Baten Kaitos: Memory-holing the end of the world

Baten Kaitos, as I wrote last time, is a game of apocalypses. Eternal Wings (later BKEW), the first game, takes place a mere twenty years after its follow-up prequel, Origins (later BKO). And yet, the cataclysmic events of BKO are barely ever brought up. Therefore: major spoilers ahead as we'll need to list some twists and turns of BKO, and how world knowledge is bizarrely distributed in BKEW. The big plot twists and key dramatic reveals are not mentioned.

A couple hours into BKO, one of the sky islands gets sheared in half by a giant laser. This specifically happens to be Hassaleh, from which our hero Sagi hails, a continent which was not once brought up in BKEW. In itself, that omission is not especially notable - it's plenty common for sequels and prequels and others to add new places to a world, with no concern for true continuity. It gets stranger, though, when that fast-forgotten place is the theater of such a momentous disaster, in such a small world.

Later on, an entire artificial continent takes flight. The new Emperor, freshly elected on an agenda of fearmongering and Imperial supremacist rhetoric, wishes for everyone to let go of the old ways and come live on this brave new mechanical world. All they need to do is discard their wings, a symbol of old, superstititous times.

Oh, also he'll destroy all the other islands. Too bad for those who don't wish to move.

These are not the only tragedies in BKO. On each island you visit - Diadem, Sadal Suud, Anuénué - the Empire causes some disaster or another. Diadem sees its fishing village invaded by soldiers and its too-young king pay dearly for his recklessness. The green valley of Sadal Suud is left a barren rocky waste. Anuénué narrowly escapes the destruction of the world-tree central to the island's culture and the well-being of the fairy queen.

Twenty years later, near-all that is left is vague comments and one cranky villager in BKEW rambling about how Imperials always cause trouble. His ire is directed at the inevitable Good Imperial Who Got Exiled For Refusing To Comply, and painted as unjustified - nevermind that there has not been anything resembling a regime change in the Empire.

It all feels weird. A continent cut in half. Threats to destroy the entire world. Highly local disasters, paid for in blood, still well within living memory. And yet, barely twenty years later, no one seems to remember: everyone has moved on. It could all be explained away as sloppy writing, if this series was not so weirdly sharp at times... and if it didn't have a lot more to say about knowledge and memory.

BKEW tells you very early about "the five whales", the five continents that float in the Sky and form the known world. Sadal Suud, Diadem, Anuénué, Mira, Alfard. At the bottom of the Sky are the Taintclouds, a deadly, poisonous layer that no one in their right mind would ever attempt to pass through.

Or so say the fisherman of our crew and the world knowledge lessons of the School of Magic. They will be proven incorrect eventually, as you meet a mysterious wizard from below the clouds and inevitably travel there, to the land of Duhr below. So far so good, this is a classic plot arc.

Except. There's that one guy who wants you to find his entire family. They all have bracelets, it's a game-long sidequest, whatever. One of them has been getting letters from his son... which mention the Labyrinth of Duhr, below the clouds. So either said son has been traveling back and forth, or the long-lost mysterious land somehow has mail service.

Then there is the very first thing we are told, in the one pre-rendered cutscene that opens BKEW:

A long long time ago, it was.
Before people began to dwell in the Sky,
a terrible war was waged between us humans
and the wicked god.
After the horrendous battle, our ancestors entombed
the wicked god, and left the polluted and
barren earth to find a future in the Sky.

This is the founding myth of Baten Kaitos. Near every detail of it will turn out to be more complex than the cutscene implies. From one god, it becomes gods plural. And what was a "god", exactly? Were they wicked at all? Who were the humans they were fighting against? What happened, really? BKO, inevitably for a game subtitled Origins, answers every last one of those questions in unexpected ways. But it is BKEW that asks them first.

The first way in which it asks those questions is that you hear the tale several times and it is never quite the same. The continents took flight, the Ocean disappeared, that is agreed upon. But the details change in subtle ways, never really adding up to a single cohesive story. That's a given for a legend, after all. But this legend was supposed to be history. Where is the line between facts and storytelling?

The second, more direct way those questions get asked is that you eventually get a lore dump villain monologue telling you the entire thing is wrong. There never was a singular wicked god called Malpercio. There is one now, kind of, put together from disparate parts and faith. That doesn't matter to the overall plot, it's a god and you'll kill it. But thematically? This is the game telling you, crystal-clear, that the core myth of the world was just that: a myth.

Again and again Baten Kaitos tells us that knowledge is not evenly distributed. It tells us that folk belief and formal education will both get things wrong. It tells us that history is a fickle, constructed thing. And so it becomes tricky to blame the memory-holing on classic sloppy writing.

Instead, despite how convenient it is as a writing device, it feels deliberate. Of course tragedies went forgotten: nobody wants to think about them. The cost of it? Failing to learn lessons results in complacency, actions that could prevent further bloodshed do not happen in time, and another apocalypse rolls around.

This is especially obvious with Anuénué's tradition of neutrality. In BKEW, the Queen's initial refusal to help seems to make sense. In BKO, you discover that she behaved the exact same way two decades earlier, and paid a staggering price for it. Why did she fail to learn? Why did she not act sooner?

In year six of a pandemic people want to pretend is over, it all hits entirely too close to home. The history of the early days of covid is being actively rewritten before our eyes: soft last-resort lockdowns are painted as dictatorial overreaction, State failures are erased, accountability for mass death gets washed down the drain. Learning loss gets blamed on school closure rather than planet-wide trauma.

This memory-holing is not without consequences. Some are immediate: funding drops, vaccines are made harder to access, sick leave is removed, masks and air cleaning are abandoned. Some will show up later, maybe soon, maybe in two decades: we are not ready for the next pandemic. Viruses will not care. They will spread unless we act against them.

Back to normal always wins, it turns out. Even if it means forgetting the apocalypse itself, opening wide the gates for the next one.