Because Lia has a Baten Kaitos problem

This page is the kind of thing that happens when you're a nerd who got metaphorically clubbed over the head by a silly videogame as a teenager, and proceeded to turn into a game engine programmer with special interests. For now it's going to be a mix of index of twitter threads and resource repository, and we'll see what it becomes over time.

BK:EW playthrough semi-livetweet

From 2020-10-14 to 2020-12-24, I replayed through all of BK:EW, aiming for 100% completion and making obnoxiously long Twitter threads about the entire process. The final format ended up being something ressembling a text-based Let's Play.

The following is a list of all those Twitter threads, in chronological order. All the threads were complete last I checked them, but I've gotten a couple reports of Twitter poking holes in them occasionally. Let me know if something is broken. The entire thing comes with major spoiler warnings from the start, for all of EW and The Big Plot Twist in particular, because analyzing how it is and isn't signposted was a major part of the fun. Also contains strong opinions by a queer antifascist but if that bothers you I don't want you reading my stuff anyway.

Those threads include a ton of screenshots, all of which have alt-text for every textbox. There are also content warnings on the most egregious bits, but they are not necessarily extensive or sufficient for everyone! For example, because this a somewhat typical JRPG, solving problems through violence is constant and did not get tagged.

2020-10-14: Tech setup.
2020-10-14: Opening, Cebalrai, Moonguile Forest.
2020-10-15: Nunki Valley, Pherkad.
2020-10-16: Rodolfo's Mansion, finishing Sadal Suud.
2020-10-17: Nashira.
2020-10-18: Lesser Celestial River, Nashira.
2020-10-19: Nashira, Cloud Passage, Sheliak.
2020-10-20: Elnath.
2020-10-21: Shrine of the Winds, finishing Diadem.
2020-10-22: Combat explainer, Anuénué Port, Komo Mai.
2020-10-23: School of Magic, Corellia's Palace.
2020-10-24: Ancient Library of Magic.
2020-10-25: Holoholo Jungle, Opu.
2020-10-26: Komo Mai, Opu.
2020-10-26 cont, broken thread: Opu, Celestial Tree.
2020-10-27: Celestial Tree.
2020-10-28: Celestial Tree boss.
2020-11-01: Finishing Anuénué, Trail of Souls.
2020-11-02: Trail of Souls.
2020-11-03: Parnasse, Detourne.
2020-11-04: Detourne.
2020-11-05: Detourne, Parnasse.
2020-11-06: Reverence, Nekton.
2020-11-07: Nekton, Mira Drama.
2020-11-09: Balancoire.
2020-11-10: Duke's Manor, Coccolith.
2020-11-11: Coccolith boss.
2020-11-12: Finishing Mira.
2020-11-14: Mintaka.
2020-11-15: Battleship Goldoba.
2020-11-16: Azha.
2020-11-16, cont: Lava Caves.
2020-11-17: Azha, Lava Caves.
2020-11-18: Lava Caves boss, Plot Twist, Imperial Fortress.
2020-11-18, cont: Corellia's Palace.
2020-11-19: World tour, fetch quests.
2020-11-21: World tour, fetch quests.
2020-11-22: Interdimensional cracks.
2020-11-23: Corellia's palace, Wazn.
2020-11-24: Kaffaljidhma, Cursa.
2020-11-25: Lake of the Dragon, Kaffaljidhma.
2020-11-26: Finishing Wazn, Corellia's palaca, Mintaka.
2020-11-27: Imperial Fortress.
2020-11-28: Imperial Fortress boss, Mintaka.
2020-11-29: Labyrinth of Duhr.
2020-11-30: Gemma.
2020-12-01: Capella, Algorab.
2020-12-02: Zosma Tower.
2020-12-03: Algorab boss.
2020-12-04: SP combos, nothing to see here.
2020-12-05: Finishing Duhr, Corellia's palace, fetch quests, SP combos.
2020-12-06: World tour, fetch quests.
2020-12-07: Celestial Alps.
2020-12-08: Celestial Alps boss, Corellia's palace.
2020-12-09: Komo Mai, Illusory Fortress.
2020-12-10: Nashira, Greater Celestial River.
2020-12-11: World tour, fetch quests.
2020-12-12: Phantom Goldoba.
2020-12-13: World tour.
2020-12-14: Nihal Desert.
2020-12-15: Nihal Desert boss.
2020-12-16 aside: Alternate Geldoblame read.
2020-12-16: Zosma Tower.
2020-12-17: Zosma Tower boss.
2020-12-18: Constellations, animals, Quzman, secret recipes.
2020-12-18: Corellia's palace, opening Cor Hydrae.
2020-12-19: Cor Hydrae.
2020-12-20: Cor Hydrae.
2020-12-21: Cor Hydrae.
2020-12-22: Cor Hydrae boss, 100% achieved.
2020-12-23 aside: Victory Banquet interpretations hot take.
2020-12-23: Cor Hydrae boss, Victory Banquet.
2020-12-23, cont: Moonguile Forest, ending.

