EarthBound Commentary

this video is an in-depth commentary on earthbound so much of the magic of earthbound comes from experiencing the little details for yourself so if you have any interest in playing the game I recommend doing so before watching this video we have a lot of ground to cover so without further ado let's get started earthbound hit American shelves in 1995 on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System until the 2015 release of its predecessor earthbound beginnings it was the only game in the series to see an official English release I'm going to be looking at earthbound independently of mother 1 because until very recently it was english-speaking audiences first and only encounter with suga zato Ichi eyes acclaimed mother series now Chickasaw 2 et toi himself is not exactly a game designer by profession aside from the mother series he's only made one other game a fishing game he's primarily occupied as a writer specifically famous for being a copy writer he actually wrote the advertising material for quite a few Studio Ghibli movies he also runs his own somewhat popular online newspaper but it doesn't just write either if you ever seen the Japanese version of My Neighbor Totoro he voices the father in that movie he even writes song lyrics for pop songs his jack-of-all-trades a Renaissance man and a celebrity with total composure this is a video about Earth's bond moto volt Suja suckle Miyazaki well what I think sets earth bound primarily apart from other games is its sense of perspective and that perspective I think is a direct byproduct of its creators broad pool of experience with life earthbound makes a lot of really simple but OnPoint observations about the way people act the things that they say what the world has to offer what life's all about that kind of thing but let's not get ahead of ourselves let's start where any good story should the beginning a [Music] few things worth mentioning about this character named screens you actually name every character you're ever going to control in the course of the game you name ness but you also name is companions Paula Jeff's and poo now you haven't met these guys yet but this serves as sort of a primer it's getting you excited for all the people you're going to get to meet over the course of this globe-trotting journey across a goofy world this part also nudges you toward injecting a little bit of yourself and your home into the game the game asks you for your favorite food it asks you to name your pet and it asks you to name your favorite thing that's what you're going to draw power from as your psychic ability in earthbound when you finally earn it and whenever you choose to visit home which you can do at any point in earthbound your mom will whip up your favorite food to just give you a little case of home but because I have no friends and because all I like is pizza I'm going to be rolling with most of the defaults one fateful night in 1990 X nest is awoken by a mad ruckus outside his mom and his little sister Tracey are scared so naturally nest steps up to the plate to go check out what's going on but not before changing out of his jammies of course now the cops are about as in control of the situation as you'd expect adults in an RPG to be which is not at all they're basically just knowing around pretending to know what to do now one of the cops asks us a question about this chunky kid over here pokey is he our friend now the choice has no practical consequences but it does say something about who we are from our limited interaction with him he doesn't seem like the kind of guy I'd want to hang out with but that said I was raised to give people the benefit of the doubt and I think Ness was too now this doesn't actually matter really what you're choosing here is next going to be a compassionate boy or is it going to be a little bit cheeky are the way things play out the same but it's an important difference and it changes your color of your view of the game because the police are blocking the crash site with a meteor landed we have to go back home but we don't get much rest until we are woken by quote the most annoying knock in the world it's pokey now pokey here is trying to get our help finding his little brother who apparently ran off he condescends to our mom here which immediately should leave a bad taste in your mouth I don't know if any of you have heard of or seeing the old show Leave It to Beaver there's a character in there named Eddie Haskell and he Haskell is the all-american clerk boar who will do her side whatever he needs to do to get what he wants but around his friends he's a total ass that sort of who pokey is or at least who he is at the beginning of the game we'll follow him as Earthbound progresses but essentially we're going to be following neces development into a thoughtful open person with knowledge of the world and also track pokies development into a myopic moral failure heading outside we get into our first combat encounters now there's not all that much to the combat in earthbound anyway but that's especially apparent now when really all we can do is hit the attack button and wait for the fights to be over now while the combat is as bog-standard as it gets at this point it does excel above other RPGs in the flavor text use in battle now keep in mind this was not a very common feature of RPGs back then you see we had Final Fantasy 6 or 3 as it was known as in the state secret of men a Dragon Quest that kind of game those games had functional battle text they explained what was happening to WHO how much damage was being dealt what status ailments were in play they delivered information that was the purpose of the text in earthbound well one of the most memorable parts of this journey up the mountain isn't any item that we find or enemy that we encounter it's how once in a while pokey will do something like apologize to the enemy or get scared if you need to forget in our modern world of under Tales and leases that RPGs weren't always doing creative funny things like this they played it a lot straighter earthbound shook the entire genre up for the better anyway it turns out it was not picky who ran away from pokey but the other way around typical Cowardly pokey anyway when we get to the top a buzzing creature appropriately named buzz buzz emerges from the meteor to deliver a shitload of exposition to us now earthbound story is fantastic earthbounds plot on the other hand is about what you would expect there's an important distinction there whereas the story is more the ultimate point or the arc that the characters in the game will take the plot is the series of events that will occur and the plot is pretty standard there's an evil bad guy named guy guess who's going to destroy the world in the future and it's up to us to collect eight things so that we can stop them I think this is actually a little bit of parody here because one of my least favorite parts and I imagine many others least favorite parts of RPGs are the exposition dumps and who better to deliver an exposition dump than an intentionally annoying character named buzz-buzz who constantly goes buzz Liz but anymore than makes up for that by putting us on his back when we get jumped by the star man Junior when we descend a mountain makes it all the more tragic when buzz buzz is brutally murdered in a second anyway we return pokey and piggy back home and their father promptly goes upstairs to beat the hell out of them in the Japanese version it was a little clear that what was going on was beating they censored it a bit in the American version they changed the sound effects but the sound was more explicitly violent in the original we also learned a bit more about the home that produced pokey here his father tells us that our family owes him $100,000 this was more explicitly a lie in the original Japanese the translation was closer to a kajillion dollars it was clearly false with a swift swing of her flabby arm pokies mom lard 'no that's really her name takes buzz buzz out rest his soul or at least rest his soul after he gives us some more exposition of course he basically tells us that we're going to be going around the world looking for the eight pieces of our song that's all we need to know right now with that we're ready to leave the house and greet a new day I really like that moment how the music rises up in sync as the scene fades and today what better way to go off to the races and take our journey off and one of the most important parts of any journey are the memories that you form along the