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.
