Baten Kaitos I & II HD Remaster dev on graphical updates and challenges

In an interview with Nintendo Everything, Baten Kaitos I & II HD Remaster producer Koji Nakajima spoke about the process of updating the GameCube graphics for Switch and challenges involved with the project.

Nakajima told us that the main characters, battle backgrounds, and bosses were either “re-modeled or brushed up from the original models, and the towns and dungeons which are expressed in 2D, have been remade in a higher resolution so that they can be displayed beautifully on the Nintendo Switch while keeping the original art materials.” He also stressed that the team wanted to ensure that it did not “destroy the atmosphere and image of the original game. ”

Baten Kaitos I & II HD Remaster runs at a 16:9 aspect ratio rather than 4:3 of the originals. Nakajima said the developers “had to make sure to fix issues to have the best experience possible for players.”

As for general challenges, first up was “to gather information and development assets from that time.” The team actually “searched both internally and externally with staff who knew about the development at that time and gathered everything we can.”

Nakajima also shared the following with us:

“Then we had to face another difficulty in getting what we had gathered to work properly on the latest hardware. It took a very long time to verify the results, and unexpected problems kept coming up during the development process. It was very difficult to solve them one by one. It was twice as hard because we were working on two titles, Baten Kaitos 1 and 2, haha.”

We’ll have more from our interview soon.