No one really remembers Baten Kaitos in spite of the huge fame the studio behind it gets for their much lauded Xeno series of games, either because of the platform the game is on or the unbelievably bad voice acting and utterly bizarre combat system acting as an, admittedly, high barrier to entry. However, what this game lacks in modern values such as accessibility in gameplay (and a respect for the player's time) is an utterly unique and beautiful transitional JRPG that iterates upon the last generation of JRPGs by taking advantage of what new hardware can bring and managing to take off as a distinctive game even to this day. No other game does a card battle RPG system quite like it, nor do any other card battle RPGs being anywhere near as good.

Baten Kaitos retains, or possibly births given it's release date, a lot of storytelling quirks that would be present in future Xeno games too, taking an utterly unique premise with its world, and giving you story beats that twist and turn in fantastic ways as the story progresses with an endearing cast of characters. It really should be experienced for yourself, and nowadays there are a good number of ways you can play this game not on the original hardware so I highly encourage anyone to check out this game and not let it be lost to a wikipedia article or some dude's reddit post or backloggd review.