way the photo man the self-proclaimed photographic genius is one way that earthbound makes those memories literal let's think about it what's the point of taking photographs in real life you're capturing a moment in time so that you can go back and reflect on it later reflection is one of earthbounds primary themes so it's only fitting that someone will snap photos of us as we encounter key moments or maybe even just little distractions on our journey the photo op Center has found our opportunities for the game to remind you to keep in mind what it is you're doing where you've come from and where you're going not just in the game but in real life it's a little premature to get that meta but the game goes there we'll revisit later now one of the things you'll notice as you stroll into our net is that unlike the vast majority of RPGs there's no clear delineation between the town and the overworld it's all just one continuous place you walk in and there's enemies running through the streets there's enemies near and in the arcade not only does it eliminate any traditional concept of an overworld it also keeps you on your toes earthbound makes it clear that you could encounter enemies anywhere you go anything could be around the next corner or in the next area and that's a good sense of wonder for a game to instill especially in an RPG that's all about exploring a big world now if you start chatting up the locals of on it you'll notice that the adults in this game tend to be missing some change between the years there I think that adds to the feeling of being out on your own on a big question it's up to you and your friends to save the day not mom and dad or the cops for the to that lack of help the mayor won't give us the key to the sanctuary until we deal with his gang problem a gang set up shop in the arcade after taking on dozens of pogo stickers and skateboard punks we are able to face our first boss Frank an older man who probably shouldn't be hanging out with a bunch of kids in an arcade now it's no secret that earthbound can take some dark turns once in a while and this is one of the first instances of that I just think it's really funny that a grown man is attacking a little boy in a back alley with knives naturally the mayor is happy that we took care of his gang problem and he's willing to give us the key to the giant step cave however he makes us promise that he a grown adult who runs a town will not be held responsible is he sending a child to his death right now now the giant step cave is the first real challenge that the player encounters and unfortunately it reveals some of the shortcomings with the battle system right up front for starters things are very boring at this stage there's only one party member Ness and all we can really do is hit the back button or once we level up a bit uses one psychic ability until we get some more party members things are going to be a bit tedious and the combat is at its worst at the beginning of the game for sure so though earthbound combat is still pretty interesting compared to RPGs of the time they had a nice feature where if you were clearly over leveled for an enemy you wouldn't even have to sit through the fight it'll just immediately end and you'll get a sliver of experience there's also a unique and strange rolling health meter the idea is that when you get hit for damage you don't lose all of that health immediately instead your health starts ticking down in front of your eyes and if say a fatal blow is struck then you may be able to heal yourself before your health actually hit zero saving you trouble is the health ticks down so quickly but you're not even going to notice this most of the time it really only comes into play later in the game and even then it's subtle so when we get to the end of the giant step dungeon we face off against our first sanctuary Guardian the Titanic and yet so earthbound technically has boss battles but they're never all that interesting they go down with some pretty straightforward combat and for the most part they're just big animals there are some exceptions but the boss battles are not highlights in earthbound but while the sanctuary Guardians are nothing special the sanctuaries themselves certainly are their little anomalies that we find just strange features of the land that cause you to reflect on how it got there and what its place in the world is these memorable locations caused Ness to turn his thoughts inward here he reflects on a vision of a small cute puppy but our dog king isn't a puppy he's an old mutt with an attitude problem which means that we're actually seeing a vision from the past so as you move forward in earthbound globe-trotting checklist of these sanctuaries you're really finding new interesting places and meeting new interesting people and all of those new experiences with life caused you to turn your thoughts back to the past and again reflection is one of earthbounds key themes when we finally come outside the cops are pissed that we upstage them think about it Ness rolls through town cleans up the town's gang problem within minutes curries favor with them there and then proceeds to brave the strongest challenge the area around on that has to offer the cops look like jackasses and they want theirs so naturally they take Ness into the back room so they can beat the hell out of them with billy clubs i don't know it's funnier here that there's grown men beating the out of a little kid because their pride was wounded or that they managed to somehow fail at that it's a good scene Tucson is a different place from on end and it marks neces first time really venturing away from home visually it's different the leaves are starting to change it's more of an autumn type place it's more developed it has a bicycle shop a department store a hotel a theater for live music as the game goes on Nessa's going to visit locations that are more and more unfamiliar but this first step away from home is an exciting place that shows how big the world is beyond meses home town when you fall asleep in the hotel in Tucson Paula reaches out to you via psi in your dreams we talked to Paula's father and the local town thief and learned that Paul has been kidnapped by a crazy group of cultists and hauled off to a cabin in the woods now that's a problem because we named Paula we know her and the preschoolers like her she's a nice girl we got to help her out but unfortunately the path is blocked by a big iron pencil which means we're going to have to make some friends there's two local inventors apple Kidd and orange kid Apple kid is cutting-edge kind of stinky kind of fad but he knows his stuff he's dedicated to the craft and art of invention and he makes exactly the tool you need to get through meanwhile orange kid is devoted to figuring out a way to uncoil an egg yeah fortunately the pencil eraser erases the pencil and opens the path unfortunately that path is peaceful rest valley perhaps the most annoying area in the entire goddamn game now I've already mentioned several times that earthbound strong suit is not its combat but the combat is still genuinely fine through the course of the game except at the beginning the beginning is where its weakest and that's for a number of reasons for one there's just less for you to do there's fewer options to pick there's fewer ways that your powers and abilities and attacks can work together with the rest of your parties it just doesn't have that complexity to make it interesting at the start second because you don't have the healing abilities of your teammates and because it's early on and you're not likely to have many healing items you have to rely on the RNG a lot more in this first part of the game than you do later on and in this area peaceful rest Valley egregiously so I mean it's just ridiculous this area is extremely long it's winding it has multiple paths with little collectables it all sounds great but when you factor in that enemies are constantly randomly spawning and moving all around and there's basically no way to avoid them whatsoever using the intended methods of the game you end up having an area that is never any fun to play through at least not for me this area is almost irredeemable and I mean almost because oh my god it is completely redeemed by this one enemy the territorial oak look at that smile look at why this oak is so territorial that he uses psychic abilities to shock your brain and he's the most formidable enemy in the area and when you beat him he explodes into flames like a suicide bomber and wrecks your and honestly