Tuesday Nov 21, 2006

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Earthbound is the scariest game I have ever played. Maybe that's an exaggeration. But that game is scary!

I hear Shigesato Itoi based Pokey's dialogue during the final boss fight on his experience of accidentally walking into a porn cinema when he was a kid, during a rape scene.

The graphics are creepy to me, as is the music, both of which are throwbacks to first Mother game on the NES (or FDS?). I actually find the games on the pre-16-bit consoles to be super-creepy, surprisingly enough. Even Super Mario Bros., to a degree! Atari games? Forget about it! Totally creepy!

But the themes in Earthbound are pretty scary. The plot is that there is an entity that exists beyond time and space who is bent on the destruction of everything. That may not sound all that scary at first, because there are a lot of plots where someone's out to destroy everything, but we're talking about an entity. Who knows what this thing is. And it exists beyond time and space, which is a kind of a mind-bending concept for some video game-playing kid to wrap his head around.

The final sequence of the game, in particular, is rather terrifying.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)
For one thing, the world-saving kid heroes have to have their spirits removed from their bodies and implanted into robot bodies. It always makes me a little sad, and definitely scared, when I get to that part in the game.

And then they have to warp to the pocket of space-time where Giygas (called Gyiyg in Japanese, which is even scarier) exists. They enter the cave in which it "lives", and find themselves walking along some horrific organic machine thing. Pokey appears in a scary, spider-like craft at Giygas's side, taunting the now-robotic heroes (again, his dialogue is based on a rape scene).

Then Pokey turns off the "Devil's Machine", revealing Giygas's true form, which is just some sort of ethereal, spiritual entity with a sort of a scary face, made of red whorls that repeat in a pattern across the screen. By the time the kids get there, Giygas's evil has grown so strong that it has gone out of control. It tries to speak, but can barely utter anything coherent, repeating itself, saying it is happy, saying it is sad, repeating the hero's name, screaming.

The kids attack it with everything they have, but nothing seems to work. So the only thing they can do is pray. Yes, praying, in a game. Their prayers reach all of the people they love most, who all stop what they are doing and pray for the kids' safety. Each time another group of friends prays, Giygas is severely damaged, growing more and more incoherent and shapeless.

Finally, at the end, get this! Finally, they run out of people to pray to, so they just pray. And who hears their prayer? YOU! THE PLAYER!! In an earlier point in the game, it asks you to enter your name. So, at the end, you see YOUR NAME written on the screen, saying that you're praying for the kids. Well, that's the end of Giygas. His scary red pattern grows more and more chaotic until it just turns into a semblance of TV static, and finally disappears.

What happens to the kids, then? You see their battered robotic bodies in front of the cave where Giygas was, and it looks like they're out of commission. Until! You see their spirits float out of the robots, somehow crossing space and time to return to their bodies in Saturn Valley. And they wake up! And that's it, you see the happy ending sequence and the friends part ways and go back to their homes and their parents.

Isn't that INSANE??



I seriously gave myself a fright just writing that! This is supposedly a kids' game! Can you believe that?? It was not that successful when it was released here in the US, but now it has a cult following of dedicated fans. Just visit Starmen.net to see for yourself.

...

HOLY MOLY! Look what's going on at that site!

Hoo, boy. Too much excitement for one night, I tell you what. I think I'm going to rest for a while. Good grief!

VIEW 12 of 12 COMMENTS
12angrybadgers:
I checked out some of the screen shots for Battle of Olympus. Looks almost identical to Zelda II! eeek I catch myself thinking that I might enjoy the game play with the different mythology (er, so to speak). Perhaps the Zelda story and the side-scrolling environment just don't jive very well.

Glad to hear you're back on track with school, even if things are rough. Got any plans for after graduation? I actually applied for a job at UofMD a while back. Drove my ass all the way up from NC for the interview, but they ended up doing an internal hire. Not sure I would have loved the job anyway, but I would've been nice to save the gas money.
twinkie:
HA!!! I totally remember that!!!!!

I tried sudoku for the first time and thought of you. Boy do I suck at it.

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