Pls buy Baten Kaitos remastered

Yim

Not sure if I’ll get this because I still have the GC versions (and haven’t gotten around to the second one yet). I don’t remember Baten Kaitos all that well but I remember thinking it was one of the most realistic games I’d played, not because it in any way resembled the real world but because it had a consistency behind it. Or maybe just because instead of carrying around a zillion weapons and suits of armour and potions or whatever, your inventory is a deck of cards that could actually be carried around.

bnn

My 2 cents to temper expectations: BK1 is interesting but a bit clunky overall. BK Origins (excuse me I mean BK2) is excellent though.

(keep a few saves around in BK2 though, there is a baffling difficulty spike in the middle)

2501

sabertoothalex lol yeah the FMV being in English was in fact in the original Japanese release! And then they redubbed the cutscene that was already in English with different (shittier) actors for the overseas release! Very strange stuff.

Tradegood

I’ll be importing the physical edition later this year to check it out. I’m not the biggest fan of deck builders to be perfectly honest but I’m going in totally open minded! If I don’t love it, I might pop it in the SALE thread so that it can find a nice home.

2501

Tradegood The deck building doesn’t really feel like a TCG honestly - each “card” represents a traditional RPG item (weapon, armor, consumable, etc.) so you’re basically drawing a suite of command options each turn (attack, defend, heal). Use a command and you draw a card - the challenge then becomes linking synergistic commands together with a limited real-time window to think about each play. What makes it interesting is the cards have consistent properties but different contextual uses: you can use a weapon card on a defense turn or an armor card on an attack turn (the command windows open up like Paper Mario), but the results will be sub-optimal. If you combine two specific cards in a turn - e.g. a fire-property card and a wood card - they’ll synthesize to create unique effects, or sometimes even permanently transform one card into another.

There’s a whole sub-game around throwing camera cards into your combos to photograph each enemy type, eventually using light and dark spell combos to get proper lighting! Leave a fruit card in your inventory for a certain number of real-world hours, and it’ll rot; leave a milk card, and it will turn into cheese!

My point is, battles are a lot brisker and deckbuilding less reliant on painstaking min-maxing than you might think based on the words “cards” and “deckbuilding”. Like I said above, once you’re actually in a battle it feels more like tactical Rummy than Magic The Gathering. It reads partly as a refinement on Chrono Cross’s combo-based, “abilities as one-shot items” setup, and the item elemental properties with intuitive-ish DIY interactions even feels a bit like a germ for Breath of the Wild (which the BK team helped develop).

None of this should be mistaken for Xenosaga Episode I’s actual, fully fleshed out TCG minigame, which is kind of an insane idea that I definitely want to revisit at some point.

◉◉maru

There you go @2501 , here’s the Western launch trailer.

LeFish

I have both of these games but bizarrely finished neither of them (actually, less bizarrely I’ve a Japanese copy of the second one and it was going over my head) and I’m up for double dipping on these.

Even though there is a physical release of the game over here in the UK it only appears to be available in three online stores so far so it’s not exactly widely distributed here either.

RubySunrise

I nominate this thread as the place to talk about playing the game, too.

I started on Eternal Wings and the Endless Ocean last night. That opening cinematic/trailer that plays I remember so clearly, but had also forgotten about it. I watched that trailer so much when it first released, it’s easily the part of this game I’ve put the most time into. I don’t remember much about playing the game itself from back in the day, but I know I had it and played it - a lot of these early hours feel very familiar, but like a dream half-remembered.

So far I’m having a good time with the game. It’s gorgeous, the art-style feels fresh. So many colors! I’m excited for the battle system to develop. I’m wondering if it’s better to keep an equal number of different elemental attack cards in my deck to cover various enemy weaknesses, or to stack just one type to avoid opposite types canceling each other out. Obviously, I wouldn’t play a water and fire attack in the same combo, but it feels unoptimal when I get a hand with 1 defense card, 1 water atk, and 1 fire atk, and I end up just attacking with one card.

I’m into the blank magnus stuff, too. Feels like something cool might happen with a long string of “trades” using those cards.

I played this first session on my monitor, but I’m excited to play handheld next. JRPGs are so good handheld.

HeavenlyHalberd

Just a PSA: there is a menu bug that locks the game that I encountered that hopefully gets patched ASAP. Here is a very helpful Reddit post about how it activates and how to avoid it. I ran into it unfortunately but I was lucky enough to have saved right before the game locked. Be careful if you’re disposing of any cards.

◉◉maru

FYI, the latest update (Ver. 1.0.2) fixing the menu-locking bug highlighted above by HeavenlyHalberd has just dropped today. I am planning to start the game tomorrow in the plane.

2501

Finally set aside an afternoon to dig into the first few hours of BK1. Backgrounds look amazing in 1080p - the conversion is much better than Chrono Cross. Apart from that and some slight UI changes though the “remaster” is pretty minimal - no QoL enhancements beyond an autosave button, which is a little annoying since combat could definitely benefit from a fast-forward or autobattle function. It does feel a little creaky in the ways you’d expect a 20-year-old JRPG to be. Hilariously(?) even the performance hasn’t been updated from the Gamecube: the framerate is smooth in screens without too much activity and chugs in densely packed ones, just like it did 20 years ago. Nostalgic…?