when I think of this area between the tedium the unengaging combat all of that when I think of this area I just think of that tree so they did something right we emerge from the valley of the shadow of death into happy happy village which is a town taken over by a cultist group called a happy happiest there are great parody of the cult mentality they have everyone in the town singularly devoted to the mission of turning the world blue they paint everything blue they make the cows blue they wear blue clothes they want everything to be blue and like any good cult they have their charismatic leader in mr. carpenter carpenter whatever this keeping Paulo locked up in a cabin and apparently he can control lightning but thankfully paula has an item that can help us here the Franklin badge it's an item that reflects lightning it's funny how an item with such a humble beginning its purpose is to reflect lightning against this one guy who uses lightning that item ones up precipitating one of the most devastatingly tragic scenes in mother3 and speaking of mother 3 pokey what is actually behind the happy happiest somehow he's working with them to lock Paul up this guy just graduated from neighborhood to genuine psychopath criminal but I don't think that captured it all really to pokey this is all just mischief he just messin with his friend Ness he's having some fun he's just he just messing around no no harm no foul this is one of the fundamental underpinnings of folkies character because of his upbringing or who he is or a combination of both he is unable to connect with people on an empathetic level he doesn't understand the impact that his actions have and he is unable to feel what others would feel he is not able to be a human so we take care of car painter and it turns out he was under the thrall of the statue that he was worshipping the many many statue that will come up later in the game but it seems to be the embodiment of a seductive kind of evil it called to him and made him do peculiar things and that's true it really did make him as soon as you beat him and free him of the many many statues control he gives you the key to free Paulo his cult disperses happy-happy village goes back to being normal really the statue is a material force of evil in the world on a philosophical level this is important Thomas Aquinas as a devout Catholic believed that there was no such thing as true substantial evil that evil was not a real thing that was created at any point but instead he argued that it was simply a lack of the good that it was us turning our way from the light and the good of God in earthbound the metaphysics are a direct counterpoint to that there is a genuine substantial real pure kind of evil that exists on a deep godly metaphysical level and it rears its head as we go through our story this is the first time it shows its face though so I wanted to point it out with Paula in our party we're well equipped enough to take on the next sanctuary Guardian the formula is the same here is the giant step but it's a lot more tolerable thanks to the second party member so if Paul has help we clear the dungeon and face off against our second sanctuary Guardian the mondo mole yeah I don't know much to say about this guy he's a big mole so instead I'll take this opportunity to talk about one of the more memorable features of earthbounds battles the backgrounds the standard approach in RPGs is when you begin a battle you enter a sort of abstracted representation of the environment that you're in if you're in a grassy field then you'll enter a battle and you'll see a generic field Plains backdrop or if you're in a cave you'll go into the battle and you'll see a generic caves backdrop earthbound is very different in this way it's backgrounds are made up of two layers each with their own variations on color distortion effects and patterning the end result is that no two backgrounds are exactly the same and all of them are trippy and memorable well maybe not memorable on their own I don't remember this particular background as some great thing but taking on the whole these backgrounds add a great deal of texture to the battles in this game so we defeat them all and make it to our second sanctuary the Lilliput steps is just a little mysterious set of tracks from one tree to another in the forest it gives us one more phrase of our personal song and grants us a brief vision of a baby wearing a red cap this is another flashback that nest is past and I really like this one because the red cap is one of NASA's iconic features and it's cute that he also had it as a baby that's always been his thing now even though we've got the sanctuary we're not ready to continue on the next leg of our quest that's because the tunnel that connects Tucson to the next town three-d-- is filled with smooth Yugos wood and the only indication of a ride we can hitch is the runaway fives tour bus at the north end of town the runaway 5 the coolest cats in all of earthbound these jazz masters make the stage their own they are gods of the groove but they're not so good with money they're always finding themselves indentured to different clubs and theater owners across the world of earthbound and in this case at the chaos here in Tucson they're in the hole for $10,000 so are they worth saving let's find out hmm oh yeah oh yeah that's smooth that's some smooth smooth groove oh oh oh mah gah so we get 10000 bucks from the town thief free the boys from their indentured servitude at the Kaos theater and hitch a ride to our next destination three-d-- three-d-- marks a hard left turn for the tone of the game it's a considerably darker area than both Annette and Tucson and I don't mean dark in a creepypasta kind of way I mean dark in a Halloween jack-o'-lantern kind of way the town is overrun with zombies and ghouls so the townspeople have taken refuge inside the circus tent in the town square we poked around trying to figure out what's going on but find no leads except for a scantily clad young broad who were told we should spend some time with hell yeah so we follow her into her hotel room for some sweet sweet lovin this is gonna be so sick I can't wait to smash me some I bet oh oh no it was secretly a trap so nurse gets jumped by some zombies we wake up buried alive the zombies do not mess around so ness and Paula are sealed in an underground vault with no hope of escape the door is locked so what will they do well naturally Paul is going to do exactly what she did the last time she was trapped with no hope of escape reach out for help psychically and just like that we cut to somewhere completely different a snow-covered alpine forest appropriately named winters winters is home to an academy for gifted boys it's at this boarding house that we meet Jeff the third good kid involved in the fate of the world and I guess there's a few things to say about the winters section of the game the first is that it's an unexpected change in playable character you switch abruptly from ness and Paulo to Jeff a world away Jeff himself is the neglected son of genius inventor and scientist doctor and Oh nuts just an inventor as well and were introduced to this fact through some light puzzle solving where we use gadgets to open lockers okay yes speaking of the lockers this is where I noticed earthbound single biggest problem the inventory managing items in this game sucks it is so bad it is aged terribly and is the least enjoyable part of the entire game just dealing with your inventory selecting items using them equipping them it is so sluggish and cumbersome earthbound its aged well in almost every way but there are a few parts of it inventories one combats another where it definitely feels it's aged and yeah I don't know what else to say but I wish they did the inventory better Tony's farewell to his best friend and roommate Jeff is so funny to me it's so over-the-top and emotional I don't know where you're going and why but remember with best friends forever this game is able to ring a lot of comedy out of some simple sprite animations and sharply written text this game is just very weird overall this is the bubble monkey he likes bubble gum so we give him some gum and then he comes with us so anyway the two of us on our Christmas adventure across the frozen tundra of winters one on our way to our father's house doctor and Oh nuts along the way we'll ride the big fat pink head of Tessie the lock test monster on the other side of the lake we find the stupidest dungeon ever devised it's a series of straight corridors the enemies we encounter