author's note: I shopped this piece around a bit and didn't find purchase, so I am posting it here!
In January of this year I packed my things into a moving truck and made my way northeast. I moved across the country (from Jacksonville, Florida to Brooklyn, New York) during a pandemic to be with my partner of three years. I couldn’t have picked a more strange and alienating time to move to a new region of the United States, a country whose pandemic response has been an abject failure by just about any metric. I also couldn’t have picked a stranger time to move specifically to New York, a city that I knew only as a visitor, but was now making my home. Brooklyn still retained its familiar energy and the sense of community had not left (I often enjoyed walking by folks sitting outside my local bodega and fish market throwing dice, or the excellent hip-hop taste of a regular group of basketball players who often spent Saturdays at the court outside my window), but the surging livelihood had dimmed to a slight buzz. Brooklyn felt, and feels, like a city stirring back to life, a dreary-eyed titan waking from a year-long slumber.
I arrived in Brooklyn and immediately fell ill with COVID-19 (based on the symptom timing, it was almost certainly contracted either right before leaving Florida or somewhere along the trip), and unfortunately passed it to my partner as well. Being ill and still needing to be cautious, much of my time in this new, unknown city was characterized similarly to what I imagine was the experience for many people who are privileged enough to work from home – sitting inside and keeping myself busy while I waited for the vaccine to distribute. It was during this time that I decided to pick up Earthbound.
Earthbound, (Mother 2 in Japan) is a game that I had never played in my youth but always wanted to visit ever since being introduced to the beady-eyed, ball-capped protagonist, Ness, in Super Smash Bros. over twenty years ago. What immediately struck me about the game was its timelessness – other than some wooden UI navigation mechanics, the game feels as though it could have materialized out of the ether earlier this year. Having played so many games inspired by and in conversation with Shigesato Itoi’s sophomore outing (Undertale, Omori, etc.), I expected the game to feel dated and tired, surpassed in scope and complexity. I could not have been more pleasantly surprised to find the game an absolute delight to experience in 2021. For those unfamiliar, Earthbound is a JRPG released in 1994 for the SNES. The game follows a young boy, Ness, who meets with a strange talking bug creature from the future who crashlands in his town of Onett. The creature, who introduces themselves as “Buzz Buzz”, informs Ness that Earth has been corrupted by an evil entity known as Giygas. In Buzz Buzz’s time, Giygas has cast the universe into infinite, unending darkness. There is of course hope – a prophecy foretells of a boy and his friends who will drive back the darkness by communing with several sanctuaries around the world.
And that’s it – Earthbound throws you head-first into the deep-end of its strange, yet familiar world. Long-time JRPG fans know that despite the bizarre introduction, the conceit of traveling the world to collect x number of special macguffins while leveraging the power of friendship and personal growth is extremely familiar. It was even a bit tired back in ‘94 when Earthbound released. What sets Earthbound apart from it’s contemporaries and even from many modern titles is the context in which these tropes were deployed. What I find so fascinating about the journey of Earthbound is the focus on healing through harmony (the harmony in this sense being both literal and figurative). In order to unleash his inner power, Ness must first defeat guardians of the “my sanctuary” locations, then record melodies that emanate from these places of power using the mysterious “sound stone” given to him by Buzz Buzz. The locations that visit often remain as mysterious as they first appear. For instance, the initial sanctuary is the footprint of a huge giant that scars a network of caves and valleys to the north of Ness’ hometown. The source of this footprint is never found, and the only explicit reference to the giant is through local legend and rumor from the many NPCs that decorate the opening town of Onett.
With each visit to a sanctuary, Ness unlocks another part of the overall melody, but is also visited by a vivid memory from his infancy. Earthbound is fascinated with the connection of all things. While defeating the guardians of these places is part of it, the power is not fully harnessed until the player/Ness commune with the piece of the melody itself. Earthbound understands that power and growth come from making connections, not purification. Healing areas from the influence of the evil Giygas is not accomplished through violence, but through remembrance and finding oneself within these places that are beyond our literal understanding. These places are all at once older, greater, and more powerful than us, but share in part of our collective history. To heal, we must connect both with each other, but also with these places on Earth that reside in our collective consciousness. Through legend, through experience, and through context, we derive special meaning and give power to the places in our lives that we feel a connection with. Our own sanctuaries have existed long before our time, and will exist long after we are gone. They contain all at once a snapshot of the life of single humans as well as a collective history that is shared through the combined experiences of all humans.