BKO playthrough semi-livetweet

From 2021-04-15 to 2023-02-11, I finally trudged my way through BKO. While I wasn't initially aiming for 100% completion and did not quite get there, I ended up chasing sidequests and every last textbox, which is part of why it took me the best part of two years (other reasons are Control, Outer Wilds, Returnal, and life getting in the way).

The format is the same as with BK:EW: basically a text-based Let's Play, lots of tweets, a fair amount of snark, alt-text on every single screenshot, of which there are a lot. The Twitter threads are in chronological order and should be complete unless Twitter did something weird. There are no spoilers - I was discovering the game for the first time.

2021-04-15: Setup, UI complaints, Dark Service HQ.
2021-04-19: Emperor's Residence, WHAT IS GOING ON.
2021-04-20: Albali Sandhollow, Rasalas, Mintaka sewers.
2021-04-21: Mintaka sewers, Mintaka.
2021-04-22: Mintaka, Giacomo, Baelheit and Shanath's plotting, Hassaleh, Nusakan Thornwood.
2021-04-24: Nusakan Thornwood, Sheratan, too many sexist jokes.
2021-04-25: Sheratan, Lake Botein ruins, more Sheratan.
2021-04-26: Lake Botein.
2021-04-27: Sheratan, Valara, Rasalas, Sandfeeders' Nest.
2021-04-28: Sheratan, Sedna, Mintaka.
2021-05-02: Mintaka, Coliseum, why does Sagi keep getting hit on by adult women, Dark Service HQ, Nihal Desert.
2021-05-04: Greater Mintaka, funeral, candidate speeches and bombing.
2021-05-07: Greater Mintaka, Verus, Nihal Desert.
2021-05-08: Azha.
2021-05-10: Nihal Desert's SECRET CAVE.
2021-05-12: Greater Mintaka, Azha investigation.
2021-05-22: Greater Mintaka investigation, Azha interrogations.
2021-05-26: Azha interrogations.
2021-05-28: Lava Caves, Naos.
2021-06-10: Naos, Lava Caves escape, Azha.
2021-06-15: Sedna, Greater Mintaka, Baelheit.
2021-07-30: Emperor's Residence, Secret tunnel, Verus, more Baelheit and Shanath being evil.
2021-07-31: Mintaka, mailtime.
2021-08-01: Sidequests distractions, Sheliak, Elnath.
2021-08-02: Elnath.
2021-08-03: Lesser Celestial River / Cloud Passage.
2021-08-04: More distractions, Lesser Celestial River / Cloud Passage.
2021-08-05: Nashira.
2021-08-06: Doing Nashira wrong see what happens.
2021-08-07: Cloud Passage, Giacomo, Sheliak.
2021-08-09: Sidequests.
2021-08-12: More sidequests.
2021-08-14: Elnath, Cloudvents, Naos, Matar Highlands.
2021-08-15: Cujam, Cloudvents, Elnath.
2021-08-17: Diadem dialogue chasing.
2021-08-18: Cloudvents sidequest, Nasca, Skeed and Vallye learn martial arts.
2021-08-19: Missed dialogue in Azha, Verus lore dump.
2021-08-19: Pherkad posters part 1.
2021-08-22: Pherkad posters part 2.
2021-08-23: Pherkad, back to Nashira and Sheratan.
2021-08-25: Nunki Valley, Cebalrai.
2021-08-26: Cebalrai, Rodolfo's Estate.
2021-08-27: Rodolfo's Estate, Giacomo.
2021-08-29: Running errands in Pherkad and Azha.
2021-08-30: Running errands in Sedna and Elnath.
2021-08-31: Pac and upgrades flavor text.
2021-09-01: Nunki Valley burning, Cebalrai.
2021-09-05: Heughes, Cujam, Naos tragedy.
2021-09-06: Zaurak Keep.
2021-09-07: Zaurak Keep, Nunki Valley ft. Palolo saves the day, Cebalrai, Pherkad.
2021-09-08: Loose ends on Sadal Suud.
2021-09-09: Sidequests, Skeed and Vallye learn farming, checking on Heughes and Sheratan and Diadem.
2021-09-10: Stalker sidequest, Verus, off to disk 2 and Anuénué, Bird Problem solved on first try.
2021-09-13: Holoholo Jungle, Library of Magic, Anuénué Port, Komo Mai.
2021-09-14: Komo Mai.
2021-09-15: Running cookie errands, rigging elections, meeting the queen, saving the animals in the jungle.