are mad ducks and worthless protoplasm we then meet the men responsible for this dungeon his name's brick road he's devoted his entire life to making dungeons and while ow a for effort a good good luck anyway there's a lot of combat after this point not much to say about that one thing worth noting is that you passed by one of the sanctuaries that you'll encounter later in the game anyway bubble monkey has done his duty and goes off to be with the goalie of his dreams I'm going to take this opportunity to address the humor in earthbound it's always hard to explain why something is funny in earthbounds case what makes it a funny game it certainly has a reputation for being one and I'd say that reputation is well-earned but why what does it do it makes it funny I think that there are two key characteristics to the humor in earthbound there's a lot more that goes into it but there are two things that make it consistently funny in my opinion the first is all the characters utterly lack self-awareness when they speak so Oh Jeff you're my son it's good maybe 10 years since I last saw you I'm so glad you're a healthy boy please thanks dad the second key feature of this game's humor is the absurdity of everything you mix that with the bumbling idiot see that we were just talking about and you have the charming package that we know and love today in general earthbound doesn't have a single sarcastic bone in its body it's totally earnest all the way through and it's really hard to communicate in a video like this just how endearing the game can be it's something you have to experience for yourself on our way to go through Paulo and s we get sneak peeks from the air at what the rest of the world of earthbound has to offer a city a desert this world is big and it all feels connected we saw the whole trip beginning to end Jeff crash lands in the cemetery destroying the sky runner in the process but he has just what we need to get the hell out of here a bad key machine so we break free and asking around town we find out that the leader of the zombies is strong because he always eats peanut butter and fly honey sandwiches yes just one of those earthbound things along with the tent with a big angry face that wants to kill us conveniently shortly after this we get a call from Apple kid who's got just the hook up we need zombie paper it's like flypaper but for zombies we lay our clever trap and one by one all the zombies around town converge on the circus tent we notice also that two zombies who are blocking a ladder are now moved come morning the zombies are good and dealt with so we can go down that ladder and see where leads we follow it into a secret passageway that's dark winding and scary everything in here is a zombie so we must be on the right track we fight a mini boss named mini barf how much to say about him but he's gross and he gives a hint at what the final boss of this area is going to be when we emerge an old man tells us that there's a place with lots of interesting people up ahead Saturn's Valley let's check it out Saturn Valley is one of the strangest areas in the entire game and that's really saying something for atham Saturn Valley is home to a toddling race of well-intentioned little guys who speak in broken English everything about the mr. Saturn's is silly from the way they look the things they say the mr. Saturn shaped houses that they live in and the mr. Saturn themed appliances that they use within you hear that bumbling stumbling tune yeah that plays through the entirety of this area and it's great then maybe most memorably there's the way that the mr. Saturn's talk the Saturn's dialogue deserves to be commended for how strong a sense of sound is able to communicate just through its font when you read this how does it sound in your head I would this character deliver this line if I were a casting director trying to find a voice for mr. Saturn this text alone would tell me to look for someone loud fahren energetic and cute the Saturn's dialogue has a memorable sound to it in this way while the voice that you might be imagining for mr. Saturn right now may be very different from the voice that I'm imagining the font ensures that you're still hearing something vividly when you read the text now this font was actually more important to this game than you might assume for the original Japanese version of the game the game's director shigga Sato etoy designed the font himself it was that important I know it may sound silly to call something small like that important or you may question ye toys found it necessary to design it himself and make it just right but you have to keep in mind that a game like earthbound unlike many many other RPGs it's not about the big epic story moments it's about the little moments along the way that make you smile that's a critical facet of this game and it's done very very well here with the way the Saturn's talked the layout of Saturn Valley is a sharp departure from the design of earthbound other towns and cities that we've seen so far from the unfinished ladders that pepper the landscape to a cave filled with garbage and a pointless ledge and some kind of pen keeping a mad duck you can't do anything with it he's just kind of there functionally though Saturn Valley is just as useful to you still as any other town maybe more so because you can stay at its hotel free of charge everything about this place the design of the area the ability to heal for free the mr. Saturn's themselves and everything that they had to say they make this an area that you like and want to come back to anyway back on the main track the whole reason we came to Saturn Valley was to get some intel on where to find the mastermind behind the invasion of zombies and three-d-- we learned that the password to their secret base is to stand motionless behind this waterfall for three minutes yeah so them I don't have much to say about the dungeon itself is just kind of an industrial complex but I will give the game credit for being more lively with the addition of Geoff's to your party it's a lot more interesting when you have three party members who can bounce skills off of each other and the combats never great but it is appreciated that it gets better as the game goes on this is master belch he is responsible for the zombies I'm not quite sure what the connection is between these big blobs of puke and zombies and ghosts I don't really care though master belch is a memorable villain he enslaves the mr. Saturn's which is sad but also funny and he's gross he belches but this very realistic sample for a Super Nintendo game once in a while as he talks and it's a good time as any to talk about the status illness in this game so master belt right here is belching at our party and it makes Paula feel nauseous nausea is one of the status ailments you can get you can also catch a cold you can start crying or my personal favorite is you can get homesick if nest doesn't call his mother often enough at the game as many telephones in the drug doors then he'll feel homesick and will be unable to fight he'll just start crying and mrs. mom the only way to cure this ailment is to go to a telephone and give your mom a call so that she can tell you everything's going to be okay maybe let you know what your sisters been up to just remind you of that connection to home you're out in the world but you aren't cut off from where you came from that's very important in this game Nest draws his energy to push on not from some mystical pool of anime power but from his connections to people his family his mother in particular the series is called that for a reason as far as the resources go where do you get money you don't find treasure chest full of gold or shake enemies down for their spare change your dad deposits money in your bank account so you can pull it out at the ATM that's what this game is all about the little stuff the real-world stuff oops so as I was waxing poetic turns out guy goose was able to smuggle a Manny Manny statue into fourside the big city in the world of earthbound speaking of guy guess it's about time we talked about the game's antagonist everything we know about guy guess at this point suggests that he's some kind of generic alien monster I mean what was the very first screen when you boot up the game being a 1950s b-movie looks like a screenshot ripped directly from attack of the 50-foot aliens or something - our encounter with the star man at the beginning of the game with that classic Day the Earth Stood Still look which catches us up to what we just did defeat