SMITE New God is Bake Kujira, the Whale Yokai

Bake Kujira will be SMITE’s 129^th playable deity, but he might be the most unique one added to the game.

While not as popular as League of Legends or Dota 2, Hi-Rez Studio’s third-person MOBA, SMITE is still going strong. The 10^th World Championship will take place in just over a month, and there’s still biweekly updates and a ton of new content added to the game.

The most hype additions are of course the new gods, the playable deities that fill up matches of SMITE instead of champions or heroes. The last god, Maman Brigitte was added almost 3 months ago on September 26, so it was high time the next character left the Titan Forge – and he’s sure to make a splash!

SMITE New God: Bake Kujira

The 129^th god in the 10-year old game will be Bake Kujira, an obscure, but incredibly cool Japanese deity. According to Japanese folklore, Bake Kujira, or Ghost Whale is the spirit, or culmination of spirits of hunted whales along the Japanese shoreline. It is followed by strange fish and eerie birds, and brings curses upon fishermen and fishing villages. Bake Kujira is usually depicted as a whale of a skeleton, and in some stories, fishermen simply can’t hit him due to being a skeletal spectre.

In the teaser released by Hi-Rez Studios, Bake Kujira keeps this backstory, as we can see a whale hunted down by fishing vessels when it came up for air. After turning into a vengeful spirit in the dark depths, it returned to the surface to destroy the humans that hunted it down.

While the teaser didn’t confirm any abilities for Bake Kujira, we can make some general assumptions:

• He should have some sort of submerging ability akin to Jormungandr’s 3, maybe tied in with a skill that lets him burst out from under the waves to knock enemies up,
• He is accompanied by the spectral birds from the folklore, so he might have a mechanic tied to them, maybe a damage-over-time effect or some kind of harassment,
• At the end of the video, Bake Kujira is showed with an opened mouth, and as some real-life whales can gulp up incredible amounts of fish, we might see an ability similar to that – maybe an ultimate that is also an execute?

We don’t have to wait long until the vengeful whale swims to the Battleground of the Gods, as at the end of the video his release date was revealed: Bake Kujira is arriving to SMITE on December 12^th! The Season of Worlds begun on November 14^th, heralding the end of the 10^th competitive split of SMITE, as well as the approaching new content and the SMITE World Championship. Keep an eye on ESTNN for the latest drops from the Battleground of the Gods!