2021-09-17: Holoholo Jungle, more electoral fraud.
2021-09-19: School of Magic, more electoral fraud, Holoholo Jungle, Opu.
2021-09-22: Sedna and Komo Mai loose ends, Celestial Tree, back to Komo Mai, Celestial Tree Veinroots.
2021-09-22: Celestial Tree Veinroots, checking on the rest of Anuénué.
2021-09-24: Celestial Tree Veinroots boss, Zaurak Keep.
2021-09-25: Zaurak Keep, Big Reveal about Malpercio's origins.
2021-09-26: Check on the Unknown World, Cujam, Battlefields of Atria, Valara, Sagi has had enough.
2021-09-28: Check on Anuénué.
2021-10-01: Finish Anuénué, fix the ship, Mintaka, Skeed and Vallye learn magic.
2021-10-03: Check on Hassaleh and Diadem.
2021-10-04: Check on Sadal Suud and Alfard.
2021-11-13: Loose ends in Anuénué, Greater Mintaka, summing up the mess we're in.
2021-11-14: Council, plot twists galore.
2021-11-23: Even bigger plot twist, Shanath, escaping the mysterious fortress.
2021-11-28: Check around Alfard, Sheratan.
2021-12-08: Sidequests and new dialog mostly in Sadal Suud, Skeed and Vallye learn about sibling strife, kick Heughes' ass.
2021-12-13: Sidequests and new dialog in Diadem, kick Nasca's ass.
2021-12-14: Sidequests and new dialog mostly in Anuénué, Greythorne powers unlocked, steal an election.
2021-12-15: Kick Valara's ass, read some mail, Greythorne adventures part 1.
2022-01-17: Sidequests and new dialog in Alfard, Greythorne adventures part 2, Dark Service HQ.
2022-01-30: Dark Service HQ.
2022-04-18: Sidequests and new dialog in Alfard, Greythorne adventures part 3.
2022-04-26: Sidequests and new dialog in Azha and Diadem, Greythorne adventures part 4.
2022-10-26: Mailtime, Greythorne adventures part 5, hope you wanted more weird sex jokes.
2022-10-28: Sidequests, plushie duty.
2022-10-28: Nekkar.
2022-10-30: Duhr, so much flavor text.
2022-12-24: Sidequests, Atria ominousness, Duhr, Sedna, Seginus.
2022-12-25: Seginus graphics shenanigans, new dialog in Duhr, Matar Highlands, sidequests, saving Gena.
2022-12-27: Re-check all the things, new dialog in Azha, Georg is a jerk.
2022-12-29: Re-check all the things, Guillo is rude, new dialog in Azha, Sheratan, the stalker sidequest sucks.
2022-12-31: Coliseum ranks 1, 2, 3, 4.
2023-01-01: Atria, Wiseman, Rasalas, Verus, Tarazed revealed.
2023-01-15: Re-check all the things, new dialog mostly in Alfard and Diadem, Greythorne shenanigans in Duhr, Vega, finishing Sedna.
2023-01-16: Coliseum rank 5, random highlights from around the Sky.
2023-01-21: Inner Tarazed.
2023-01-22: Tarazed Control, Baelheit, all the plot twists.
2023-02-04: Tarazed Core, Verus' secret room, the worst mixing recipe.
2023-02-05: Coliseum championship and advanced battles.
2023-02-11: Final sidequests round.
2023-02-11: Final bosses, Tarazed escape drama.
2023-02-11: Tarazed escape "true ending" version, final dialog, credits, hot takes.

BK:EW, "Graphics programmers can't play games normally" edition

Fun glitches to investigate

Emulator only:

Bad masking, Goldoba control room screen.
Bad masking, Detourne.
Bad masking, Reverence.
Bad masking, Goldoba.
Bad masking, Lava Caves.

This one is known and was mentioned on the Dolphin forum years ago.
It even has a dedicated test case in the Dolphin graphics CI.
But the potential fix looks like it opens a giant can of worms.
The PR has since been closed and the tests look green in CI so this needs re-testing on a more recent version of Dolphin.

Bad masking, Imperial Fortress.
Bad masking, Greater Celestial River.
Incorrect final blit, Coccolith.