a belching blob monster from outer space who raises zombies from the grave to attack a town full of circus people all this considered who guy guesses servants are what were presented as being the war on gigas gigas is silly he's a big dumb alien and that simplicity is critical to earthbounds ultimate bait-and-switch we need to believe that this is a straightforward quest to stop a straightforward villain now in reality it's anything but but we don't know that now before we head back to three there's a sanctuary hidden in the depths of Saturn Valley milky well before we head there were offered a cup of coffee and when we take a sip were presented with the most earthbound scene in all of Earth bound it's a trippy casual reflection on everything that you've accomplished up to this point your journey this is many players favorite part of the game and for good reason now there's a lot to dig into here first let's notice that the narrator whoever is telling us about the events of our quest is addressing Ness in the second person as you now as I mentioned at the very start of this video it's important for earthbound to involve you as the player directly now this is not how neces character is handled in the vast majority of the game normally you're looking at Ness from a top-down point of view detached he never says a word we never know what he's thinking and we have no indication that he's anything other than a vehicle for the players inputs at least not until this coffee break here the map the player sprite the characters mr. Saturn's it all fades out it's just you and the game the game is inviting you here to look at neces journey as your journey not that you need convincing of this you've already invested probably a dozen hours of your own time into his adventure at this point even though the game already has you it still takes this opportunity to confidently assert that it is not an experience just to be breezed through it's something to be chewed on something to be thought about and remembered now I don't think II toy well I'm sorry our narrator cares so much if we reflect on the game itself this is the attitude that the game wants us to have toward life you leave home you experience the world and take it into yourself and you return home better for it then after reflecting the narrator asks us to think about the future what we're about to go up against it'll be more difficult than anything we've undergone to this point but he knows we'll be all right the game has earnest faith that we'll be able to complete it so that stuff aside where does the coffee-break fit into earthbounds larger story I mean it's so bafflingly unique that it feels like a major turning point and I think that it is but we don't get anything material out of the coffee break just as a contrasting example let's look at ocarina of time in ocarina of time you complete the first three dungeons in the game the Deku Tree the dodongo's cavern and jabu jabu's belly after all this you're granted the Master sword a powerful weapon lets you face the rest of the game confidently with courage the coffee-break gives you no such literal gift instead it offers you a spiritual one the gift that we receive after clearing the first three areas of the game Annette Tucson and three-d-- and obvious pun on numbers if you didn't catch it already what we're given is a new sense of perspective a mandate to look at the rest of the game in different way to reflect as we experience it to close the game offers Ness paula and Jeff and by extension the player the ultimate gift wishes us good luck and with that we're on our way to the rest of our journey so we beat this big pile of and claim our next sanctuary the milky well now the text that all the sanctuaries in the game is well done but this is one of my favorites and milky well Ness recalls a memory of his mother from far away she said be a thoughtful strong boy I mean through all the question in the world can you really hope to become anything greater than that anyway time to head back I realized I haven't pointed this out before but once you clear a sanctuary out all the enemies have bothered you on the way there start to run away from you it's a small touch but it really feels like you've claimed as your own this is your place now and the enemies know it okay so with three finally cleared of zombies the buses are running again and we can head on to our next destination for side to get there we just need to cross the dusty Dunes desert should be simple enough the bus is gassed up and ready to go yes or any second now we'll be rolling up on the big metropolis of fourside these problems always always problems so a traffic jam is blocking the road before side so we'll have to cross the whole desert to make it there this is a cool area for a few reasons one there's a status ailment that you can only get in this and a different desert in a game called sunstroke you need a cool towel to cool yourself off and cure this particular status ailment I also just love the music in this place earthbounds music is top-notch it's my favorite on the Super Nintendo and one of my favourite soundtracks of all times but my personal preferences I had one thing that nobody can deny this game is how creative its music is just listen to this track it's a combination of a lazy Mexican riff with surreal alien warped beeps and bloops and hums we already heard from when master belfs was burping at us that the game uses samples real world recorded samples not just synthesized electronic sounds a game even samples popular music don't believe me let's listen to a few [Applause] [Music] Monty Python playing [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] earthbound soundtrack was innovative to understate things especially for a game originally released in 1994 for the Super Nintendo in fact to fit all the games to music onto a Super Nintendo cartridge they had to upgrade from the standard 8 megabits Super Nintendo cart to a super-sized 24 megabit card you may be inclined to ask why Nintendo went to such lengths for this game but then recalled that Suga Sato eToys profile in Japan extends far beyond video games it's almost like having a celebrity developer on board anyway after we cross the desert we find a cabin near a construction site inside we can rest and wait until morning for the traffic jam to clear and with that we're off the fore side for side is substantially more developed than anywhere we've been to this point in the game the modern looking bridge we have to cross to get into the city demonstrates this pretty well earthbounds world is sort of a vague approximation of what a Japanese person imagines America to be like and for side is New York City or you know close enough the skyscrapers are colossal change from the architecture that we've been seeing in the other towns of the game foresight really gives the impression that you're far far away from home in the big city it's different very different from the other chance that we visited the first time that you come here you're likely to just wander around aimlessly for 20 minutes trying to figure out where the hell everything is the scale of this place is overwhelming and that's definitely the point thankfully there are safeguards in place to make sure you don't get too lost the department store is closed as of now and we can't get into the Monta tobi building yet both of these stacks serve is a little hint of where we'll have to go later to one of the few places we can go now is the top Ola theater a pun on the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem New York here we find out that once again the runaway five are in money trouble this time in the hole for a No dollars but wait a minute didn't the people at the construction site in the desert say they were building a gold mine sounds promising when we return they finish their work and we can finally enter the mine predictably it's full of monsters now but not just any monsters five big moles and these moles are the funniest enemies in the whole game all of them insist that they're the third strongest mole in the whole they'll give speeches about it - no really I'm the third strongest mole my strength falls between the second and fourth strongest moles and then I'm the third strongest mole of the whole silic you thought the strongest mole in the whole the second strongest mole in the whole the fourth strongest hole in the whole and the mold Nomo and the weakest mole but I the final mole and the third strongest hole of the mole even the backgrounds all say number three while you