They said the Wilds could never be tamed. If only they could see us now.
Here’s the tl;dr version of Bastion’s setting. You know how JRPG worlds often feel like medieval Europe and medieval-Europe-flavored fantasy run through a strange and colorful culture grinder? Bastion’s landscape is like that, except its raw materials largely come from North America.
Now, the long, spoiler-filled version.
In Bastion, your character belongs (or belonged) to a migrant people from a vague Motherland across the sea. From their City upon a hill, they spread out across their adopted continent, subduing the wilderness, mining energy resources, and so on. And they built a wall, and kept pushing this wall outward as they grew — that was the hero’s job. It was a culture paradoxically fascinated with acquisition and intent on keeping unwanted elements out — a culture happy to accommodate, if not entirely accept, foreigners willing to serve as laborers, foreigners such as the inhuman but intelligent Windbags.
You can see the grimdark potential there (and I guess it is a post-apocalypse story, after all). But Bastion’s as fun as it is partly because it isn’t just an extended metaphor. It takes North American cultural artifacts and makes them fit in a fantasy world. For example, the mechanical bull becomes an idol, an object of worship. (Note, also, that religion in Caelondia is a commercial enterprise.)
In their efforts to domesticate the wilderness, the Caelondian Brushers found themselves at odds with a whole bunch of spiky plants.
You’ll run into these, too, but fortunately you’ll have at your disposal “the weapon that conquered the continent” and a pair of dueling pistols.
Let’s get back to the history, though. It’s important.
Eventually, inevitably, the Rippling Wall reached the borders of the Ura, a people not content to assimilate and become miners and trash collectors. And here’s where it gets difficult to drop appropriate links. The Ura aren’t a clear analogue for, say, the Native Americans or Mexico, though you could make a case for one or the other. Suffice to say that they were residents of coveted land, people with a civilization in place, and that war ensued. It’s a familiar story.
And it might’ve been a long story, but it was made short by the Mancers of Caelondia, who devised a way to close off the ancestral burrows of the Ura. It didn’t work, for various reasons. The result is the fragmented, floating world in which the game takes place.
Expansionism with shattering consequences. Fair enough. Except in Bastion, you can undo it — you can turn back time, if you so choose.
Is it wish fulfillment on a grand scale? Well, not exactly — before you’re offered the choice between rewinding the world or living with the consequences, you’re reminded that there’s really nothing stopping the Calamity from happening again. Maybe it’s inevitable. How far back would you have to turn the clock before that wasn’t the case? How many time loops have we been through, anyway?
Bastion’s final lesson, then, seems to be that history, big mess of causation that it is, is complicated. That to write history is to guess at things.
What does it mean to pursue the past at the cost of the present? What does it mean to shoulder your less-than-sterling heritage and move on? And why isn’t Bastion a standard text in every U.S. history class ever?
schneider
/ 29 May 2012Oh, I love Bastion! I never thought of this angle, but it’s fascinating. The score does evoke a broken, new frontier vibe to me. This is a great reading!
As for the ending, I spared Zulf, and chose to live in post-cataclysm Caelondia. I think it’s indicative of my values (no save points, you’re gonna carry that weight, etc).
Pontifus
/ 3 June 2012I kind of forgot to mention the music, didn’t I? Well, dammit.
I made the same choices, but in my case it might be cynicism. This war would always happen. I don’t want to doom the world to endless
eighttimeloops.Annwyd
/ 5 June 2012I’ve been browsing anime blogs today, and stumbled across this; I wouldn’t have commented on a post that’s a few days old, save for the fact that about a day after you posted this here, I posted some commentary of my own Bastion saying more or less the same thing:
“I could add that I wonder how much of the themes I read into it were intentional. I think the strong motifs of the Western genre might have had a point beyond aesthetics, that maybe the player was supposed to feel like they were breaking down the spirit of the American frontier, even though it was secondary-world fantasy. I might consider reading it as in part a parable on the destructive nature of expansionism and the myth of the frontier and the need to find new modes of thought, done not in a self-righteous and pretentious way but simply as part of making a beautiful game.”
And I would also say that unlike many modern video games praised for their deep and meaningful storylines, Bastion integrates them with both its aesthetics (the lovely music and visuals) and its gameplay. Reading about the degree to which decisions about the art and gameplay influenced the rest of the game, rather than being made off to the side while writers put together the gritty and issue-laden story in another building, is enlightening. Well, in short, Bastion strikes me as the best example of video games’ capacity to be art that I’ve seen. Not that I’ll stop playing those other ones, of course.
Annwyd
/ 5 June 2012Also, seeing as I left this comment before I’d done more reading here and fully grasped the postmodernist drive of the blog, I now feel the need to clarify that my posturing on “video games’ capacity to be art” up there is not intended as a judgment over whether or not all video games should try to make use of that capacity and become Art (or indeed that there indisputably exists a clear and meaningful divide of high art/low entertainment), but rather an observation that in a social setting where the argument over the capacity is a chronic preoccupation of many gamers, developers, critics, and others in the mix, I find that Bastion addresses that argument more productively than much of what is usually suggested.
Pontifus
/ 6 June 2012Yeah, I’m with you — not to worry. I won’t ask everyone who mentions “art” to define it!
Though I find the art/non-art argument in the gaming community pretty tiresome at this point (I stand by the idea that it’s art if and when one uses it as such), your suggestion that Bastion addresses the divide is fascinating. It really isn’t that “deep,” if you think about it — it’s actually quite simple. It lacks many of the things people usually offer as evidence of art in games; the world is pretty but, gameplay-wise, small and linear; the narrator is great, but that distracts from the fact that there isn’t even any real dialogue (except arguably at the very end). Nothing is purely symbolic; everything serves a gameplay purpose, as you point out. It’s a basic, almost minimalist story, and the questions it asks are fundamental (can’t we all just get along?) — but that we’re even having this conversation is, as far as I’m concerned, evidence that it works. It works as-is; it doesn’t have to be avant-garde (on the indie hand) or have a ten-thousand-page script (on the triple-A-studio hand).
The question of why it works has as many answers as the game has fans, I guess. The point is that it works for me, and when a thing works for me, or works upon me, I’m inclined to wonder what it does when it gets inside other people’s heads. For me it’s not a question of whether the themes you or I have pointed out have a point or are legitimate/intentional, but whether other people also saw those themes, or got something different out of it, or didn’t get anything out of it at all.
The critic is always writing about him- or herself. That’s my favorite thing about the whole enterprise.
I feel like I might’ve rambled a little here.
r042
/ 6 June 2012I really liked Bastion; I must admit I didn’t think of the aesthetic to this extent as I played but focused instead on how it seemed to do everything it set out to do in gameplay and narrative terms so well I could find nothing to fault about it (except the hammer and shield challenges but I never consider my own proven ineptitude at games to be a reason to criticise the intent).
Good article!
Pontifus
/ 6 June 2012The hammer challenge can go to hell.
Am I right in thinking that you’re from the UK? It might be easier to see one’s own country’s cultural cliches in things. Though I guess colonialism resonates with…well, everybody ever.
r042
/ 7 June 2012I am from the UK, yes. I did pick up on a sort of US styling to it in the choices of weapons and the idea of being on a new frontier, but this article highlighted a lot of things I missed!