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With the Baten Kaitos I & II HD Remaster launching this September, we’re getting more and more details about these niche card-based RPGs from back in the GameCube days. And series director Yasuyuki Honne recently revealed that Baten Kaitos almost wasn’t called Baten Kaitos (thanks to our sister site, Time Extension!).
Sharing the details on Twitter, Honne revealed that (translated by Simon Griffin and SatsumaFS for Nintendo Everything) “there was a lot of opposition” to the name at Namco. Honne doesn’t specify what Namco, now known as Bandai Namco, thought at the time or why they changed their mind, but we’re glad they did.
Here’s Honne’s tweet (translated via Nintendo Everything):
“Thanks to the kindness of Bandai Namco, the world I worked so hard to create, and the maps I worked so hard to draw twenty years ago have been resurrected! Incidentally, I was the one that named the title ‘Baten Kaitos’, but there was a lot of opposition from higher-ups at Namco to the name…we got it passed though!”
Baten Kaitos is an unusual name at first glance, but anyone who’s played the game may have done a bit of extra digging to find out what it means. Baten Kaitos is actually the traditional name for Zeta Ceti, a binary star in the Cetus constellation. It’s an Arabic phrase which translates to “belly of the sea monster”. Cetus is also known as ‘The Whale’, and is named after a sea monster in Greek mythology.
Both constellations and sea monsters — specifically a sea whale — are prominent in Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean and Baten Kaitos Origins. Multiple different locations, weapons, and moves are named after other Arabic star constellations. An entire sidequest is dedicated to collecting star constellations and rebuilding a map, too. The sea whale is a bit more spoiler-y, but it’s an important figure in the lore of the series’ world. So ‘Baten Kaitos’ is a very deliberate name.
Honne points towards this connection in response to another fan’s tweet. He states that the team at Monolith Soft only had a limited budget, so “in order to create a real sense of grandeur”, Honne — who was also the art director and a map painter on the two games — had to specify many things ahead of time. One of the first things Honne named was an airship, of which he says:
“…then the world grew based on that keyword, expanded further by the story writer, and that was the flow. Using the names of constellations also helped localization as the words are universal, and that’s how it started.”
Constellations, then, are a key part of the world of Baten Kaitos — something newcomers will discover when the game drops on Switch on 14th September (in North America and Japan) and 15th September (in Europe and PAL regions).
What do you think of the Baten Kaitos name? Are you glad it managed to stick? Let us know in the comments.