On the other hand, the first few hours just reaffirm my belief that Masato Kato and Yuji Horii are the only two JRPG writers responsible for NPCs that sound like human beings and not glorified flavor text dispensers. Even the standard “rural farming hamlet opening section” feels like an actual inhabited place thanks to the inhabitants who go beyond spouting tutorials and “WELCOME TO TOWN” boxes - instead, like Chrono Cross NPCs, they talk about their work, families, fears, desires, and outlooks on life in ways that just so happen to convey useful exposition to the player. There’s so much gratuitous detail in the environments and dialogue for the sole purpose of making the world feel real and lived in, without ever feeling like the game is tossing an encyclopedia at you. The worldbuilding is thoughtful enough that you feel like the writers had the entire setting fully worked out before starting the script, rather than making it up on the fly - dialogue drops casual references to cities you won’t visit for dozens of hours, because they’re a part of the world, duh! And the post-Miyazaki fantasy ideas are poetic and mythical to just the right degree: in this world people have wings that are said to reflect the shape of their heart, but the technologically advanced nation no longer has natural wings and makes their own out of metal. The hero has one organic wing and one metallic one. Not subtle symbolism, but lovely - and most games don’t have symbolism at all!

Also dig all the subtle reflections and references to past and future games with overlapping creative staff: Xenogears and Chrono Cross in the rearview mirror, and the Xenoblade series in front. Might go into more detail about this later.

RubySunrise

2501 the game does feature auto battling, gameplay speed up, and a few other QoL features. Press the start button out of battle.

2501

RubySunrise !!!

HeavenlyHalberd

I’m on the second island and I like how this game features some random unnamed but surprisingly deep and fleshed out NPCs with surprisingly complex backstories and or/philosophical dialogue. Also, as someone who is going to poke around and read every bit of flavor text and check every barrel in a JRPG regardless, I love how this game rewards you with cards and it actually feels rewarding towards deepening your deck instead of other games just giving you a potion or something. I wish more games had substantial rewards for poking around like Dragon Quest and its Mini Medals.

2501

2501 Okay so after checking these out briefly I am 1) glad they’re in the game but also 2) mildly disappointed that they’re right under the no encounters/invincibility cheat buttons that keep finding their way into JRPG re-releases.

whatsarobot It’s not QUITE Chrono Cross 2 but it’s definitely closer to being that than any other game is.

whatsarobot

With each post in this thread, my resolve is weakened. I have neither the time nor the game budget (this month) for these remasters, but you all are making them sound so good. Chrono Cross was my favourite video game for many years, and I never realized, in all of my GameCube owning and playing years, that Baten Kaitos is essentially Chrono Cross 2.

RubySunrise

2501 no encounters/invincibility cheat buttons that keep finding their way into JRPG re-releases.

I’m glad they’re there. I’m a forgetful and distracted gamer. I don’t want to have to fight the same encounters I’ve done two or three times already because I accidentally left the screen before grabbing the chest, or because I’m wandering around trying to find clues to an environmental puzzle I don’t yet have the key to.

2501

Also though the “find an old man’s entire extended family from five marriages by talking to random NPCs over the course of the entire game” sidequest remains one of my favorite RPG questlines ever

Karasu

I’m an incredibly slow game player, so I’m moving at a sub-glacial pace, but so far I’m really enjoying Baten Kaitos. In particular the magnus stuff seems designed to pull me in, even if there are other little bits that detract for me, like the slightly hard to make out in handheld mode environments (mostly finding doorways in villages, really). Thanks @2501 for recommending it!

One thing that I’m noticing though, and I had the same issue with the Chrono Cross remaster: it’s pretty clear that these games all relied on the manual to do some of the heavy lifting for game systems, and the absence of the manual means that you either a) figure it out on the fly, through puzzling stuff out or b) you look up the systems online. Both of these are lousy solutions in my opinion, because a) often you miss stuff by just messing around but you’re able to progress, only to figure out a key system hours and hours later by accident and b) usually explanations found online (in my experience) go into way more detail than is needed, sometimes spoiling stuff unpleasantly but more often just presenting some kind of 100K word treatise on the calculations the game does for said mechanics. It’s hard to find the happy medium that I assume the manuals for both of these games provided. I know there are NPCs in BK that include question trees that fill in these gaps, but I missed an early one and when I found him later if was like it sure would have been great to know that before the boss battle.

I know everyone loves to dunk on how hand-holdy tutorials are in modern games but I think they’re doing work for the paper manuals that no longer get produced. It’s just for these games in particular there was little to no direct, unskippable tutorial content in the original, and nothing has been added to address that. Here on IC we have a bunch of folks who love to noodle around with game systems to figure them out (I’m often one of those people) but I’m wondering how many people playing these games for the first time have the patience to do that, and how many just give up.

Anyway, sorry for the mini-rant! The game is quite a lot of fun, and it’s mostly very beautiful, so here’s hoping it stays so engaging!

2501

Karasu fwiw the remaster has an in-game manual that covers the basics pretty well! Just go to Help from the menu.

RubySunrise

I do feel pretty strongly that regular enemy battles are often a big part of the deliberate pacing in JRPGs, and I always keep that in mind when using these QoL features. I’m here for the long form rhythms of area music transitioning to battle music then back again, correctly paced leveling, and resource gathering.

sabertoothalex

2501 Yes I had to spend quite a bit of time reading through this because like Karasu said there is zero in-game explanation for the way a lot of the stuff works lol

Karasu

2501 lol not sure how I missed that, but thank you!

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