The appeal of this game is that it's not about deckbuilding as much as it is the act of shuffling and playing cards, like a never-endin turn of Yugioh **Baten Kaitos**, despite everything, managed to return in a beautiful HD collection with a lot of QOL improvements and a graphics upgrade. I've always loved **Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings & the Lost Ocean**. It was such a unique game at the time, and still is today. The way cards are the focal point with which all interaction is done is very cool, and the combat system, whilst slow-paced, felt great as you upgraded characters to be able to play multiple cards at a time. That said, I had actually never played **Baten Kaitos: Origins**, the sequel-prequal (sprequal?) that followed. It was impossible to find as a kid, and eventually I just gave up looking. So this was my first time playing it, and man. *Man.* What an unbelievably fascinating game. **BK:O**'s entire existence seems to be predicated on one word: *refinement*. Mechanically, it improves on **Baten Kaitos** in every single way. The puzzles make more sense. There's a quest log now. But this can be seen more than anywhere else in the game's combat system. The combat in **BK:O** pretty much completely throws away **Baten Kaitos**' original concept, replacing it with something faster, flashier, and ridiculously more fun. It works like this: Each character has a deck of cards that are numbered between 0-7. 0. Equipment (Weapons & Armor) 1. Weak Attacks 2. Medium Attacks 3. Strong Attacks 4. Special Attacks 5. Special Attacks 6. Special Attacks 7. Special Attacks You play cards in ascending order. So you can do 0-1-2-3-4. You can also skip steps, so you could do 0-1-7. But you can't go the other way around. That's the basic point. But then on top of that, you have one of the sickest things I've seen in an RPG in a long-ass time: the **Relay Combo**. What this does is allow you to keep an attack going with another party member by starting back to 0 or 1 with a card in their deck. This means I can have party member #1 do a 0-1-2-3-4 combo, then start back again at party member #2 to do a 1-2-3-7 combo, then start back again at party member #3 to do a 0-1-2-3-4-5 combo. That's the basics. There's also MP Bursts and other stuff, but frankly I'd rather you play the game and discover them yourself! The point is that it lets you do sick shit like this (please excuse the resolution, I was playing on ultrawide resolution lmao): ![[MomentsclipfromJun302024.mp4]] Look at that shit! Look at how flashy it is! Look at me teleporting around trying to match all the cards up! I don't really like deckbuilding, to be honest. I am tired of cards being the way to do anything in any roguelike ever since **Slay the Spire** came out. That's a big part of what makes **Origins** so fun! It's not as strategic as the original game, I'll grant you that. But it accesses a different part of interacting with cards, which is the kinetic aspect of shuffling, discarding and slapping them down onto a table at high-speed. The game has an active-time-battle system, so you have to keep it schmooving or else be defeated - which *will* happen. **Baten Kaitos: Origins** might be one of the most difficult JRPGs I've ever played, with high damage-scaling and very smart AI that will punish you by picking off your lowest-HP party members with no trouble. But that also means you have to choose when to start playing cards or play it safe (heh). Do you want to wait until everyone's lined up so you can do a longer Relay Combo, or let someone take a turn early to get some healing in? Not to mention that you'll want different elemental decks for different enemy types. You also will have to choose how many cards you want to keep in each character's deck - more cards might seem like a good idea at first, but it means it might take longer to get access to the cards that you want. I've mentioned before that [[Grinding is Good Actually|smaller encounters in a JRPG aren't inherently a bad thing]]. And I still stand by that! But **BK:O** blew me away because it made *every* encounter, big or small, feel fun as hell. I'd hang out in dungeons for fun, just to tune my deck to be as comboable as possible learning which cards to keep and take out. Anyways, I write all this, but it's really hard to describe **Origins**' appeal, you kind of just have to try it yourself, which I highly encourage! This is one of the best JRPGs I've ever played when it comes to sheer playability. It often felt like an arcade game more than a traditional JRPG. I'm gutted we'll never get to see what the team could have done with a **Baten Kaitos 3**, but the legacy they've left behind is pretty great!