Nintendo buys (most of) Monolith Soft

OICAspork

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This is pretty big news. Nintendo purchased an 80% stake in the company responsible for Baiten Kraitos... and more importantly Xenosaga. That gives one of the biggest (if not THE BIGGEST) non Square-Enix RPG company to Nintendo consoles. Here is the Japanese PDF: http://ir.nikkei.co.jp/irftp/data/tdnr2/home/oracle/140/2007/241b063/241b0630.pdf and here is the Neogaf post that shared it: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=152789

I wonder if they also get control over the intellectual properties.
 
This is very unlike Nintendo. Remember when they bought Rare, they only owned a little over 50% of the company (probably 60% or something). They're probably running out of room to keep all their cash.
 
Damn it, I liked Xenosaga and no offense but isn't the type of game I see translating well to the Wii.
 
Baten Kaitos is terrible IMO. Star Ocean 3 is terrible IMO. I've only heard bad things about the latest Xenosaga game. The Wii could use some more substantial games, but I do hope they get their act together and make it good, whatever it is.

Also of note is that these are the guys who (were supposed to?) make Disaster: Day Of Crisis.
 
Star Ocean is Square-Enix but I definately liked Xenosaga I. Xenosaga II was meh and I have yet to get III yet. My issues is Xenosaga was definitely an Epic RPG based on cutting edge graphics and CG Movies which is the exact opposite of the Wii.
 
Star Ocean is Square-Enix but I definately liked Xenosaga I.
Star Ocean 3 is published by Square Enix, but developed by Tri Ace. All part of the family. Baten Kaitos and Star Ocean 3 even have the same battle theme (performed by different instruments), and I'm sure there are more, I just forgot which ones.

As for Xenosaga, the physical design of the Wii matches the visual style of Xenosaga quite well IMO. White, smooth, simple shapes. Not that it matters for the game itself, but I thought that was interesting.
 
The Xenosaga franchise is already concluded with the third and final episode on PS2. If there is going to be another Xeno like game it won't follow or continue the Xenosage universe.
 
First of all Tri-Ace rules. ;)

Second of all, well I'm not surprised really... Nintendo doesn't buy firms too often, but they do buy them. After analyzing their portfolio and present market with Wii, it's likely they're giving some thought to where they can plug some holes and broaden into w/exclusives some of the few areas Nintendo itself doesn't cover naturally with its present offerings.
 
First of all Tri-Ace rules. ;)

Second of all, well I'm not surprised really... Nintendo doesn't buy firms too often, but they do buy them. After analyzing their portfolio and present market with Wii, it's likely they're giving some thought to where they can plug some holes and broaden into w/exclusives some of the few areas Nintendo itself doesn't cover naturally with its present offerings.
How well did Star Ocean 3 do in the big three territories? I thought it did pretty decent. But I also thought Baten Kaitos 2 did fairly poorly. Regardless, it does seem like a smart move. Sometimes buying a company is less about giving your own product something more, but rather stopping a competitor from having something. I'm not sure I see far enough ahead on this one to know whether that applies here or not, though.
 
When I boot up Star Ocean 3 it displays the Square Enix logo and then clearly says "tri-Ace created". Plus I'm positive there is an overlap in (rights to) certain production assets, such as the music composition. But the exact lineage isn't really the point, so I'll concede that.

I realize it could have came across as if I hate them, but that's not how I feel.
Baten Kaitos is a really ambitious, interesting game and certainly deserves a second, third look. But it is, and that's a problem I'm also having with Star Ocean 3, an extremely-mixed bag. Things just don't match up, you get the feeling that too many departments worked on the game with too little coordination, and it breaks the overall experience. Baten Kaitos is of course a creative concept, the visual design is gorgeous in places, characters, story, dialog is at least par for the course or perhaps even good, and it's genuinely interesting when you start playing it IMO. It's just that it so poorly fits together. The core battle mechanic is the thing that makes Baten Kaitos what it is, but it's just horribly unpolished, a constant detriment to extracting any fun out of the game, and pulls the whole thing down.

