Soapbox features allow our writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random things they’ve been thinking about. Today, Nile celebrates the innocence of youth, the pain of growing up, and the magic of a classic SNES role-playing game, which celebrates its 30th anniversary on August 27, 2024…
There is arguably no more complimentary label than calling a piece of media “timeless,” a product so true to its unique vision that its images, sounds, and spirit succeed in impacting the emotions of audiences across generations. Three decades after its release, Earth (Mother 2 in Japan) is for many a game worthy of this title.
That’s proven by the incredible community that’s still 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 what it means 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 “mature” story. However, in the trailer for Earth USAIn a 2023 documentary about the game’s Western online fan community, series creator Shigesato Itoi is heard referring to EarthBound as a game that “turned adults into children and children into adults.” This brief audio clip aptly sums up its timeless appeal.
Every adult has to go through childhood, and once they do, it’s a phase of life that’s gone forever. Playing this game as an adult, the magic of EarthBound is the ability to reconnect with memories of our inner child’s yearning for adventure and noble purpose, as well as our first realization that the world is often a cruel place.
EarthBound frequently features hilarious dialogue, soft pastel tones, and an endless supply of charm. But it’s laced with allusions to absent parents and domestic violence as a group of kids confront thugs, corrupt police, people who practice extremist ideologies, and, time and again, the greed and incompetence of adults in positions of authority.
This is a game that shows off its dissonance as effectively as it does its famously surreal weirdness. Nowhere is that more evident than in EarthBound’s final boss encounter. The player’s confrontation with Giygas pits you against an incomprehensible evil force that has no form, manifesting itself not as a spirit but as swirling shades of red and black, a kind of tormented Rorschach of malevolence.
The shift in tone in the game’s final level is a remarkably unsettling contrast that raised a number of questions throughout my playthrough. What is Giygas ultimately a metaphor for? What is the significance of the game’s child protagonists being forced to inhabit machine bodies? And what is the larger message behind this unconventional method of defeating the boss?
While the player is always aware of a larger evil force at work in the story, that force manifests itself throughout the game in silly ways like trading blows with haunted fire hydrants and piles of vomit against a bright hallucinatory backdrop. One could be forgiven for expecting the final boss to be a ridiculous joke, not a turning point for the psychological horror genre.
Giygas manifests itself as a face twisted in pain, a being without reason or consciousness, its existence spreading pain, even to itself. The heroes of the game, we are told, cannot even awareness the way Giygas harms them. To me, it is the embodiment of the ontological potential for evil in the hearts of living creatures and the trauma it causes.
Itoi said in a interview that the encounter with Giygas was inspired by an incident from his childhood when he walked into the wrong cinema and witnessed an extremely detailed scene in a film that had been imprinted on his memory. The confrontation could therefore be a metaphor for the shock of our childhood perceptions being permanently altered.
As we grow into adulthood, our expanded awareness of the troubles of the world breaks through the isolation of childhood. Perhaps every adult can recount moments of such realization in their own lives. Traumatic events, or the awareness of them, mark the end of childhood in some way, as symbolized by Ness and his friends having to leave their childlike bodies to confront Giygas.
The heroes of EarthBound are told by scientist Dr. Andonuts that their human bodies cannot survive the journey through time and space to reach Giygas’s location in the past, so the children then undergo experimental surgeries – depicted with terrifying invasive sound effects – to inhabit cyborg bodies with the knowledge that this may be irreversible.
The transition into adulthood is also irreversible. The transformation of children into machines can be a metaphor for the dehumanization that can occur when faced with life’s darkest challenges, or a symbol of the alienation and detachment that can accompany the process of growing up. Ness’s red hat is the only part of his former human self that he retains when he becomes a machine.
As the heroes enter Gigyas’ lair, they climb into what appears to be the living, breathing bowels of the so-called “Devil Machine” where we’re told our enemy resides. The machine projects a strange image of Ness in human form, emphasizing that this isn’t just a fight to save the world, but a symbolic fight to preserve his humanity and the good within.
Giygas wreaks havoc on your party and can withstand normal attacks. Instead of “Fighting” him, the solution is to select the hitherto ignored “Pray” command, which triggers cutscenes of the characters you’ve helped along the way begging for your safety, culminating in a fourth wall breaking moment where you – the player – also prays for the party.
That collective effort ultimately defeats Giygas, leading to a bitter end for the children, who part ways and return home to their families after their souls return to their human bodies. So while life circumstances can force young people to face adult issues before they are ready, EarthBound theorizes that we turn to our inner child for moral resilience.
It also suggests that no matter how unfair and sometimes disruptive the world can be, we can face it all with a big heart, finding meaning and joy through our relationships with others and the positive impact we can have on their lives. Like the best examples of children’s literature, EarthBound’s message is also relevant to adults.
Are you celebrating EarthBound — we mean Mother 2 — today? Let us know in the comments..