fight them like I said before most of the humor in earthbound is more make you smiled and make you last kind of humor but this sequence just slays me every time so we clear the place out and now it's safe for the four men to start mining heading back to four side were stopped on the bridge by the Foreman's brother in a bulldozer he's nice enough to give us a little kickback for our help he wasn't able to find any gold but he was able to procure a diamond the diamond is worth more than enough to the owner of the table to let that run away five out of their debt once set free were finally able to explore the four side department store now if you've been following this sequence of events it may seem pretty arbitrary it is following the chain of logic from after we realized the runaway slide would need money and that the gold mine would be a good place to visit we had to clear the mine out leave and then expect to be given a reward not at the mine but on the way back to fore side and then expect that only after freeing the runaway five that would trigger the department store to open I don't follow but the department store scene itself is pretty fun we explore the place just go and shopping like normal then on our way out the lights cut out and paula is abducted by a weird googly-moogly tentacle alien as I mentioned in the on that section of this video one of the cool parts of that earthbound is that there's not a real separation between the overworld and the rest of the map enemies can be encountered in the world at large running through the streets of town or in this case in a place we would expect to be safe a department store so we beat the department store spook but it looks like he's already smuggled Paula off to the mana Thole building inside who do we find but pokey livin large it seems like he's been just as active being an as we have being a hero now what is he doing in foresight exactly well probably the same thing that he was doing back in happy happy village recall that the many-many statue is what caused carpenter and the cultists to kidnap paula and ruin the town in the first place awfully suspicious now belch told us that the many-many statue had been moved to four side and look who shows up pokey the statue itself is a representation of physical manifest evil and it's no accident that it and pokey seem to be two birds of a feather there's not much we can do here pokies goons force us out and so we need to think of a plan running around town looking for leads will eventually lead us to the cafe a bar and the original Japanese works another game all mentions of alcohol were scrubbed out in favor of coffee in the english version after learning that mr. mana totally is a regular at the cafe we leave to find ever dread the thief back from Tucson lying hurt in the street he's been beaten and left for dead by mana Toby's goons and he tells us that we should check behind the counter of the cafe if we want to know what's going on with the Manny Manny statue in my atole before he passes on to the next life ever Dredd leaves us with a haiku poem when on your way out be sure that you say goodbye then lock the door tight tragic for the first time in earthbound the stakes have gotten mortal and real pokemons atole gigas they are willing to go to any lengths to Oh ever dread he's a walking away he's uh he's why just slimy stuff mutt they're baack inspecting behind the counter leads us to another dimension entirely where everything is screwed up topsy-turvy inside out and backwards whatever you want to call it this is not not an okay place not normal no no nose many weird places in earthbound but moon sight is the first batshit off-the-wall completely out of control environment this is very intentional it's meant to be unsettling and completely impossible to make sense of let's take how you navigate this place you find weird dudes wearing sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts and they teleport you around seemingly at random until you finally end up where you need to be the enemies are more abstract than they ever have been I mean literally you get attacked by abstract art the colors are out of control the townspeople or crude facsimiles of them chant and babble to themselves in weird tongues listen to the sound that plays when you sleep at the hotel what an awful off-kilter rendition of that classic jingle this place moonside is a distortion of four side it's a place that should not exist and sure enough what do we find in the center of town but the mani mani statue again you feel like the relative goofiness of the happy happiest call to wear pajamas and paint cows blue here the mani mani statue has last yong the collected consciousness of an entire metropolis does that sound familiar to anybody has no okay I don't want to over-interpret what's going on here on its most basic level moon side is just a weird backwards world where up is down left is right yes is no but by this point it should be becoming clear that the many many statue is not just a mystical artifact or some evil God it's somehow related to people it's related to a distortion in people I need to pause for a second because we're being followed by an invisible man with a golden tooth who can help get us to the many mani statue anyway the many many statue shows up when something is going wrong within the hearts of people in happy-happy village it was car painter starting a cult and kidnapping a young girl in fourside its mana Thole he's taken a tyrannical control over the town and ordered the police to rule with an iron fist and as this statue blazes a trail of chaos who follows behind it every step of the way pokey Nessa's rival it makes sense that an embodiment of evil like this would go hand in hand with a boy whose heart is fundamentally misaligned with the world so we bust up the statue and Moon side dissolves into a simple warehouse in the back of the bar well sorry the cafe the mouse tells us that the whole time we were in moon side we were really just wandering around the warehouse with a vacant faraway look in our eyes disturbing I'm going to do a blow-by-blow here because this series of events is so arbitrary and dumb that it's just charming first we get a call from Apple Cathy and mentor back in Tucson he tells us he invented a gourmet yogurt machine but the only problem is it can only make trout flavored yogurt right now he's having machine delivered to us via escargot Express's neglected class okay so we moved the cafe and a monkey crashes into the wall in turn scorched black we have a chat with him and he tells us that hallo Rama whoever that is has just finished fasting he lives in a hole in a desert with a bunch of monkeys in it all right so far so good the monkey delivers his message and quickly teleports away next this separate dumbass crashes into us and judging by the onomatopoeia in the text box continues to flop and flail into us after he's made contact so this guy also tells us about a hole in the desert full of monkeys a sunbathing dude told them about it and of course true to form neglected class has forgotten our package in the desert at least it's clear where we need to go this character is a great stab at terrible customer service I'm not going back that way don't ask me to get it's your package right so you go get it maybe that thing I forgots important to you so while I wait there's more this rapid-fire train has not ended yet a maid comes up pokies maid to be specific and she needs special trout flavored yogurt for pokey how convenient boy howdy do we have a solution for her but this all happens in the span of like a minute is really funny to me now what is not so funny to me it's the item management hell that we're forced through when we go into the monkey cave this part of the game is bad for all the same reasons that the gibdo well in Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask is in a game whose weakest feature is its inventory management I don't know why they decided to put an entire stretch of gameplay where you're just flipping through your inventory giving monkeys the correct item clearing out space in your inventory to pick up the correct item swapping them out moving through the damn menus it's terrible and of course is going to be a couple items that you have to go get if you don't have the pizza that you need so you got to order that and wait for it to arrive it's just not fun maybe that was the point maybe this is all just a big elaborate scam poking fun at these fetch quests and different RPGs I don't care I don't like this part so what