It has this thing with magnus cards that age while you're playing the game, and that means many of your items will become useless, not only your healing items but also cooking ingredients and quest items will turn into something else. That sets a certain pace where you feel compelled to play efficiently to maximize your mileage, but at other times you need stuff to age (turn milk into cheese, grapes into wine, young bamboo into food etc) for it to even become useful/applicable as a key item. It's schizophrenic right there, and no matter how you play it you're always doing something wrong, missing opportunities, losing stuff. Then there's this whole photo collection thing that doesn't fit in at all with the timing elements of the game. Plus with the randomness of the in-combat availability of the camera, it's a pretty lame game-stretching measure.
Speaking of in-combat decks, it's never right. You start out severely limited and end ridiculous. That progression of the hand they give you is a huge cop-out from the problem of making the system challenging and fun to play IMO.

And the audio production in Baten Kaitos just stinks to high heaven. I don't know if it's some sort of issue with compression versus the limited space on Gamecube discs, but I absolutely cannot listen to dialog without getting mad at it.

What I'm saying is that Baten Kaitos certainly showed a knack for compelling stories and visual design, and of course huge props to them for taking the risk of doing a fresh RPG combat system. What I'd like to see now is something that has a big enough budget and is worked on for enough time to become a polished, balanced, playable game where everything clicks together.
 
You don't actually need to use all the possible deck combinations to beat the game. If you're going for 100% completion, yeah, it's going to take you forever. But for the most part, I just ignored aging magnus and only really went after increasing the number of elemental yells by going to an earlier part of the game and emptying my deck of everything except for the crucial items. Overall, I found the combat system rewarding and enjoyed stacking my decks.
 
Believe it or not, I looked around and I see that even Nintendo fans aren't happy with this. Xenosaga's terrible, even people who played it don't like it. I really don't see how buying another company just to get some RPGs (bad RPGs) help, unless Monolith's Disaster is in-freaking-credible. I mean, if you want RPGs, I think most third parties would flock to the Wii sooner or later. Why spend money on such a company with one good game and one bad game in it's portfolio? I really want some Disaster info now!
 
Believe it or not, I looked around and I see that even Nintendo fans aren't happy with this. Xenosaga's terrible, even people who played it don't like it.

Bizare comment.. which people are you referring too?.. I haven't played the Xenosaga games myself, but looking at GameRankings:

Xenosaga 1 - 83.3%
Xenosaga 2 - 73.4%
Xenosaga 3 - 82.6%

The second game looks like it might have been only average to good, but the other two had very good ratings.
 
Anyway Nintendo is not known for throwing money out of the windows. If someone does not understand why they bought that dev, maybe just maybe, you should ask yourself if you have enough data to know better than N ?
We will see next months if something good comes from that move.
 
Bizare comment.. which people are you referring too?.. I haven't played the Xenosaga games myself, but looking at GameRankings:

Xenosaga 1 - 83.3%
Xenosaga 2 - 73.4%
Xenosaga 3 - 82.6%

The second game looks like it might have been only average to good, but the other two had very good ratings.

Looks around other messageboards and you'll see most people hate the Xenogames. Names like Xenoturd, to jokes about Nintendo buying the wrong Monolith. I know the Xenosaga games are some of the most boring games ever made. You literally spend 30 minutes or more sitting there watching doing absolutely nothing.
 
Anyway Nintendo is not known for throwing money out of the windows. If someone does not understand why they bought that dev, maybe just maybe, you should ask yourself if you have enough data to know better than N ?
We will see next months if something good comes from that move.

Maybe they bought them because they've had some flops and are thus cheap.

Nintendo's had a habit of buying small, crappy dev companies, building them up, and then spinning them off once they get too expensive to keep. So a small underfunded dev gets to grow quite a bit under nintendo, and gets the finance and time they need to make decent games. Presumably anyhow, at the very least they get to make good selling games.

Genius Sorority and Retro came from nowhere to make smash hits.
Nspace went from mary kate and ashley games to Geist.
Rare went from a small company to one of the most important dev studios in the n64/psx generation...and then back to almost nothing again.

Nintendo seems to look for promise and a group its own designers can work with, not for successful, well to do companies.
 
I was confused from this thread till I found out that I had the wrong Monolith in mind (Monolith Productions Inc.).

now everything makes sense.
 
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