“Your Favorite Game” – Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean
It’s all about videogames this week and I am living. Seriously, if 14-year-old-me had known one day she’d be sitting in a classroom in Edinburgh watching a presentation about the history of gaming, she might have been less emo about her terrible life choices. I’m sure she would have been proud of future-her for tearing up at the Wii picture, at least.
The battered PC I shared with all six of my siblings and a number of different Nintendo consoles have always been my gaming platforms of choice; the mainstream, more toxic-masculinity-oriented worlds of Playstation and Xbox (I’m sure that’s a load of crap, but that’s how they looked to me at the time – and in my defense, their fans did nothing to prove me wrong) held zero attraction on me. As for apps, well, I’ve bought my first smartphone about four months ago and still have to download a single game on it.
But Leila, that is great! You finally have an excuse to try! You love Pokémon! You love augmented reality! Download Ingress! Download Pokémon Go! Blog about those!
That sounds sensible, doesn’t it? (Or it would sound sensible if I hadn’t gone overboard with the exclamation points, at least.) But option #2 is to blog about my favorite game, and I will never, ever pass up an opportunity to gush about Baten Kaitos. Sorry, Pokémon Go. I promise I will give you a chance someday.
So, meet my greatest gaming love and lifelong companion, the game that ruined every other RPG for me and at the same time ensured that I would never really stop playing. Drumroll please.
Just to give you the basic information, Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean is a 2003 JRPG developed for Nintendo GameCube by Monolith Soft and tri-Crescendo. I played it for the first time when it came out in Europe in 2005 and as you may have gathered by my completely chill and detached tone, I’m still very much not over it.
As mentioned in a previous post, in order to fall for a game I have to fall for its story, and boy did Baten Kaitos deliver on that front. The premise is almost banal in its simplicity: a gang of improbable heroes gets together to try and collect a series of magical artifacts that will help them thwart the evil Empire’s plans of domination over their fantasy world. Yawn, right? Except that their quest is filled with mind-blowing twists and shocking reveals, and even before those come into play, the complex, lovable characters, the breathtaking world building, and the perfect balance of heart and humor make for the most compelling epic fantasy I’ve ever come across – not just in the gaming world but on any platform.
What really sets Baten Kaitos apart from other RPGs, though, is the gameplay. Even though I’ve happily played a wide range of genres, RPGs have always been my undiscussed favorite – and in most of them I’ve found the same two fundamental problems: one, the annoying notion that the player has to identify with the main character, which results in cardboard protagonists that rarely engage with NPCs beyond replying “Yes” to everything they say if they’re good guys and kicking their ass if they’re bad guys; and two, a boring battle system, which makes the hours spent leveling up a tedious obligation rather than one of the most fun parts of the game.
Baten Kaitos brilliantly solves the first problem by making the player’s mirror and the protagonist two different characters. In its world, special people can bond with Guardian Spirits that will advise them and make them stronger – and that’s exactly what happens to the protagonist, Kalas, at the beginning of the game. This solution allows the player to identify with the above-it-all Guardian Spirit, to move around and fight as Kalas, and to enjoy a rich, well-crafted story where the main character is allowed to speak his mind, to make mistakes, to grow. And it blurs the line between fiction and reality by making the Guardian Spirit a creature from another world – our world –, not really a character but rather a role for the gamer to play.
As for the battle system, as it often is the case, it’s probably way more complicated to explain than to just play. And it is pretty damn complicated to play in the first place. It’s turn-based (attack and defense), which is great for me because I’m not handy enough with a controller for real-time combat. Just ask the dozens of people who pwned me on World of Warcraft before I ran from that game in tears. And it’s card- and number-based, which admittedly can be a bit of a turn-off on first impact. After all, there must be a reason why Baten Kaitos sold so poorly in spite of being The Best Videogame Ever. But once you get the hang of it, there’s nothing like the rush of selecting the right combo, and even fighting puny soldiers and lesser monsters becomes as engaging as big, epic boss fights. After all, there must be a reason why I keep wanting to return to it even after completing it four times and knowing the story by heart.
Baten Kaitos is special to me for many reasons, some of them really personal, but from a more course-oriented point of view, it’s the shining model I want to follow for my individual project. Because I see videogames first and foremost as a medium to tell stories in a different way – by allowing the audience-turned-player to live them in first person, making important decisions and taking part in the action in a way we couldn’t imagine on a TV screen or in the pages of a book, and Baten Kaitos does it spectacularly. Here’s hoping Breakaway will come close.