I adore so many of the things this game has going for it, but I just can't cope with the drudgery. Wedged in between all interactions with Baten Kaitos are pregnant pauses - forced to wait repeated five-second intervals for things like a character to slide onto their mark and grace you with their dishwater dialogue box, exploring the world map or going through the combat. It's just too slow & it breaks my heart because the meat n potatoes here is really cool.

At BK's core is a deckbuilding rpg ordeal with the devil in its details. I really enjoyed my time with the half of Disk 1 I could feasibly play before becoming comatose, because every few screens served some kind of insane revelation as to how the game actually works. Not only do you need to negotiate with a limited deck size to allot your battle abilities - weapons, spells, items etc., you're also limited in how many quest items you can carry. Quite literally everything in the game you can pick up becomes entrapped within a card you have to shuffle and thumb through, it's a fun obfuscation of the normal menu system! Where things get really devious is the point where you realise the milk quest item you stored at an earlier point has curdled into yogurt because you took too long travelling between locations - your ice blades have thawed and are now a useless basic dagger. There is a combo system in which certain cards used in specific orders trigger special effects, and this is extended to seemingly(??) mundane objects, like spending a turn mid battle to use a knife to trim a bonsai tree you found. It's all very satisfyingly scrappy, I desperately wish it wouldn't take days out of my life to simply experiment with the toys it has given me. I thought Monolith Soft were openly hostile to completionists with the deluge of sidequests in Xenoblade, but this game reads like a ransom note to anyone with OCD. I looked it up and Oh My God there are so many fucking evil missables and one-offs.

The presentation is particularly beguiling, the similarities to FF9 are hard for me to ignore. Gorgeous mist-laiden high fantasy setting with surprisingly good monster and character designs. The backgrounds are all pieces of pre-rendered or sketched artwork with noticeable variation in quality. Sometimes you'd be looking at painterly postcard chic and one screen transition over you're in Hyrule Town. It becomes a juggernaut of beauty whenever the environment calls for some kind of cloudy sheen, honestly some of the most sublime 2d effect work I've ever seen, my jaw repeatedly hit the floor at all things waterfall. I'd share a million screenshots, but they don't do justice to what looks unparalleled in motion.

Really want to say stuff about the story but it'd mostly just be speculation, I'll probably never finish this. We're heavily leaning on angel wings in our theming here and I can't help but gobble that stuff up.