I bought and played Bastion the night it came out, having followed Supergiant Games ever since January, when I found a link to a game that – upon first glance – looked similar to an isometric RPG game I was set on creating. But Bastion was its own thing, which I soon found out during the developer videos at Giantbomb.
The reason I was so interested? Sure, the art was amazing – at that point I wasn’t aware the sound was as well – but the narrator. Here was a developer set on doing something new, set on bringing a baby into this world.
I guess with every new sequel to a sequel, I get queasy. There just aren’t that many original designs floating around right now – seems like everyone is dead-set on repackaging the same bullshit we’ve already seen with a different colored ribbon. People have compared Bastion to an old SNES game. I don’t see it. But what I do see is this freshness, and perhaps that’s what people really mean now when they call it an SNES game: an original game. For god’s sake, an original game!
Everyone I told about Bastion during this time wasn’t thrilled. They didn’t see the potential the game had, being caught up with the nth installment of whatever RPG series and reluctant to try an XBLA title. But this isn’t about how I was right and they were wrong. This is about why I, fundamentally, can’t look past Bastion’s ending.
(SPOILER ALERT)
When you get to the end of Bastion, the game freezes and you are offered – in a menu screen – two options, either to try and save Zulf or leave him behind. The reason I am so opposed to this is before the menu pops up, the game design is spot-on. Near perfect. Every part of the game felt enjoyable to me. But this – MENU – pops up, I’m thinking, “What is this? No “good-or-evil” menus popped up in the entire game!” All of a sudden I was shocked.
It may have been Supergiant’s tight development schedule. But I view the menu as a blunder, a smear on the perfect canvas.
Bastion is a game devoted to dynamically engaging the player through gameplay. The narration represents the epitome of this fact: he reacts to you, he talks to you, and you trust him. The entire game leading up to the ending moment was filled with direct engagement. You were told your decisions in the game, on the playing field, had meaning. And I was foolish enough to believe they would follow through on this design theme. I was wrong.
What should have happened? There should have been no pop-up. The player should have been able to either realize there was a choice, and choose, or not realize there was a choice. And that potential: for people to not realize there was a choice, and blindly trudge forward leaving Zulf behind only to later find out they could have saved him – is a moment I wished occurred in Bastion, one that I can’t look past.
Goodness gracious, you definitely didn’t understand the point of Bastion’s ending. I know, it’s been almost a year and I’m now replying but let me explain it to you as best I can.
The entire point of the Kid’s journey was learning that memory is what keeps us moving forward. What Zulf represented was the past. Zia encouraged you to pick Evacuation, therefore she represented the future. The entire game, your under the impression that you’re trying to rebuild a world. If you seriously missed the point in the game where you learn the behind the scenes work of both nations featured, then I feel sorry for you. Caelondia was going to destroy Ura with the Calamity but a Ura who worked on it figured out what they wanted to do. So that person made sure it would backfire when used. So it did, and Caelondia was destroyed. When you learn this, why would you want to reverse time when those mistakes would just happen again? Because nothing would be learned from the Calamity since nobody would remember it. Therefore, the same mistake would keep being made again and again and again.
You truly want to know why they gave you the two choices, Restoration and Evacuation, at the end? If you chose Restoration(reversing time), then you did not learn what the game was trying to teach you. The Calamity would happen again, and you would start over in New Game Plus. The game clearly encourages you to learn from the mistakes made between the two nations and choose the future over the past. If you chose Evacuation, then you learned what the game was trying to convey to you. Therefore, you picked the true ending to Bastion.
There is no good and evil ending. There is simply an encouragement to learn from past mistakes and build a better future. In reality, Supergiant isn’t letting you choose the ending. That’s simply an illusion to test you on what you’ve learned about Bastion’s history and lore. Because if you learned and processed what the Narrator told you about the history, then nobody in their right mind would choose Restoration. You were right that that the Narrator was telling you that your actions had meaning. The ending was a test to see if you truly learned the moral of the story. The game was about how memory keeps us moving forward and that the past is there so we don’t make the same mistakes more than once. It’s about learning from those mistakes and building a better life. If you learned that and UNDERSTOOD it, then chances are, you picked Evacuation which is the true ending to Bastion. Filled with hope, memory, friends, love, and the future.
By the way, about Zulf…
If you picked Restoration, you didn’t save him. Zulf wanted his fiance back but if you reversed time, he’d only be happy for a short amount of time before the Calamity would once again be activated and in turn, losing his fiance in the process. You’d be causing him pain in a never ending loop by picking Restoration. So in reality, that wouldn’t have saved him. In fact, f you remember correctly, before the ending, on the last level when the Ura turn against Zulf, you have the option to pick him up or leave him to die. That’s a test as well. The choice you should have made is left him there because he represents the past. By him dying, he would join his beloved fiance. But if you picked him up and carried him to the Bastion, you condemned him to a lifetime full of pain. Picking Restoration would cause him the loss of his fiance again and picking Evacuation is him being haunted by the loss of her along with events of the Calamity for the rest of his life. Leaving him to die is letting him meet his fiance in the afterlife and truly as you would call it, “saving him”.
The choices of picking up Zulf or leaving him and picking Restoration or Evacuation, those are tests to see if you learned the moral of the story. It seems you didn’t.
Very well said. I don’t necessarily agree with your assessment on leaving Zulf to die, but absolutely understand the logic that leads to that conclusion. Bad things happen to everyone and while some will experience more painful times than others, it’s necessary to move past the psychological shackles or else we do not progress as individuals or as a species. There is no guarantee that Zulf would ever find happiness in the post-Calamity world, but we cannot simply stop our lives because something terrible happens. Everyone loses loved ones in the Calamity and they are allowed to move on and I think Zulf deserves this opportunity as well.
Whoa, I never said the tests shouldn’t be there. This isn’t a criticism from a narrative standpoint at all, it’s about the choice in game design. The player is literally taken out of the game world with a menu pop-up. The choice could have been diegetic, i.e. in the game world itself as a natural consequence of the rules of the game. It wasn’t. The narrative still makes sense — my problem is the way they went about it.