Monolith Soft has been one of Nintendo’s most celebrated developers recently, with the on-going success of theXenobladeseries and their hand in helping to create the recentZeldavideo games’ worlds. While their newer works need no introduction there’s a lot more to the developer’s back-catalogue than theXenosagatrilogy, such as the Baten Kaitos series, released on the Nintendo GameCube in the early 2000s. With remasters of both Baten Kaitos games set to come to the Nintendo Switch September 14, I want to dive in and dig into why I can’t wait to play these classic JRPGs.
What made these games different from other popular JRPGs at the time were their deck-building mechanics. It seems that Baten Kaitos got lost in an era where practically all card-based games were compared to pop-cultural juggernauts likeYu-Gi-Oh, which overshadowed their other qualities. The games were buried in the GameCube library, immortalized as one of the console’s greatest exclusives that never made it to the modern platforms.
When combat ensues in Baten Kaitos, your deck is shuffled, and a hand is dealt to you. The battle proceeds by strategically playing a sequence of these cards. Each card, representing a weapon or armor, holds a numerical value ranging from one to nine. Unleashing a chain of cards with ascending values augments your damage output or resistance against adversaries. Moreover, elemental affiliations are associated with the weapons and armor, making it crucial to play the right cards in challenging encounters.
Now, a card battle system may sound a bit disenchanting to someone who is used to the real-time action RPG combat with strategic positioning and combo attacks the Xenoblade games have. But I feel like this is something that Bandai Namco and Nintendo were privy of when they decided to remaster the games.
The first game, Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean, is set in a world where humans live on floating islands in the sky. You play as Kalas, a young man seeking revenge for the murder of his family. Kalas meets a spirit-like creature named Xelha and joins her on a quest to recover magical cards called “Magnus” scattered throughout the world. Magnus are objects that store memories and emotions from various moments in time. These objects can range from ordinary items like fruits, flowers, and weapons to more significant artifacts like ancient relics. Each Magnus is unique and contains a specific memory tied to it, making it a sort of “memory capsule.” These Magnus cards can capture the essence of objects and creatures. The second game, Baten Kaitos Origins, is a prequel set thousands of years before the events of the first game. The story follows a young Guardian Spirit named Sagi, who is investigating a series of political assassinations in the floating kingdom of Diadem. As Sagi’s journey unfolds, players will discover the ancient origins of the Magnus cards and the roots of the conflict that eventually led to the events of the first game.
On the surface, these sound like your typical JRPGs, but much like any Monolith Soft game, it’s checking under the proverbial hood that’ll show us what’s truly exciting about them. What makes the adventure different is you. Yes,you. See, you take on the role of a god-like figure. In both games, you’re not just the player controlling the characters, but an active participant in the world: an entity known as the “Guardian Spirit.” As the Guardian Spirit, you exist outside the main narrative as a separate entity with the power to peer into the characters' lives, influence events, and manipulate time. This unique perspective allows you to observe the unfolding story and interact with the characters in unconventional ways.
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Throughout the games, characters are aware of your presence as the Guardian Spirit, and they may occasionally address you directly, breaking the fourth wall. This adds an additional layer of meta-awareness to the narrative, blurring the lines between the in-game world and your real-life role. When Kalas or other cast members interact with you, they’ll turn to face the camera, including you in the conversation. All of a sudden the level of immersion is taken beyond the usual third-person perspective. It takes that immersive storytelling that I’ve known from the Xeno-series, but makes it more intimate.
The HD Remasters will have Japanese-only voice-overs and enhanced graphics, the option to turn encounters off, utilize auto-battle, skip cutscenes, and take advantage of the auto-save feature. As a new player to card-based games, I love the idea of an auto-battle feature. I used a similar option in Xenoblade 2 when I was first learning how to play it, because as much as I ended up loving the combat system, that game did a terrible job of explaining it and the mechanics got progressively harder as I advanced. Having the auto-battle feature on acted as a tutorial.
I don’t expect Baten Kaitos 1 & 2 HD Remaster to sell as much as recent Xenoblade games, but hopefully there’s enough interest in this somewhat obscure gem to let Bandai Namco know that we do indeed want more Monolith Soft games from the past. After all,we’re still hopingfor a Xenosaga remaster.
