Poll of the Day > Baten kaitos remaster finally came out

(+) Yeah! (+)

I bought it instantly of course as a BK mega fan.

Playing BK1 so far. Performance is surprisingly not good for a remaster of a gamecube game. But I shouldn't expect too much from the Switch.

There is no English dub, of course I knew this going in. I do have some nostalgia for the tin can dub with horrible acting, but I probably would have played it with JP VA anyway given the choice, since that was never an option in the original release or even on emulator to my knowledge if you want English text.

Marketing for this game is completely non existent. No NA physical release. No presence on the eShop. No critic reviews. It's like they want this game to flop.

But anyway, I'm enjoying it a lot. They added a game speedup for QOL and some other things. Graphics look pretty clean.

Damn, that sucks.

I loved both BK games, warts and all. I was wondering if they were going to redub them - especially the first game, which had terrible quality (I recall Origins being much improved on that one).

I find it bizarre that they included full English on the Asian physical release, yet (apparently) aren't doing a physical release in North America.

I'll still probably import it at some point anyways, but it doesn't sound like I'm missing much at the moment.

No English VA means no buy. Their loss.

darkknight109 posted...

I find it bizarre that they included full English on the Asian physical release, yet (apparently) aren't doing a physical release in North America.

It kind of makes sense. Physical distribution is much more expensive in North America than in other regions, thanks to the lower population density and inexplicable abandonment of everything the industrial revolution did for transportation infrastructure. For a relatively high-risk rerelease (neither game sold all that well, and while the Switch having five times the GC's install base and Monolith being a very highly-regarded studio following Xenoblade's success give it potential to do much better than that, that's still not exactly encouraging performance), I can understand going with digital-only to eliminate the potential for stale inventory.

acesxhigh posted...

Marketing for this game is completely non existent. No NA physical release. No presence on the eShop. No critic reviews. It's like they want this game to flop.

NoA putting zero effort into a Monolith RPG release, such that any success it sees is due purely to fans promoting it and/or actual promotion efforts in other reasons? Must be a day that ends in Y.

They did at least announce it in a Direct, though. That's something. Still, the parallels to Xenoblade 1 are pretty hard to miss. That one succeeded in spite of their best efforts, eventually turning into a flagship franchise, but because NoE localized it first, that created a norm of having most of the voice actors being British and NoA gets out of paying for them. I guess that's what they're hoping for here: If it succeeds, they get a bunch of money for doing basically nothing, and if it ends up being revived into an actual franchise, the precedent has been set of fans being okay with JP voices and NoA can just cite that as an excuse to similarly put no effort into future installments. Not sure how that works with Bamco being the IP holder, but it seems pretty par for the course with how lazy and risk-averse NoA has been when it comes to big JRPGs.

MagicalPrincess posted...

No English VA means no buy. Their loss.

MagicalPrincess posted...

I love [...] FFIX

FFIX doesn't have English VA. Why the double standard?

Any actual gameplay improvements to BK1, like deck management or how the elemental opposites cancel out each others' damage?

darkknight109 posted...

I loved both BK games, warts and all. I was wondering if they were going to redub them - especially the first game, which had terrible quality (I recall Origins being much improved on that one).

Origins had incredible English VA.
Stripping it out when it's already there and done, which probably took more work than fucking leaving it in, is a crime.

I find it bizarre that they included full English on the Asian physical release, yet (apparently) aren't doing a physical release in North America.

Wait.... Can you buy it from PlayAsia and get a physical copy w/ English dub still there?
Never bought from there before, I'm sure the shipping costs are atrocious...

adjl posted...

NoA putting zero effort into a Monolith RPG release, such that any success it sees is due purely to fans promoting it and/or actual promotion efforts in other reasons? Must be a day that ends in Y.

They did at least announce it in a Direct, though. That's something. Still, the parallels to Xenoblade 1 are pretty hard to miss. That one succeeded in spite of their best efforts, eventually turning into a flagship franchise, but because NoE localized it first, that created a norm of having most of the voice actors being British and NoA gets out of paying for them. I guess that's what they're hoping for here: If it succeeds, they get a bunch of money for doing basically nothing, and if it ends up being revived into an actual franchise, the precedent has been set of fans being okay with JP voices and NoA can just cite that as an excuse to similarly put no effort into future installments. Not sure how that works with Bamco being the IP holder, but it seems pretty par for the course with how lazy and risk-averse NoA has been when it comes to big JRPGs.

