Baten Kaitos 2

By Tom Bramwell Published 26 September, 2005

Why, what did he do?

Wah, death of the Cube, wah wah etc. NONSENSE. Among other things, the tail end of the year will also see the release of a sequel to Namco's rather excellent Cube RPG Baten Kaitos. Which appears to be a prequel, despite being called Baten Kaitos 2. If we could tuuuuurn back tiiiii-aaaam. [Apologies. I'm guessing we just hit medication-o'clock in the darkest corner of the office. – Ed]

Revealed in Famitsu just prior to the Tokyo Game Show, Baten Kaitos 2 takes place 20 years prior to the events of the original game, and sees players taking control of a spirit that occupies one of the empire's Elite fighters, a chap called Sagi. As the spirit, you get to offer Sagi advice as the game progresses, which sounds interesting.

Sagi's on a mission to find out what's changing the world, and along with new friend Miri and a strange doll called Giro (no idea), he'll meet up with characters from the first BK including Gibari, Savyna, Geldoblame and Ladekahn. Fans of the first will also be pleased (or not – who knows?) to learn that the Magnus card-based battle system returns.

We should be in a position to measure the pleasure shortly after the game's release in Japan this December. The last one made it out in Europe through Nintendo, so we'll let you know if we hear anything.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (24) Latest comment 6 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Blerk #1 6 years ago

    Cards. Hmph.

  • kangarootoo #2 6 years ago

    Blerk. Hmph.

  • kangarootoo #3 6 years ago

    "Wah, death of the Cube, wah wah etc. NONSENSE"

    Man, you should post on here more, you'd fit right in.

  • tengu #4 6 years ago

    You've got a fan Blerk :)

  • Blerk #5 6 years ago

    I've been trying for a stalker. Fans are easy.

  • itamae #6 6 years ago

    Prequel. Hmph.

    Afraid to put any story inconsistencies into your game? Just do a prequel...

  • Mint #7 6 years ago

    "Why, what did he do?"

    Chortle.

    Never played the first one, looked at it and thought "blergh, cards", was I totally wrong?

  • Sorb #8 6 years ago

    Sound good. I hope they go for pre rendered cutscenes this time though :/ How´s it going with Baten Kaitos for PSP by the way, any release dates out yet?

  • ProfessorLesser #9 6 years ago

    Hated this game, absolutely hated it. It had no saving graces in my opinion. BK2 would have to do a hell of a lot to get me to play it. Dropping card-battling would be the first thing, but trust me, that would be only the smallest thing.

    Believe it or not, card-battling was the best thing about the first game. But that's not saying a lot.

  • #10 6 years ago

    so the cubes not dead?

    really?

  • Hicksy #11 6 years ago

    Good news - good first game!

    /hopes they can even out the difficulty in the 2nd, frist spiked quite a lot! o_O

  • cuniculus #12 6 years ago

    http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/cher/ificouldturnbac ktime.html

    Beautiful.

  • The Old Bill #13 6 years ago

    \O/

    Very, very good Namco.

  • Scimarad #14 6 years ago

    Nice music, nice graphics, ear-rending voice acting and awful,awful battle system.

    That's Baten Kaitos IMHO.

  • Daryoon #15 6 years ago

    The card-battling was fine, it was the rest of the game that was awful.

    Cliche plots work when done well (Tales of Symphonia). Baten Kaitos didn't do it well.

  • Gastrian #16 6 years ago

    Baten Kaitos was a bad game. Sod the prequel Namco and give us another Tales game.

    The graphics for Baten Kaitos was good if you still think the graphics for FF8 or 9 are up there with this genreation's offerings.

    And that damn card system wasn't even a proper card system. Its like taking the materia system from FF7 and making it randomised. A very, very poor game.

  • ProfessorLesser #17 6 years ago

    Probably exaggerating a little there, but aye, I never saw anything special about the graphics. They were alright, but they were just so static. I might as well look at stills.

    Don't get where Scimirad is coming from on the music, though. I thought that was pretty awful.

    I suppose I should admit here and now that I didn't have the will to finish the game after I'd gotten to the unforgivingly drawn-out 'find the invisible switches in the snow' bit where you can't save for, no joke, about an hour and a half.

  • Xerx3s #18 6 years ago

    "I've been trying for a stalker. Fans are easy. " - I could be your stalker if you'd like. Im good @ it. Also do sadistic twisted mindgames. But i charge extra in the weekends.

  • Scimarad #19 6 years ago

    So, to recap - Most of us thought it was crap but disagree utterly as to why it was crap:-)

  • itamae #20 6 years ago

    Well it was a bit crappy, but compared to Symphonia it was RPG heaven. And the people who think that Baten Kaitos' graphics were sub-par should have their eyes checked. I mean hello, the game has the most beautiful backdrops ever seen by man.

    /hated the character design and the battle system though

  • Scimarad #21 6 years ago

    Aha, now I really liked Symphonia (until I got stuck in the second Zero G puzzle...)

  • Gastrian #22 6 years ago

    Itmae, the backdrops were pre-rendered so of course they would've looked "nice" but character animation in the field was dreadful, the backgrounds were static and looked very flat.

    The game also suffered badly from "invisible wall" syndrom. A quest early on was to get some milk for some npc, you go two doors down and theres some milk in buckets. Two comlete the quest you had to wait until you were given blank magnus cards. Honestly, this guy is capable of saving the world but can't ask for a cup to put some milk into. There were quite a few quests where you had to use magnus cards no matter how illogical it was just to suit the designers need to be clever with the magnus system.

  • The Old Bill #23 6 years ago

    And I thought it was good, Scimarad.


    I feel very alone.

  • Azu87 #24 6 years ago

    "How´s it going with Baten Kaitos for PSP by the way, any release dates out yet? "

    There has never been any announcements of a PSP version, just a DS :p . And yes, it's still under development even though we haven't heard anything about it after it was announced a year ago. But a week or two ago Namco added Baten Kaitos DS with Xenosaga I+II to their homepage, so it IS still being developed.

    So no Baten Kaitos PSP coming any time soon.

  • Scimarad #25 6 years ago

    " And I thought it was good, Scimarad. I feel very alone."

    There was a lot of stuff I really liked about Baten Kaitos but I just thought the battles were way to random. Also managing the cards was way too much like hard work. I would probably have gone back to it but my GC doesn't seem to want to run the disk anymore...