Confirmed on original hardware:

Unknown:

Things to look into

Dynamic snow and dynamic sand. Likely using the same tech, not done on GPU in the emulator. The vertex transform unit is probably emulated on the CPU.
There's some cool vertex displacement during fights in Coccolith.
Figuring out the bad masking. Though from the Dolphin links the answer seems to be "clean up the implementation of a major part of the Gamecube GPU", so, we'll see how that goes.
Pondering the Duhr port glitch.
Extracting the ACTUAL drop tables and figuring out how correct the wiki and GameFAQs are.
Relatedly: a Japanese speedrunner reported an incorrect drop on the final boss during a recent run. Is that a bug that can be exploited to completely change 100%, since seeing a Magnus is enough to add it to the Gathering? Or does Malpercio just drop Bamboo Shoots sometimes? This has since been documented more extensively, I'll fish that out and link it with permission eventually.
How does the blur / depth-of-field work?
How does the dynamic exposure from Light / Dark moves work?
How does the photograph aging process work and why does it sometime break on emulator, resulting in 1G pictures?

Poking at it all in RenderDoc

Note that the Twitter threads are purposefully kept non-graphics-programmer friendly.
RenderDoc 101, depth buffer.
Greythorne colors, snow and sand, reflections, Detourne cubes, masking.
Trying to extract a Greythorne mesh.
What shape are those petals anyway? Plus weird post-processing effects ordering.
A quick look at a combat scene, ft. Cursed Hell Turtle.
The Greythorne model viewer and the related Twitter thread.
The underwater effects are achieved by rendering things twice, once in transparent blue and once opaque as normal likely using the water plane and depth testing for masking.

Game / lore resources

Game discs info:

Eternal Wings:

Japan:

Disc 1
Disc 2
Demo disc ("Special experience"). This was apparently sent to people who filled a survey, and includes a couple playable areas.

USA:

Europe:

Origins:

Japan:

Disc 1
Disc 2
NB: there are two revisions of the Japanese Origins disc, because the first printing apparently had a game-breaking bug. The data for those is here: Disc 1, Disc 2.

USA:

The Internet Archive and Demoban.net have interesting preservation efforts you might want to look at.
Remember however that downloading ISOs is not legal, no matter what you might have read in some places.

The official (US) website 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 none of it works anymore.
I did manage to pull out the main SWF file and get that running in the standalone content projector (link is now dead, thanks Adobe), but it pulled in other SWF files that were not archived.
The wallpapers that used to live there 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 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.
Nakaba Higurashi, the lead character designer on both Baten Kaitos titles, has a portfolio website with many illustrations for both BK:EW and BKO. The BK:EW artbook contains those, but there is no such artbook for BKO!
Japanese game manuals on the Internet Archive's Manual Library:

Scenery Recalled translations:

There are actually TWO novels (as described above) and a manga. You can find scans if you look, but there's no full translation out there.

I will not provide full scans of the novels, but I did scan the 11 illustrations they contain. You can find those here (at time of writing), and lower resolution versions on Twitter.
Tori has put together a translation of the "Castle of Storms" novel. I'm afraid it might also be pretty darn bad. The novel, not the translation. (Linked with permission)

GameFAQs has a whole bunch of old guides though there seem to be a lot of mistakes in most of them.
The Fandom-hosted wiki has more data than one would expect, including a full list of Magnus with locations. It does not, however, mention the existence of the novels.
The Cutting Room Floor has some more technical tidbits, plus some fun localization differences.
There are people who speedrun this, including 100%. You can find those resources on speedrun.com and there are separate English-language Discord servers for BK:EW and BKO speedrunners.
More to be added after I ask people whether it's okay to share their stuff, duh.

Game-specific technical resources

bk-undub: a tool to replace the oh-so-special English VO with the original Japanese. I am working on a non-coder-friendly tutorial for running the thing on Windows. Unlikely to be easy to use for non-technical players. But it's open-source and probably contains some insights about the file formats so it's on my radar.

My first thread about getting it working on Mac.
My second thread about testing compatibility for savestates (nope) and save files (yup).
My third thread about getting it working on Windows using WSL, plus a failed PAL test.

French fan translation for Origins. Same as the above, probably some insights to be had about file formats.
A Spanish one is also available, which is what even made me stumble on the completed French one. (Thanks to BatenPosting again)

General technical resources

Dolphin emulator:

The devblog is absolutely amazing.
EFB versus XFB in Dolphin.
EFB access from CPU, somewhat comparable to modern occlusion queries and framebuffer readbacks..
How Dolphin now emulates the very special Gamecube GPU.

Gamecube architecture overview.
Detailed hardware study, notably with lots of details about the RAM choices.