is our reward for going through all of this tedium well it's actually pretty good on top of getting the trout flavored yogurt maker that we've been told poki needs we are also taught by one of the sages apprentice monkeys how to teleport and this skill is so useful it almost makes the previous section worth it so how does teleportation work in earthbound well for one I'm glad they introduced it when they do up to this point you've been taking normal means of transportation to get around you've walked from town to town you've taken busses on occasion and in general it takes time to get from one point to another in a world that's this big so teleportation is a huge boon twist now we've seen a lot of the world and we've done it on foot we're by car or by bus so to be able to warp around at this point is certainly welcome second I like have the teleportation actually works it is not as simple as selecting a destination from a fast travel menu to be able to teleport at least the first we need enough space to really get a running start almost like the DeLorean from Back to the Future reaching 88 miles an hour near the solid stretch of road to do that and it's fitting that you're taught the technique on a long stretch of road I guess I just appreciate how the teleportation is a more physical part of the world than just an option in a menu and that certainly appreciated after all the menu fiddling we had to do to get the skill in the first place so teleportation definitely cuts our commute back to fore side down we give the maid the rancid traps flavored yogurt dispenser and that gives us the blessing we need to go visit mom atole on the top floor I like how the robot bodyguard gives us a full 10 seconds to enter the secret code not like we know it we just have to wait for it to count down and there we go battle so after winding through a series of hallways and rooms we encountered the ultimate bodyguard of the monetary building this tiny dinky robot the clumsy robot now don't let his name mislead you while he is clumsy he is also invincible now as usual earth bound calm is that it's best for its cracking jokes I love how the clumsy robot will do actions like wanting to go get a battery now this battle goes on and on and it feels like it'll never end it's just ness and Jeff here the possibility of dying is very real but just when things were at their darkest the runaway v finally helping us for a change the execution in this moment is pretty interesting due to response combat systems limitations we're really only ever in combat seeing the enemy and the background and the text boxes with our party's names in it so when a friendly group comes in to help us how does the game communicate that it may be too easy to miss if it was just told in text at the top of the screen so it works out well that the people who save us are the runaway five musicians so when they come in their classic song that they play on stage that we've seen twice to this point starts playing it's a great way to illustrate what's going on without the use of visuals with the robot out of the way we're able to walk into the next room and save Paula who's there but Mr mana Thole cowering look at his skinny arms his thin body and his gray hair just as was the case with carpenter and happy happy village none of this with the desire of mr. mana Thole it was all done at the urging of the Manny Manny statue mr. mana told he would never do something like this but of course the Manny Manny and pokey would pokey and the statue sucks the life out of mana Thole and the city because that's what evil does well I don't know about you I'm not about to let pokey get away with this so oh and there he goes before he zips off to parts unknown again pokey takes one last opportunity to mock ness call in the pinhead and say that he has no use for monocle anymore so it's pointless to hang around this is just reinforcing what we already know that pokey guy gets the Manny Manny whatever bundle them together they're one step ahead of ness and we're playing catch-up now let's actually back the tape up here to look at the helicopter specifically the lettering on it that says heli you'll notice that it's a mirror image of the word it's reversed you'll notice this in lots of old games it was a memory saving measure and of course you'll notice it all over Earth bound - if the difference between storing two different sprites for this one helicopter in the storage or just mirroring the same one half the storage now the time this isn't a problem because character sprites and most other enemy sprites are symmetrical if you hook them around you don't really notice but when there's writing involved it becomes clear my question is why put the word heli on the helicopter at all I mean we know what it is it took off from a big pad with an H on it it has a propeller it flies why introduce the error at all whatever it's not a big deal so my Nottoli told us that we were going to have to go to the resort town summers in order to proceed on our quest he saw this in a vision when he was under the many many statues control when we talked to mana totally again he issues an unintentionally pointed remark of concern for pokey he took the helicopter I hope he's okay physically yes for now spiritually developmentally morally no he's been deteriorating since the beginning of the game recall at the beginning when he was just a bully or a mean annoying kid in our neighborhood coward - now he's reveling in his greed hurting people kidnapping people and he's just getting sucked farther and farther down this rabbit hole of evil at the many-many statue now of course the statue is literally exerting control over people's minds and it is creating distortions and illusions and all that but it operates on a subtler level - pokey is failing in his development as a good thoughtful person and that statue drawing him in symbolizes that another thing worth noting about the statue while we're on the subject is that next is not immune to its influence we saw as much when we got sucked into the imaginary world of moonside it's not like pokey and everyone else is bad and Ness is good so therefore the statue FX some people and not others everyone is susceptible to its call and that's going to come up again later so the run away 5 gives us a ride back to 3 we're going to use the sky runner to get to Sommers before we can do that we have to modify it to be able to reach that far to do that we need to fly all the way back to winter so that dr. Andrew nuts can work on it for us now we fly back using the same pass that Jeff took when he was on his way to rescue Ness and Paula what's the difference here well nothing except that we're flying in the other direction what's the importance of that well remember once again that one of earthbounds key themes is reflection this scene is one of the many opportunities that earthbound gives the player to reflect on what they've done when we were just flowing on our way to rescue nests and Paula we got a glimpse of everywhere that we were about to see we saw a massive sweeping desert a huge sprawling metropolis now we've been there we've done that and we get to see it again as we head on to the next leg of our adventure so after we land at dr. antonov's lab at Stonehenge we get to head back into the caves where we saw that sanctuary as Jeff earlier that we couldn't access and finally take it head-on as nests and the gang I said before that the sanctuary Guardians aren't all that memorable this is an exception this is shroom excuse me I meant this is true other than that not much to say here just think it's funny that there's an exclamation point like that in his name for no good reason and what adds to the joke here is that the battle text will sometimes put an exclamation point like oh yeah Jeff filed the big bottle rocket exclamation point when it does it was shroom it says nested 86 damage to sure now this might actually be one of those things that had more impact in the original Japanese she could sought to eToys inspiration for creating mother 1 in the first place was the fun that he had playing Dragon Quest and planning Dragon Quest he narrated the game out loud as he played it like yes the hero strikes were 28 damaged and he got really into it that way and he wanted fans to have the same experience playing his games so if there's an exclamation point like that maybe there's a reason maybe he did intend for there to be some obnoxious loud quality to this character's name the sanctuary rainy circle gives us a whiff of our favorite food you may