that I just happened to do involuntarily, other than that I didnt encounter any other oddities.
Like Eternal Wings, there are qol toggles for cheating through the game as well as increasing both battle and movement speed. But one of the more leasure adds is the ability to retry normal encounters instead of being sent to the game over screen.
While it is an absolute shame they didn't include the incredible english voiceovers, the japanese va is still super solid and at least to me didn't dismiss any of my favourite characters. Milly's english voice over has such a centric and near impossible performance to compete with, but I'm glad her japanese one was just as great in its own way. Guillo and Sagi are both just as wonderful too!
This game also has a new game - (hard, with tougher enemies and limited levelling) and + (memes) which i sometime look forward to hit.
Stripping away some of the complexities of its brethren game, Origins sets its own rules and the right dosage of depth with a hectic, challenging and super flashy combat system, that requires you to always stay on your toes, even for normal encounters, but it's still always fair game veering on the sweetspot between just right and tough.
Magnus cards still have a presence blending deck managing for combat and collectable cards for puzzle-solving together with the standard jrpg formula. The cards adds flavour of novelty and innovation, but also not anything that is less intruding than whatever else you would use for gear optimising or menu items in any other jrpg.
While Origins has a strong narrative with inventive turns and twists, the plot takes its sweet time to get going in the earlier hours in addition to a few other segments where you're either forced to do fetch questing or talking to a multitude of random npcs to trigger the story, while this is a less occuring issue, it makes for an annoying presence the times it does.
Origins recycles a lot of assets and areas from Eternal Wings as they both share the same universe, While you don't get to see any new island aside from one, there are fun alterations and differences portraying the cultural growth and diminish 20 years prior to Eternal Wings.
What is fresh though are the neatly designed dungeons all having some sort of unique gimmick or majour puzzle setting them apart.
Thankfully the remaster of origins is mostly stable, occasionally staggering between 30-60 but it didn't get nearly as bad as Eternal Wings did. There is a weird Magnus card dupe exploit with the npc traders that I just happened to do involuntarily, other than that I didnt encounter any other oddities.
Like Eternal Wings, there are qol toggles for cheating through the game as well as increasing both battle and movement speed. But one of the more leasure adds is the ability to retry normal encounters instead of being sent to the game over screen.
While it is an absolute shame they didn't include the incredible english voiceovers, the japanese va is still super solid and at least to me didn't dismiss any of my favourite characters. Milly's english voice over has such a centric and near impossible performance to compete with, but I'm glad her japanese one was just as great in its own way. Guillo and Sagi are both just as wonderful too!
This game also has a new game - (hard, with tougher enemies and limited levelling) and + (memes) which i sometime look forward to hit.