Lia's BK nonsense

Official data

What versions of this game exist anyway ?

Overall, Baten Kaitos is now three different games:

But if it was that simple, we wouldn't be here, now would we? Each of those games has several versions, notably in different regions - and there are minor but notable variations between them. Also Origins on GameCube had a first, buggy printing. And there's that quasi-unknown Eternal Wings demo disk that was apparently sent out to people who filled in a survey. Plus the GameCube games both shipped on two disks, meaning even more things to keep track of.

This brings us to Redump. Game preservation is often done by individuals, who archive "dumps" of games - meaning data yanked off the physical media a game shipped on. Rather than share the data itself, which would cause immense legal trouble, what is shared is a bunch of numbers proving that what got dumped is valid, full data. And so, for the GameCube versions, we have the following:

I have not located a good one-stop database of Switch title IDs (this is probably a me problem). TitleDB loookup is good but very barebones. I also do not quite know how Switch game IDs work. There's the TitleID, there's the nsuID which is more clearly tied to different regions, and different games seem to approach those differently. I've identified the following SKUs:

Other media

Both games have excellent soundtracks, that were released on CDs back in the day, and digitally after the remaster came out.

Eternal Wings has a truly excellent artbook, that is somewhat difficult / expensive to find nowadays. Most of its contents art-wise also made it into the remaster's digital artbook and you can probably locate scans online. It also contains a number of interviews: you can find a translation of the artbook interviews over at Scenery Recalled. Origins did not get such an artbook, but a lot made it into strategy guides and then into the digital artbook. Most of the art is also available on Higurashi Nakaba's portfolio website... when it works. More on that further down this page.

The Baten Kaitos IP did not stop with games. After reading this, however, you might end up wishing it did. See, there are two light novels. They are bad. I mean it. Credits for the following title translations go to Scenery Recalled.

The Internet archive has a whole bunch of relevant things. I have not had the time / energy to find everything of interest yet, here are a few notable links :

Game websites

GameCube era

The official US website for Eternal Wings used to live at http://batenkaitos.namco.com/ but is long gone. Every file the Internet Archive saved can be found here. Unfortunately, the website was in Flash, so until recently none of it worked anymore - though I did manage to locate the main SWF file and get that running in the standalone content projector that used to be here https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html. The Internet Archive has now added a Flash emulator, but this specific website pulled in other SWF files that were not archived. Not much to find there.

The wallpapers that used to live on that US website could previously be found on GamesWalls (now an archive link, and thanks BatenPosting, who posted one of those and is why I ended up looking into the old URL).

The official Japanese website for Eternal Wings used to live at http://namco-ch.net/batenkaitos/index.php and can now be found at https://www.bandainamcoent.co.jp/cs/list/batenkaitos/ instead. The archive link listing all the files is this one. The old URL is also archived, the last valid snapshot is this one.

The official Japanese website for Origins is, somehow, still online at https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ngc/gk4j/. Should it vanish, the archive link listing all the files is this one. Thanks to Metaligatr for the heads-up.

Switch

The modern Japanese official website is by far the most full-featured of the bunch. It's also the only one that gets the patch notes, in Japanese only. Needs further exploring, it's linking to a bunch of merch via contests and such.

The other websites are fairly barebones. Bandai Namco US and Bandai Namco "Europe" (ft Australia) both have fairly standard game pages.

Higurashi Nakaba, the lead character designer on both Baten Kaitos titles, has a portfolio website with many illustrations for both Eternal Wings and Origins. Those pages are currently broken, but are archived: Eternal Wings and Origins. That art also appears in the Eternal Wings artbook, on the old Origins website, and in the digital artbook.

Monolith has remade their website several times over the years. During 2003 and 2007, the "Special" category contained a number of fun things. Unfortunately many of the images are now broken, but...