Giygas’ trauma and growing up in EarthBound
During the holiday season, we’ll be republishing some of the best articles from Nintendo Life writers and contributors as part of our campaign. Best of 2024 series. This article was originally published in August. Enjoy!
Soapbox features allow our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random things they’re mulling over. Today, Nile celebrates the innocence of youth, the pain of growing up, and the magic of the cult classic SNES role-playing game, celebrating its 30th anniversary on August 27, 2024…
There is arguably no label more laudable than calling a piece of media “timeless,” a product that is true to its distinctive vision to the point of its visuals, sounds, and character. succeeds in influencing the emotions of audiences across generations. Three decades since its release, EarthBound (Mother 2 in Japan), for many, is a game worthy of this label.
That’s the case proven by the incredible community that remains passionate about the series, the many games that wear EarthBound’s influence on their sleeves, and the fact that it continues to spark theories and discussions about its meaning. in the present. People not yet born will play this game in the future and feel its impact in new ways.
It would be too simplistic to call EarthBound a “coming of age” story. However, in the trailer of EarthBound USAa 2023 documentary about the game’s online fanbase in the West, series creator Shigesato Itoi is said to have framed EarthBound as a game that turns “adults into children and children become an adult”. This concise soundbite nicely encapsulates its timeless appeal.
Every adult has to go through childhood and once they do, it is a phase of life that is gone. Playing the game as adults, the magic of EarthBound is its ability to reacquaint us with memories of our inner child’s pure heart desire for adventure and noble purpose, as well as as our first realizations that the world is, in fact, often a cruel place.
EarthBound regularly delivers funny dialogue, light, airy colors and a bottomless well of charm. But it’s coupled with allusions to absent parents and domestic violence as a group of children confront thugs, corrupt police, enforcers of extremist ideologies, and time and time again. Time and time again, the greed and incompetence of adults in leadership positions.
It’s a title that embodies dissonance as well as its famous surreal oddity. Nowhere is that more apparent than in EarthBound’s final boss encounter. The player’s confrontation with Giygas pits you against an incomprehensible, formless demon that presents itself not as a demon but as swirling hues of red and black, a kind of Rorschach cruelly tortured.
The change in tone in the game’s final act is a notable unsettling contrast, leaving me with a series of questions as I played. What is Giygas ultimately a metaphor for? How significant is it that the game’s child protagonists are forced to live in machine bodies? And what is the larger message behind this unique method of defeating the boss?
Although the player is always aware of a greater evil at play in the story, that force manifests itself throughout the game in silly ways like trading blows with haunted fire hydrants and piles of substances. vomiting against a bright psychedelic backdrop. One could be forgiven for expecting the final boss to be a silly absurdist story, rather than one that revolves around psychological horror.
Giygas presents himself as a face twisted in pain, a creature without reason or awareness whose very existence inflicts pain, even on itself. We are told that the game’s heroes can’t even awareness the ways Giygas harmed them. To me, it embodies the ontological potential of evil in the hearts of living beings and the resulting damage.
Itoi said in one interview that the encounter with Giygas was inspired by an incident in his childhood when he went to the wrong cinema and witnessed an extremely graphic scene in a movie that was imprinted in his memory. The confrontation could thus be a metaphor for the shock of our childhood perceptions being permanently altered.
As we mature, our ever-expanding awareness of the world’s troubles wears away the insulation of childhood. Perhaps every adult can recount such moments of realization in his or her life. In some ways, the traumatic events, or the perception of them, that mark the end of childhood, symbolize how Ness and his friends are forced to leave their childish bodies to confront with Giygas.
The heroes of EarthBound are told by scientist Dr. Andonuts that their human bodies cannot survive the journey through time and space to Giygas’s location in the past, so the children must then undergo experimental surgeries – depicted with startlingly invasive sound effects – to inhabit a robot body with the knowledge that this may be irreversible.
Entering adulthood cannot be changed. The transformation of children into machines may be a metaphor for the loss of humanity that can occur when faced with life’s darkest challenges, or a symbol of the alienation and separation that can occur. can happen as you get older. Ness’s red hat was the only part of his former self that he kept when he became a machine.
When the heroes enter Gigyas’s lair, they ascend what appears to be a living, breathing part of the so-called “Evil Machine,” where we learn their enemies reside. The machine projects a strange image of Ness in human form, emphasizing that this is not just a fight to save the world but also a symbolic fight to protect humanity and the good within he.
Giygas wreak havoc on your team and can withstand regular attacks. Instead of “Fighting” him, the solution is to choose the hitherto overlooked “Pray” command, which will trigger cutscenes of the characters you assisted on their journey of supplication your safety, culminating in a fourth-wall breaking moment when you – the player – also pray for the party.
That collective effort ultimately defeats Giygas, leading to a bittersweet ending for the children, who part ways and return home to their families after their souls return to their human bodies. So while life’s circumstances may force young people to face adult problems before they are ready, EarthBound recognizes that we look to our inner child for the ability to overcome them. moral recovery.
It also suggests that no matter how unfair and sometimes disturbing the world may be, we can still face it all with a big heart, finding meaning and joy through our relationships with others. ourselves to others and the positive impact we can have on their lives. Like the best examples of children’s literature, EarthBound’s message is just as relevant to adults.
Are you celebrating EarthBound – we mean Mother 2 – today? Let us know in the comments.
