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Every once in awhile, I turn up a game that surprises me. It's not often that it happens, but when it does, I'm overcome with a flood of incoherent thoughts and positive reactions. Since I've been writing here at RPGamer, I've juggled the idea of putting these reactions to writing here at the Editorials section. And now, I've recently encountered a particular game that I'd like to try this idea on: Baten Kaitos, an RPG from Namco for the Gamecube. So here goes, the first part of an ongoing series of editorials from me that won't be written with any particular schedule in mind.
Of course, before I go any further, let me go ahead and preface this by noting one very important detail about this editorial:
WARNING! MINOR BATEN KAITOS DETAILS AHEAD! I say "details" because I don't really think I've included any spoilers in this editorial. However, if you're the kind of person who wants to know nothing about a game before you play it and you're planning on picking up Baten Kaitos, then this editorial is not for you. On the whole, however, no plot details are revealed in this editorial. Nothing is found in this editorial that couldn't be found in a review of Baten Kaitos, so if you're cool with reading reviews, then read on. What is in this editorial is a somewhat broad, generic discussion of themes in Baten Kaitos and a focused discussion on how the game's story is narrated. So there's your fair warning. Let's get to what I'm actually here to talk about.
On many counts, Baten Kaitos should be a game that I am not at all interested in. Let's count the things going against it that usually drive me crazy. Occasionally atrocious voice acting? Check. Card game-based battle, spell, and item system? Check. Items that decay over time, thus weakening your arsenal? Check. These things alone should have been enough to make me frown upon Baten Kaitos, but I bought it anyway in the hopes that a fresh experience that I wasn't accustomed to might be fun.
Gradually, I began to see the things that made be glad I had bought Baten Kaitos. First and most obviously was how the game looked. This game is gorgeous. The subtle graphical details it depicts are simply amazing, but I've talked about this elsewhere. Furthermore, there was something about the whole game's fantastic themes that I just loved. The whole concept of floating islands in the sky that serve as homes to winged citizens that know nothing of what lies beneath the clouds just really intrigued me. Some people prefer their adventures to take place across the galaxies in space ships, some like them to be told from the point of view of a humble squire attempting to become a knight; Baten Kaitos's motifs spoke directly to my preference of themes in fantasy.
Now how about the game's battle system? It's a card game, isn't it? At its heart, I guess it is, but for some reason, I didn't hate it. As a fan editorialist recently noted, the creators of Baten Kaitos did an awesome job of making the battle system not seem like a rudimentary card game. The action is fast paced, and you see your attacks take place one after another. In the end, the game's battles really don't feel any different from any RPG with a turn-based battle system. Baten Kaitos' accomplishment of this makes it hugely successful in my eyes.
But let's tone down my elated ranting, shall we? Let's get down to what is really interesting about Baten Kaitos, and what it does to qualify it as an innovative, interesting game.
At the beginning of the game, one of the game's characters, Kalas, asks you for your name. He's not asking for what you want to name the main character of your adventure; he's asking for YOUR name, the player's name. At first, I thought this was just a gimmick; "Ok," I thought, "so their going to use my name as a password for some dungeon a la Super Mario RPG or something trivial like that." But I was wrong. You, the player, have your own distinct identity in this RPG; you are not acting as a hero that the makers of the game design and render for you. In most RPGs, the player does not have as direct contact with its characters as Baten Kaitos provides. Think about it; in most RPGs, no explanation is given as to why you are controlling characters around a world. You simply are. And in most of these games, you-the-player role-plays as a main character or a collection of characters. In these traditional RPGs, either a hero functions as a first person narrator for the player, or the player is inexplicably given a third person, omniscient point of view. In Baten Kaitos, however, neither of these options is chosen; a different and rarely used form of narration reveals the game's events to the player.
In Baten Kaitos, you-the-player serve as a "Guardian Spirit" for the game's characters; this explains why you control their actions and influence their decisions. If this were the extent of the player's involvement with the game's characters in the game, then Baten Kaitos wouldn't impress me. But this game does something more. While other games have used the formula I just described, Baten Kaitos makes it extremely personal by utilizing, as I just stated, a rarely used form of narration. You-the-player, the "Guardian Spirit," are not an omnipotent, omniscient entity that controls the game's characters' actions; members of the party have their own agendas that you cannot always control. Your influence can only go so far; your characters are still their own persons. While the game involves the player directly, the player is simply bearing witness to the game's characters' story. In this way, Baten Kaitos seems to tell its story by offering the player a second person point of view. Here, I'll turn to a paragraph in which M.H. Abrams defines second-person point of view in the seventh edition of his Glossary of Literary Terms (page 234):
In this mode the story gets told solely, or at least primarily, as an address by the narrator to someone he calls by the second-person pronoun "you." This form of narration occurred in occasional passages of traditional fiction, but has been exploited in a sustained way only during the latter part of the twentieth century and then only rarely; the effect is of a virtuoso performance...This second person may turn out to be a specific fictional character, or the reader of the story, or even the narrator himself or herself, or not clearly or consistently the one or the other; and the story may unfold by shifting between telling the narratee what he or she is now doing, has done in the past, or will or is commanded to do in the future.
When this literary definition is translated in terms of video games, it becomes clear that Baten Kaitos utilizes second-person narration. You-the-player, like the "reader of the story," are the second person.
Baten Kaitos's implementation of this form of narration is extremely significant. First, as noted earlier, it's not used very often, and this is for a reason. It's difficult to manage second-person narration; in literature, it is hard to control, but Baten Kaitos illustrates that it can be managed with ease in the medium of video games. Second, it substantially impacts the player's level of emotional involvement in the game's story, and this obviously has particular importance in the context of an RPG. With second person narration, the player is placed directly into the RPG; the player does not have to convince himself or herself that they are a character that is provided to them by creators of the game. An explanation and backstory is given that justifies the player's transplantation directly into the game and its story. As a result, the player becomes immersed in the story; Baten Kaitos successfully fulfills its duties as an RPG, and it does it in an innovative fashion.
To truly see the effects of this form of second person narration on the RPG experience, you need to play Baten Kaitos. I can't point out all the effects here without basically retelling the game's story, which would make for both a waste of space here and a dangerous arsenal of spoilers, just waiting to ambush those readers that might not have been deterred by the warning I issued above. But know this: Baten Kaitos is a game worth playing. See past the things that you might think are faults, and play through it if you can. You might just be surprised at how your opinion of the game changes as you progress through it.
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