All you uncultured swine (  ;) ) who played the 1st Baten Kaitos but didn't play the superior Baten Kaitos Origins have no excuse now.

Fuck Yes, this is exactly what I was hoping to see. Nintendo has historically refused to acknowledge their GameCube games, so this needed to happen. These are 2 exceptionally unique RPGs more people should play.

I’ve never seen Baten Kaitos Origins new or used in store before, and one of my best friends worked at Game Crazy then Play N Trade for like eight years. Since it never got re-released, I had resorted to other means to play it via the GC Loader for GameCube.

I kind of feel bad now so maybe I’ll snag this eventually.

According to a press release from Bandai Namco, these "remasters" will not contain the English dubs both games originally received...or any English language voice acting period. WTF? I know Baten Kaitos 1's voice acting was ****, but Origins had a great localization care of 8-4. What, did the chucklefucks at BN LOSE the original voice tracks or something?

Somewhere out there, a Monkey's paw curls a finger.

Well Nintendo has basically ran out of Wii U games to port so now it's time to raid the Gamecubes lineup of games less people played so they can basically advertise them as new games to the larger gaming audience.

Either way this is great news since I was always interested in both Baten Kaitos games but never got around to buying.  They came out in my late High School and Early College years were I just bought one game at a time and played that game as soon as I bought it.  So naturally I missed out on a lot of titles that way.

Now I'll these remasters and they'll go into my backlog and eventually be played in 2035.

Maybe now i'll finally be able to replay Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, which Nintendo has ignored since its original release and it usually goes for more than $150 used

Is Origins "1" and the first Baten Kaitos "2"? The presentation kept saying "1 & 2" but I only ever thought of the games as "1 and prequel".

"Baten Kaitos Origins" is the NA name for Baten Kaitos 2, since the game is a prequel taking place decades before the 1st game with a new cast. Considering they seem to be scraping the original NA localizations in these remasters, I wouldn't be surprised if BKO got its original name back.

If they are re-localizing BKO, I wonder if Giacomo's fight song will still be censored. The song had lyrics referencing Christianity and God, but NoA ordered the song re-edited to just have the singer repeatedly chant "hey!" over those parts of the song.

Will these be available separately or only as a bundle? I have Origins for GameCube but never snagged the first game, so if I could, I'd just buy the one. Sounds like the GCN version may still have its merits if they're not using the original localization.

Whenever a series has a prequel, I'm never sure in which order the games should be played. Release order or chronological order?

Having played both, I'm tempted to suggest trying playing the prequel 1st just to see how certain plot revelations play with you. That said, I do think Origins was written with the intention that players played the 1st game. Otherwise, there's a certain "DUH DUH DUHHHH!" moment that just doesn't have any impact in Origins that has all the meaning if you played the 1st game.

Ah, ok. Thanks for the explainer. Weird they would call the prequel "2" but who am I to judge JRPG naming conventions?

I am very interested is these because of them being Monolith Soft developed games.