Perhaps most mysterious of all is the main antagonist themselves, Giygas. Giygas is referenced several times throughout the story, though it’s never truly revealed just what Giygas is (the original game, Mother, sheds some light on this, but Earthbound/Mother 2 contains very little explicit information). We know that Giygas hails from space, but everything else about them is a mystery. Their gender, original form, intentions, etc, are often speculated on by the wide cast of characters but there’s never a true agreement. When Ness and co. finally meet face to face with Giygas, they’re first confined in a giant, Giger-esque “Devil Machine” of winding, fleshy tendrils melded with cybernetic enhancements. Once the Devil Machine is shut down and Giygas is revealed, they’re less of a singular entity but a swirling, vague mass. Their attacks on the party are stated by the game to be indescribable in form. The secondary antagonist of the game, Pokey, describes Giygas as the embodiment of evil itself, an “all-mighty idiot” that has destroyed their own mind in rage and lashes out without fully understanding what they’re doing. In this way, the enemy of the game is less a traditional antagonist and more a force of nature itself, the indifferent violence of the universe that has unknowingly turned its eye on humanity. A tragedy to those with the capability to discern it, natural progression to all else.
This may sound out of left-field for a game that begins with a talking bug. The tone and presentation is something entirely unique; a pastiche of 90s Americana from a distinctly Japanese perspective. This juxtaposition results in an absolutely amazing blend of the deathly serious and the absurd, a stilted mirror of our own world presented with a twee, playmobile-but-less-obnoxious aesthetic that remains unmatched. One of the game’s greatest accomplishments is the deftness with which this tonal mishmash conveys theme. Earthbound shows us a world that is distinctly adult but filtered through the lens of a child’s eye. Though many aspects of the game were altered for the North American release, the original Japanese text contains several explicit references to death, alcohol, and adult innuendo. There’s a prevalent idea that, despite the more direct turns into horror (one section has a town filled with blue-obsessed cultists, including one woman who will follow you wordlessly should you refuse a donation), something more sinister lurks beneath. Giygas has corrupted the world that you know, but in ways more subtle than most antagonists. Earthbound contains no looted castles, burned villages, or rampaging demons. The enemies in Earthbound are the people you know, the plants and animals you cohabit, even the inanimate objects that we regard with general trust turned against us.
Try as you might to defeat Giygas via physical harm, its impossible. While you can inflict pain, the creature has infinite health. The only way for Giygas to be defeated is for you to use the ability “pray” (unique to your party member, Paula), to reach out to the various people with whom you’ve connected over the course of the game. By receiving the prayers of those that love you and have formed bonds with you, you are able to dissipate Giygas and save your own future. It’s not growing physically stronger that allows you to prevent the world from disappearing into unending darkness, but the bonds and connections you make with both others and the Earth itself.
Again, this concept was and is not new for JRPGs, but it hit me particularly hard to experience first in a world starting the first steps towards healing from arguably the most traumatizing and psychologically damaging year in generations. In so many JRPGs, the enemies still take physical form at the end. While the often parodied idea of “a bunch of youngsters defeating the Great Evil through the power of friendship” has been done time and again, few make explicit through gameplay the bonds formed throughout the game, and fewer still allow the “evil” to remain a formless, indistinct mass. There’s no great sword cleaving through Giygas, no great explosion, no giant gun to destroy them, they grow further and further abstract until fading into television static. COVID-19, and the psychological trauma of our country and wider world, is as formless and indifferent as the cosmic force faced in Earthbound. It has altered our day-to-day lives in subtle but profoundly disquieting and alienating ways. Taking the familiar and making it alien, threatening. I believe that part of that healing process is to venture out and re-commune. To solidify our connections. To once-again become part of the on-going human story.
It wasn’t long after my move to Brooklyn that my partner and I split. After such a large change the rug was pulled out from under me just as things started to become comfortable. This sent me back out into the unknown, now to find my own place to live, my own place in this new city, this new ground with which to set foundations for a new-new beginning. During my apartment hunt, I found myself on the roof of a prospective new apartment in Crown Heights. I loved the apartment on the listing so much I called the Realtor immediately to submit an application. I hung up the phone and took it all in. The sun was setting over the rooftops as I stared into the glossy kaleidoscope pastels of the horizon. I could see shafts of the remaining sunlight peaking out from behind the skyline of the Lower East Side. The cool night air ran through my body as I watched my potential neighbors go about their lives in the park below. Somewhere, someone was listening to a gentle jazz album. The terrifying new excitement of possibility washed over my tired mind. I thought of all the others that stood where I was now, where their paths took them, and whether or not there might be a spot for my own story somewhere in this tapestry of lives, of voices, of music. I stared until night fell, and I listened.