You should play Baten Kaitos

Cast light upon the darkened earth,
Save those lost in despair,
O Mighty Ocean, guide us as we journey through
The darkest pit of night.

May time, ever fleeting, forgive us...
We who have forsaken our song, and buried our future.
Find us, O Mighty Ocean, and forgive us.

Baten Kaitos is a game of apocalypses. That's not uncommon in Japanese RPGs: the core plot is so often shaped by tragedies past, present and yet to come. In this world, the very first took place ages ago, when a war between gods and humans poisoned the Earth and caused the Ocean to disappear - as hinted at in the so-called "Ocean Prayer" above. And so we find ourselves guiding winged adventurers between floating Sky islands.

That, at least, is the story you're told at the beginning.

I'm getting carried away. Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean (later BKEW) and Baten Kaitos: Origins (later BKO) are two Japanese RPGs developed for the Gamecube by tri-Crescendo and Monolith Soft, published by Namco in 2003 and Nintendo in 2006 respectively, eventually re-released on Switch and PC by Bandai Namco in 2023-2024.

Both games share a highly detailed and colorful art direction, card-based combat systems quite unlike anything else, and take place in the same world with some shared characters. They also each feature a major plot twist that I won't spoil here, via which they indulge in meta-commentary about the relationship between player and protagonist.

I could give you the laundry list. Pretty art. Neat character design. Interesting mechanics. Excellent music. Those things alone make it a worthwhile distraction. Where it shines for me, though, is in its writing and its politics.

Is it exceptionally well-written? Not especially, at least not in the English script. However, its take on the classic ensemble cast is that those people were pushed together by circumstances and do not, in fact, get along that well if at all. In BKEW, Kalas - the lead character - is painted as an absolute douchebag from the very start. He's a jerk who has to be dragged kicking and screaming down a "reluctant hero" character arc by the secondary lead, Xelha-the-good-blond-girl.

In BKO, while the protagonist Sagi is as pure a concentrate of Good Boy as you'll ever find, he is paired with the canonically bigender snarky puppet Guillo and the no less abrasive mysterious girl Milliarde. Much of the dialogue between party members contains bickering and the question is not whether there will be a betrayal, but when it will occur and who it will come from.

Still, our ragtag crews manage to work together. In both games, the enemy is an imperial plot to take over the world. In both games, that plan is specifically a fascist one. No demiurge or evil for evil's sake here: instead we get indoctrinated kids, racialized oppression of labor and talk of superior bloodlines. None of it feels like cartoonish hyperbole, it is all terrifyingly grounded.

Sure, there's an evil god in there, and you do get to kill it. But, without getting into spoilery details, both games make it clear: evil comes from people. It is not an abstract, unknowable elemental force. It is authoritarian leaders and they will not back down unless made to by force. It is a cycle of pain and suffering that, too, must be stopped by force, but can only be truly ended with patience and care.

And on the way to that conclusion, the relationship of the series to its own setting and lore becomes bizarre. It indulges in tropes, only to flip them on their head and twist them in interesting ways. It spins a tale of war long past shaping the world as it now is, only to give us five different versions of the story that do not truly mesh together.

It gives us a prequel - BKO - set twenty years earlier yet containing paradigm-shift events that nobody ever referenced in the first game. But that comes after establishing that world knowledge is not, in fact, perfect or universal. That will warrant a spoiler-packed essay of its own.

Which is not to say it doesn't care to give texture to its world. Much of the worldbuilding occurs via simple textboxes, cheap to add en masse, and so you will get to read about what people eat, what gathers dust in their bookshelves, what their beds are made of. You receive letters with tourism board spam. It just does not care as much as many would to make it all fit together neatly. It allows itself to be weird.

I said Baten Kaitos was a game of apocalypses. The first occured ages ago. The second - chronologically - occurs in BKO, and has been near-entirely memory-holed by the time we get to BKEW twenty years later. BKEW in turn features no less than two. Through all of it, budget oblige, most of the change will show in nothing but dialogue from generic NPCs. So much of it is about petty concerns and day-to-day life in a time of upheaval.

I don't know about you, but that hits me harder than the grandiosity of Final Fantasy ever will.

Obligatory disclaimers and suggestions, should you pick those games up:

• These are older games. While the HD Remaster features some quality-of-life aids, expect Old Game Bullshit such as hoofing it back and forth across all of Anuénué a frankly ridiculous amount of times.
• If you only have time for one 80h game, I recommend BKEW. Others will disagree.
• If you wish to play both games, BKEW came out first and playing BKO second is most "natural". However playing BKO before it would certainly make for quite the experience. Your pick!
• The HD Remaster does not contain the English dub, but there is a mod out there. The BKEW dub is charmingly infamous, the BKO one is genuinely excellent.
• In BKEW, stagger-save BEFORE BOARDING THE GOLDOBA. I cannot stress this enough.
• In BKO, stagger-save BEFORE GOING TO ANUÉNUÉ. I cannot stress this enough.
• 100% runs are to be considered hazardous to health. BKEW is infamous for its ridiculous two-week speedrun and even those runners have not dared tackle BKO. Do not ruin your own fun by aiming for full completion unless you really want to, especially without a guide.
• Speaking of which, GameFAQs is a great resource. The twenty-year-old guides still apply, after all.
• These are older games. While that is not an excuse for anything, you should expect to encounter glaring fatphobia, misogyny, a truly disturbing amount of adult women hitting on a teenage boy protagonist, weird racism, and a peculiar (not fully hostile, it's complicated) relationship to queercoding.