#ewlo

In Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean, Kalas points out explicitly that his guardian spirit, the player, has amnesia and has forgotten many of the events preceding the plot. Of course, you find out later that this “amnesia” was explicitly inflicted by Kalas to prevent the spirit from shutting him out and refusing to lend him their power.

What about on subsequent playthroughs, where you know about Kalas’ treachery and have to bop along with the plot anyway? Naturally you can revel in all of the little hints along the way (even if things like the exact moment where Kalas passes the end magnus to Melodia are overtly spelled out by the game), but there is fairly little to be done (that I remember) with the amnesia concept in the first place.

I feel as though Baten Kaitos Origins either learned from this or just had more confidence to do this sort of thing. Because not giving the spirit’s condition a name fits the narrative on subsequent playthroughs much more effectively.

I’ve been looking through fanfiction and other fan-created Baten Kaitos content and I thought it was interesting how many people considered their "spirit” in origins to have amnesia on their own without any game guidance. 

I don’t remember what I thought during my first playthrough, but on all subsequent playthroughs I’ve just assumed that the spirit is 100% aware of what is going on, just like I am. This makes it a different emotional experience when the player tried to align their thoughts with Sagi in order to boost their luck in battle, while being aware that they are outright lying to Sagi in order to keep him placated a little longer. This becomes harder as Sagi becomes more frustrated as he continues to fail over and over again. The player has to make a more difficult choice every time Sagi turns to face them, and in my case, will go for the gameplay option every time, only to be savaged by the Heart to Heart scene later on.

And what would you do if you didn’t reaffirm his beliefs? Tell him the truth that his whole life has been a lie?

Of course, I’m not trying to say that the narrative I went with is the right narrative. I think it’s really interesting that people can go through the game seeing a different relationship between Sagi and his spirit than I saw. The idea of the spirit also going through the same gradual reveal of information about their own nature along with Sagi comes much closer to that long lost first playthrough feeling of knowing nothing and learning along with the cast. It would create entirely different emotions.

If this game had labeled the spirit’s condition as “amnesia” like the first game did, that choice would not have been possible.

Of course, it’s also important to keep in mind that both games have different narrative goals that play with player expectations in different ways, and how they treat the player learning new information serves either purpose as it should.

At first you assume they’re talking about their soul or essence or something like that, and if I recall correctly there is a focus on the chest area to act as a visual representation of someone using their “center,” their heart. Most people in universe have wings of the heart, which are pretty much a reflection of the person’s soul in the form of wings, so I’ve always thought of it interchangeably with “soul.”

But now I’m wondering how much of it is rooted in someone’s physical body. After all, the wings are something tangible that is part of the body, and it takes a huge toll on physical health if they are forcibly removed. Someone’s feathers can be touched and kept, so they aren’t just some sort of ethereal soul manifestation, it’s something physical. And I highly doubt we’re talking about an actual human heart, since then I would have to assume that a guardian spirit sits in your arteries like a lump of cholesterol.

In fact, what does it mean for a guardian spirit to be “in someone’s heart?” Is there some sort of physical space in a character’s “heart” that a spirit can just hang out in? Or is the other-dimensional entity that is a guardian spirit able to attach itself somehow to a person’s “heart” through a way that we as beings that can only see in three dimensions can’t comprehend, like another ethereal “heart” plane attached to the BK universe world that spirits exist on? But then, that physical aspect comes back into the picture. Spiriters can use elemental spirit attacks that affect the physical world. And again, wings of the heart are tangible, physical things.

Origins makes things a lot more complicated. I’ll try to keep this as spoiler-free as I can, but needless to say, Origins deals with some very different situations than Eternal Wings does, and the spirit is the crux of BKO.

The spirit in Origins very different and much more physically bound to Sagi than the spirit in Eternal Wings is to Kalas, for reasons that people who played BKO know. The spirit is a part of Sagi’s actual body, but it can still influence the physical world and resonate with similar entities on a seemingly other-dimensional level. In Origins, we see the spirit represented at one point as a glowing, vaguely person-shaped gas that can be seen outside of Sagi’s body, which was probably to visually show the change that the spirit underwent in that moment. Sagi and his spirit can become “part” of one another. The spirit can also influence what Milly and Guillo experience, not just Sagi. The scope of this takes a hard right into spoiler territory, but the point is that the spirit inside of Sagi’s heart can influence his body and even somewhat the bodies of others from wherever or whatever the “heart” is. The fact that it does have such an impact on his body brings the physicality of the “heart” into a much greater focus. Even though the spirit is directly entwined with Sagi’s body, Sagi still refers to his heart when talking about the spirit, so it is entirely relevant.

What’s more, Origins gives us Wiseman, an eldritch abomination of some sort that can not only see people’s hearts and magnus, but also has some means of separating the physical body from the heart. When you see the people of that world who have been separated in that way, they appear as walking humanoid shadows, although they will not remain in the physical world for long unless they have some sort of tie to the world or are held somewhere. In this way, the heart is seen a lot more as a soul (which also brings up the question, what exactly DOES wiseman consume when separating them form their bodies? It has to be more than the physical form, probably their magnus too. Do they become part of them later on? I don’t think I wanna know). Wiseman can remove their physical bodies without them even noticing anything has changed, even. The people without bodies do not need to maintain their bodies with food and sleep and so on, but they still appear human. Are the shadows that we see there the heart? Are they souls, with the heart as part of the soul, freed from physical need? Or are the shadows representations of what might exist on some other plane?

I wonder if the people in the world of Baten Kaitos just have another level or facet of their bodies and souls that we real-life humans don’t. After all, I don’t have wings of the heart, and neither do you. People sometimes theorize that ghosts are people who are on another plane and have some influence on our world even though we can’t see or directly interact with them. I wonder if people’s hearts and guardian spirits exist through a similar concept? The “heart” is also an in-universe cultural concept that is different from what we know as a heart, both in a literal and figurative sense, so it might not entirely translate between worlds. Yeah, I’m probably thinking about this way too hard, but darnit, the Baten Kaitos universe is vast and interesting, and I love to think about it!