They literally did a Direct the day it released and couldn't be bothered to include a 30 second, "hey, this game is out today!" notice. It's fucking pathetic.

FFIX doesn't have English VA. Why the double standard?

I think the fact that an English VA already exists and requires no effort and little to no money (don't know how licensing agreements work for a game from 2 decades ago...but if re-using already done VA costs even 1/10 of recording new lines from scratch, that's fucking bull shit) just makes it an extra slap in the face. If the game never had it, then sure, they can't afford to add it for such a niche game. Fine. But they had it, and actively removed it.
(And I saw speculation it was b/c some of the dialogue might be "troubling" for "modern audiences" so while they can translate Japanese into whatever English text they want, they'd have to re-record the English VA to add in the censorship... Not sure WTF in BK would be considered troublesome, but the bar for offending twitter is so fucking low, I wouldn't be surprised)

darkknight109 posted...

I find it bizarre that they included full English on the Asian physical release, yet (apparently) aren't doing a physical release in North America.

SEA releases do this a lot, I got used to it in the PS3 era

streamofthesky posted...

Stripping it out when it's already there and done, which probably took more work than f***ing leaving it in, is a crime.

I'd guess file size issues played a role there. They were both two-disc games to begin with, and when you throw updated visuals on top of that and try to cram both games into a single card, I could believe that finding room for dual audio (or more, in Europe's case) was a problem. And then rather than making multiple single-audio versions of the game, they just made the one and slapped the pre-existing translated text onto it. Toss in that the first game's voice acting was so bad and that it would just be weird to have one game voiced in English and not the other, and I can kind of understand taking the easy road.

Odds are, though, they started from the Japanese version of the game, so they didn't have to take the English audio out.

streamofthesky posted...

They literally did a Direct the day it released and couldn't be bothered to include a 30 second, "hey, this game is out today!" notice. It's f***ing pathetic.

A Direct that included a montage of recent/immediately upcoming games, no less, so it could have been more like 5 seconds. That is a little weird. There were quite a few other new RPGs in the direct, so I'm half wondering if they left it out to avoid stepping on third party toes.

darkknight109 posted...

I find it bizarre that they included full English on the Asian physical release, yet (apparently) aren't doing a physical release in North America.

Is that the physical release only? I usually buy games from HK eshop because it tends to be cheaper, but this one was listed as only having Korean and Chinese language options for some reason.

streamofthesky posted...

Any actual gameplay improvements to BK1, like deck management or how the elemental opposites cancel out each others' damage?

That is still a thing. Battle is pretty much the same but all the menus are different. Deck management seems more streamlined.

I would absolutely not bet on a HK release having english if it's not advertised

adjl posted...

It kind of makes sense. Physical distribution is much more expensive in North America than in other regions, thanks to the lower population density and inexplicable abandonment of everything the industrial revolution did for transportation infrastructure.

Yeah, this is all true but Australia got one, so

acesxhigh posted...

Yeah, this is all true but Australia got one, so

True. Granted, most of Australia's people live in a very small percentage of the country that is somewhat well-connected, so getting to a majority of the game stores isn't too hard, even if covering the whole country would be. The same is true of Canada (though less on the well-connected front, because for some reason there isn't a high-speed rail line that covers the Quebec-Windsor corridor despite literally half of the country's people living along that straight line), but NoA makes decisions like this on the basis of the US and we just kind of get pulled along for that ride, so that doesn't really change much.

streamofthesky posted...

They literally did a Direct the day it released and couldn't be bothered to include a 30 second, "hey, this game is out today!" notice. It's fucking pathetic.

there would be 0 reason to do that lmao.

the only reason this remaster even exists is because bandaid was getting close to losing the ip.

streamofthesky posted...

Wait.... Can you buy it from PlayAsia and get a physical copy w/ English dub still there?
Never bought from there before, I'm sure the shipping costs are atrocious...

No, sorry, by "full English", I meant English menus/script, not the dub. So far as I'm aware, no version has any English dubbing.

acesxhigh posted...

Is that the physical release only? I usually buy games from HK eshop because it tends to be cheaper, but this one was listed as only having Korean and Chinese language options for some reason.

I'm basing this off of an article I read online that said the physical version has an English language option and, since the Switch is region free, anyone who wants a physical copy should be able to order it without issue. I cannot confirm the accuracy of this information, as I don't actually have the game myself.