Pick a card, any card.
These days, Monolith Soft is well known for being one of Nintendo’s finest internal teams, with the Xenoblade Chronicles games delivering some of the finest open-world JRPG goodness available. Long before the company was acquired by Nintendo, however, some of the first projects it produced were the two Baten Kaitos games, both of which were originally created to address the lack of RPGs on the GameCube. Unfortunately, neither title sold very well, but they’ve now been given a second lease on life on modern hardware with Baten Kaitos I & II HD Remaster. Though neither of these games prove to be exceptional, they’re still enjoyable refreshes of an interesting phase in Monolith’s past and stand as welcome additions to the Switch’s enormous RPG library.
The narratives of both games here — Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean (2003) and Origins (2006) — are related, though just isolated enough that you can play either release first without feeling like you’re missing out too much on important context. Baten Kaitos follows a somewhat unlikeable protagonist named Kalas, a self-interested sellsword who is hellbent on getting revenge for the deaths of his brother and grandpa. Early on in this quest, however, he inadvertently releases an old seal placed on the God of Destruction, Malpercio, kicking off a race to get to the other seals before the evil Alfard Empire can use them to fully unleash chaos across the world.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
