The games are really good I promise. Nintendo and Bamco appear to be shafting this remaster of a game five people bought the first time very hard, with absolutely zero marketing, no US physical release, and even just ditching English audio from the games. But they are really good - a combination of the creative talents behind Chrono Cross and Tri-Ace games, among the last big console RPGs with meticulously hand-drawn environments, a surreal fantasy world influenced by Arabic, Mesoamerican and Okinawan aesthetics and mythology, a quirky Rummy-like battle system (light deckbuilding + timed command input chains) unlike anything else Iāve ever played, and Motoi Sakurabaās GOAT soundtracks. I really, really want there to be a market for this game and games like it: lush, neoclassical dreamlike fantasy RPGs that arenāt besotten with moe tropes and the same five or six West European, feudal Japanese and/or blandly glowstick-futuristic aesthetic choices.
Here is the director and background artist having a toast to the remasterās quiet launch:
@ā2501ā#p133089 I bought it just now, in part because I somehow missed both games the first time around! Iām not even all that worried about performance stuff (whichā I mean, the Tales of Symphonia remaster appears to have been really bad in that respect at launch), but I am kinda weirded out that there donāt even seem to be any reviews out in the wild? Still, Iām sure Iāll have a blast because both of these games are exactly the sort of games that I typically enjoy.
@āKarasuā#p133091 I literally emailed several publications asking - begging - to review the game, and my responses were bupkis!! Bamco doesnāt even seem to have sent out review codes, which is insane. Theyāre treating the game like this shameful thing to be swept under the rug, which makes no sense - the games absolutely were and are high quality! Really dismal stuff.
@ā2501ā#p133093 Thatās pretty wild! Iām always astonished when companies do this, and I have no idea why they would do itā itās like theyāre treating the game like a tax write-off or something, and they don't want to call any attention to it.
Either way I'm excited to try it, especially given that the last few new release games I've bought have ended up being not exactly my thing. I don't feel like it should be as though I'm taking a chance by buying it though! The first game at least was super well liked when it came out on GameCube, if I recall correctly.
No pressure or anything, but I would love to know your thoughts on both games beyond just your recommendation. If you're up for it!
I bought it last night as soon as I saw it go up! Got my Switch charged and headphones ready to start today after work. Iām really excited to finally play them! I just hope the remaster is a good one and that there isnāt some laundry list of horrific problems that some of these have.
@āKarasuā#p133095 A writer friend was encouraging me to pitch a proper writeup on the games to some websites, which I very well might do after I revisit them properly. (I actually never played the second one!) Itās been a while!
bought my copy this morning!! the original baten kaitos is one of my favorite games ever, and i think it does brilliant things wrt the relationship between the player and the game world; itās a much, much weirder and more alive game than it lets on at the start. iāve never played origins because itās ridiculously expensive secondhand but iām really excited to dive into it.
if anyone is interested i [wrote a bit](https://www.superjumpmagazine.com/the-virtue-of-alienation/) about the connection between _baten kaitos_ and _chrono cross_ and the broader creative approach that the team took for both games earlier this year.
@āleahā#p133118 Hell yeah, gonna check out that essay later. Alienation and existential longing are big themes in Masato Katoās work, for sure. I love BK being the only game to concede the playerās distance from its world and actually incorporate that into the story, instead of pretending we are Cloud or Snake or whomever. We glimpse the game world through a looking glass, as ghosts, able to influence it in certain ways but not to touch - what can be done with that?
@ā2501ā#p133130 exactly!! it was really interesting playing chrono cross with baten kaitos in my mind, because theyāre so incredibly similar in what i think theyāre trying to do - bk is just more explicit about it, where cc relies to a certain extent on the playerās connection to chrono trigger to achieve its effect. both are really insistent on pushing the player away, or emphasizing the distance, rather than trying to pull you in. i love the final scene of bk - >!where all the characters wave at you through the screen!< - because of that. it feels like such a profound expression of what it means to experience art, itās the creators waving at you through their work, sharing time with you. the emphasis on distance also makes the connection feel more vital.
Been staring hard at this remaster for a long time. Never played the BK games, but I'm a huge Chrono Cross fan, and enjoy a lot about Xenogears and the Xenoblade games.
I watched an interesting video about it yesterday - five reasons you MUST play Baten Kaitos. One of the five reasons was its camp value, which I found intriguing. Can anyone comment on that?
@āleahā#p133118 Hey wow I love this essay, I agree with almost every word and especially like how you lay out the value of the gameās (literal and figurative) forced perspective and the strange heuristics of a āmodernā JRPG battle system with its multiple layers of systemic abstractions that defy real-world metaphor.
Though I would disagree _mildly_ with one part - I think the inverse relationship between attack tier power and accuracy in _Chrono Cross_ is a _little_ intuitive, at least in video game logic terms. Think of it like a fighting game: you have light/medium/heavy attacks, each with its own attack speed and therefore vulnerability to blocks/counterattacks. You usually start up a combo with a light attack, then lead into medium and heavy followups. Once youāve pulled off some combo hits, your meter will charge and you can unleash a special. This all _loosely_ mimics a general notion of fighting the audience might have from watching martial arts movies or anime: the hero starts out with light attacks to soften the opponent, then the pummeling begins, and eventually the fight climaxes with a dramatic special attack. Or, maybe the hero charges headfirst with a risky but devastating move.
I think the fighting game metaphor is made a lot more obvious in _Xenogears_, another proto-Monolith Soft game with Honne and Kato on staff. The battle system is simpler and the characters are depicted as large sprites on the left and right sides of the screen. The heroes are even martial artists! But _Cross_ās battle system is directly descended from that. (_Xenosaga Episode I_ also evolves the general concept in a different direction.)
But yeah, I love and agree with the thesis of both these games putting extra effort into evoking the sense of the screen as interdimensional portal, creating a dreamlike diorama world that feels like it exists beyond what you can see on the screen, and beyond what you _could_ see even if you explored every inch. Which ironically makes these gamesā worlds feel as vast and complex and lived-in as the background art, while 3D open-world megagames often end up feeling small!
@"whatsarobot"#p133172 Iām guessing by ācamp valueā theyāre probably referring to the first gameās English voice acting, which is of the āwe grabbed the first five Americans we could find off the streets of Tokyoā variety. Itās also not included in the remaster at all: Japanese audio only. Which is kind of lame, because Iāve heard people heap superlatives on the _second_ gameās (properly localized, professionally staffed and recorded by native speakers) English VO. But anyway, thatās probably out of date unfortunately(?).
Got about half way through Baten Kaitos about a year ago on the GameCube and I really enjoyed what I played, put it down and when I went back I couldnāt remember at all what I was doing. Thinking about picking these up as a way to restart the games, but Iām kind of sad they removed the original English voices for this release. I know it's probably a contract thing with the original actors, but I loved the corny vibe that the original voices gave off.
All that said I'll probably pick it up sometime soon. Maybe we'll also get a Lost Kingdoms 1 and 2 collection for the Switch, bring back all of the GameCube card-based RPGs!
@āmtvcribsā#p133231 Iām curious to get a closer look at how the background art is adapted (or not) for HD. The first gameās opening FMV looks amusingly SD and easily pinpointable as a 2003 Namco game dragged onto modern hardware, in the way FMVs often do for these HD rereleases unless theyāre rebuilt from the ground up. The backgrounds for the Chrono Cross remaster were (I believe) AI upscaled because Square lost the original assets. This is hopefully better off than that.