In my introduction to this series, I suggested that a weird game is one that fails in an interesting way. Make no mistake; Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean (2004) is a weird game. Even though it falls readily into standard JRPG tropes, it makes numerable fascinating choices that are likely to grab a novice player's attention before the end of the introductory sequence. For instance, the game is set in a world above the clouds on a series of floating islands, the oceans having disappeared eons ago in a climactic struggle with an ancient evil. The people who inhabit these islands are winged, with the exception of our main protagonist. Having been born with only a single wing, he must make do with a prosthesis, a fact that opens him to discrimination and makes him bitter toward the world around him. These are themes and concepts seldom observed in other titles, and offers a bold take on standard JRPG fare.
While the introductory sequence had a lot to like about it, and did a lot to immediately grab a player's attention, the game stumbles just as quickly. The first combat is both an introduction to complexity of the battle system, as well as an exercise in frustration. Unlike the traditional menu-driven combat, or real-time action-oriented combat which are the usual options for RPGs, Baten Kaitos relies on a deck-based system. Cards in this world are called "magnus," and they can contain the spirit of any object (and some living things). Players collect cards that contain weapons and armor, healing and attack items, and sometimes just random objects (as well as, naturally, important key items) from various locations around the world. Once combat opens, your deck is shuffled and you are dealt a hand, from which you must play a sequence of cards. Weapons and armor have numerical values from one to nine, and playing a chain of increasing value improves your damage or resistance. Additionally, weapons and armor have elemental affiliations, and playing the correct ones becomes pivotal in difficult encounters.
At this point, the complexity of the system starts to become evident, and one might see how this could result in annoyance. However, this barely scratches the surface, as the magnus system becomes increasingly convoluted and the aggravation, accordingly, compounds. Weapon, armor, and item cards must all be played at once in a sequence, and incorrect ordering can have tremendously detrimental effects. Furthermore, certain item cards played in the correct order have a combo effect, either stacking abilities, or transforming into entirely new cards with previously unknown attributes. Some are quite simple; for example, playing a Beef card with a Charcoal card and a Large Fire card will give you a Grilled Hamburger. Other combos require less intuitive assumptions; to gain the Hate Filled Diary card, you must combine Bad Fortune, Fried Egg, and Crimson Oak Blossom cards. Some combos heal, some attack, and some do absolutely nothing. Without looking up the answers online ahead of time, there's no way to know what will happen if you execute these during a battle, or if, in fact, you might have discovered a combo while trying to do something else entirely. Finally, each hand is played under the constraints of a time limit. After the first card is selected, the player has until the action is completed to select the next card. This can take an astonishingly short amount of time, and so intentionally forming combos can be very difficult. This results in a battle system which, as I said, is often complicated to the point of frustration. Many players abandoned Baten Kaitos at the first boss battle, confounded by how unintuitive the combat was.
Furthermore, the game features an unusual time progression mechanism. Certain cards change over time. For example, Milk ages into Cheese, fruit cards become Rotten Fruit, and so on. Some of these changes occur relatively quickly (an Intriguing Mystery becomes an Unsolved Mystery in just 30 minutes), but others can take an almost absurd amount of time. The hardest magnus in the game to achieve is Splendid Hair, which is the result of letting a Shampoo card sit for 336 hours - literally two full weeks. A notable incident occurred in 2016 when a Twitch streamer by the handle Baffan attempted to complete a 100% speedrun of Baten Kaitos. Everything else in the game could be finished in about 80 hours. But to get Splendid Hair, he had to let the game idle, and as a result, Twitch suspended him for 24 hours, citing "non-gaming content" as the cause. While this is the most extraordinary example, it demonstrates the extremes to which players had to resort in order to uncover all of the game's secrets.
These bold choices resonated with some players, but certainly not the majority. Instead, they became hurdles toward the enjoyment of the game's narrative. As I speak of barriers to enjoyment, I should also single out the game's voice acting, as Baten Kaitos contains one of the very worst examples of video game voice acting from a period in time where video game voice acting frequently came under criticism (it is, in fact, one of very few games I have ever owned where I turned the voice acting off entirely in the options menu). As a result, the game never gained the sort of popular momentum needed to sustain sales, and Baten Kaitos became the exact sort of oddity I described in the introduction to this series. However, as I also discussed there, the game has a tremendous charm for those who stuck with it, especially as regards some of the game's narrative choices. So although I am discussing a 15-year-old game, be aware that the following paragraphs contain a major spoiler.
The game begins with the introduction of our primary protagonists; Kalas, an orphan, and Xelha, a mysterious young woman from an unknown country. Interestingly, the player is assigned an identity in the game, but not as one of these two characters. Instead, the player is a "guardian spirit" from another realm who has made a pact with Kalas. This allows you to communicate directly with Kalas, but not with any other characters, and serves as a mechanism for the guidance and direction you give to the party. Kalas and Xelha discover one of the legendary "End Magnus" responsible for containing Malpercio, an evil god from legend, and in typical JRPG fashion, they accidentally release it, only for it to be snapped up by the sinister forces of the evil Alfard Empire. The two conspire to retrieve the End Magnus before calamity ensues, and in short order are joined by a number of other characters to round out the party. Eventually, the group heads directly to Alfard to confront its emperor, Geldoblame, where a major revelation occurs. It ensues that Kalas has been in league with a third party (one Lady Melodia, who is a minor figure earlier in the game), and has been betraying and undermining the party since the beginning, using them, and the player in their role as guardian spirit, for his own ends.
This is a truly remarkable narrative device. To begin, the fact that the player is given a specific form in the game, and that Kalas' true motives and intent were hidden not only as a consequence of the story but as a direct result of lies told to the guardian spirit, means that the betrayal is not merely observed, but experienced. That is to say, the player is themself betrayed by the actions of this character. Furthermore, Kalas' motivation for this betrayal is not a simple thirst for power, but the desire to have his missing wing restored. To this end, he is willing to betray his comrades and endanger the world. The depths of his feeling regarding his place in a world that views his disability as a cause for both scorn and discrimination are made manifest in a narrative choice that directly affects the player and arouses a deep personal response from them.
Both in narrative and in combat systems, Baten Kaitos is a spectacularly weird game. It begins with an absolutely stock JRPG plot, but innovates in extremely novel ways, taking bold chances in areas where most games wouldn't dare, resulting in a mixed bag, as it were. Narratively, it takes one of the best chances I've ever experienced, delivering a spin on a classic narrative that packs an unrivaled emotional punch. In terms of the card-based combat system, however, it contains a categoric failure, a burden to novice players and a hindrance to the enjoyment of the game's other features. Could tweaking those systems have delivered a better user experience? Or would the majority of players still eschewed the non-traditional nature of the magnus system? It is, of course, impossible to say. Nevertheless, Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean will always be a personal favorite of mine, a game so odd and unusual that it remains impossible to forget.
Dr. Daniel Gronsky is a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Cultural Science, focusing on media studies in film and video games.