notice it says steak here that's the default I lost some footage while making this video I am NOT going to apologize it's a long ass thing but anyway like all the other sanctuary locations this is a nice little reflection on an important moment or part of neces licen pass before we head off in the newly modified skyrunner dr. Angeles gives us the important information that Jeff what's this bed sometimes but otherwise is a good kid he wants us to take care of him well that's probably as close to a heartwarming farewell we're going to get from dr. I know nuts actually it's been 10 years since he's seen Jeff I doubt he wets the bed anymore but it's the Sun it counts with those well wishes in our pockets we load up into the newly modified sky runner and jet our way over to summers you know this place looks really nice we got some nice boats out there on the water I'll pier a nice beach some umbrellas sunbathers a hot chick in a bikini man seems like everything is great except for the sky runner once again predictably it crashes and burns in a fiery mess the unreliability of doctor and a Nuts creations is funny for now maybe terrifying later we'll get to that but we can see that the sky runner is destroyed beyond any repair there's nothing left of it at least we have that monkey training that taught us how to teleport we can wander around town for a little bit now as the name implies summers is a summer resort everybody's relaxing on the beach there's a hotel it's a very touristy kind of place and as we lazily get acquainted with our surroundings we get a phone call from Tony Jeff's friend from his boarding school up in winters and he asks us a question that blows the lid off this whole game I'm collecting players names for a school project you know players just like you that's right you the one holding the controller would you register your name please don't spoil your name wrong remember have a coffee break from earlier referenced us in the second person as you well now the game has made this completely explicit we the people holding the controller are reference directly and our name is requested what for we don't know yet but the fact is there's a reason the game wants to know who we are not nest up Paula not Jeff not poo us so the game reaches out to us and we confirm who we are then we get another comically dramatic goodbye from Tony no you hang up do you hang up now I'm really hanging up this time next up is Club stoic where one of the sailors wives is hanging out all day with a bunch of pretentious pricks I imagine that this part of the game flew over most kids heads as they were playing it as it's a parody of snobby pretentious people oh you guys can't envision the final collapse of capitalism incredible mmm I think it's very complicated issue oh sorry I was sleeping I finally awakened the inner me my true self the patrons of this club are able to stare into their own soul hard enough to burn a hole in their psyche I'm now comfortable enough to stare at the real need the true self and burn the impression into my super-ego I want to be in this comfort zone any time all the time or at no time my aide is telling me what what magic cake you came all this way just to eat my magic cake this is the sailor's wife she invites us to go out to her cart by the beach so he can try some of this cake she tells us that the cake is made of all leftover materials and is very special and Ness had a dream it was a very clear and very strange dream Jesus what was in that cake we are whisked a world away again much in the same way we were when we took control of Jeff and winters to the far-off land of delam and into the shoes of Pooh the crown prince of this eastern kingdom who is undergoing the final leg of his training and has one last trial to endure he used to go to the place of emptiness to take this test normally you call your father as nest to save the game but when Pooh interacts with this phone headed man he calls Nessa's dad still and his asked if he's disguising his voice oh well not a big deal and this is dead need a sense of humor at a time like this thanks dad looks like neither and did not score neces father a very present father figures we can walk around da Lama bit and see that principal is apparently a ladies man when we've had our fill of poking around we meet up with our master at the base of a mountain and climb up to undergo the final leg of our training mu emptiness nothingness after Pooh meditates for a bit were greeted with this masterpiece of a sequence the world fades out and is swallowed up in horrific static and darkness then this disembodied ghoulish old man head engages us in a kind of battle he's the spirit of our ancient lineage he tells us he's going to break our legs holy that's brutal this spirit tears us limb from limb he rips our arms off and feeds them to the crows our health reaches zero he describes how all we can do is lie there while he cuts our ears off we don't mind if our hearing is taken from us do we yes accept it as he severs our ears from our head the sound cuts that from the game with no legs no arms and no sound what else does he have to take from us but our sight do you care if I take your eyes do you want to live in eternal darkness I shall steal your sight do you accept it yes cut to black at this point what else do we have that he can take from us he can only communicate directly through our mind but Oh our mind in the end I will take your mind but you don't want to allow that do you you can't move can you answer are you sad are you lonely if you lose your mind you might also lose any feelings of sadness to accept that I will take your mind puh know that I will possess it and we're back Jesus Christ that scene is so good for one it's a massive departure from the tone of the rest of the game extremely dark violent he rips us limb from limb and we experience it in the first person he takes our eyes our ears and our very minds and then there's this a great second aspect to this which is we listen to that dumb sailor's wife in the cafe the stoic club tell us about who the mysteries of ego deaths and the super-ego in the it'd and seeing one's true self what better way to demonstrate the stupid pretense of all that than to give you the real deal to take you through an actual spiritual undoing and Reformation we talked to our Father who tells us that we have a role to play in the greatest struggle of all time we learn a new teleportation ability teleport beta which eliminates the need for that DeLorean style ramp up to 88 miles an hour and teleports an S in summers now that who is in our party we're able to read the hieroglyphs in the museum in summers and we get a cryptic warning about Gaius this is our first hint that gigas is anything more than just a big evil alien guy he and his army are invaders from beyond space and time beyond the dark beyond the lost underworld beyond the deep darkness that's foreboding to say the least anyway the museum curator and four side gives this museum curator a call and says he's found something interesting at his place so time to go back to force side so let's do that now going back to four sides Museum we can talk to some people get our picture taken you know it's a real shame that I can't show you every single line of dialogue in the game because it's all very good and it was all written by Sheikh Assad to eat I personally he was really the only writer that was involved in this game this though is one of my favorite jokes personally Hugh not you I'm talking about the dinosaur bones now the curator of the museum won't let us under the place until we get an autograph from Venus Venus is the swanky broad whose song alongside the runaway five in a concert that we saw earlier now all the little space performances in earthbound are charming because they're working with so little and they have to sell a live performance they use some of the same tricks and the runaway five performances earlier in the game they have the spotlights on the performers in the foreground and they have them doing a little jig dance swaying in and out crossing each other that kind of choreography now the reason I bring all this up now as opposed to in the earlier performance scenes is because they add one additional element to the show that really just seals the deal they have this MIDI instrument that honestly does sound like a seductive raspy female singer it's well done they do a great job with the music in this game even for the stuff that doesn't really seem like it should matter all that much but like that instrument and like the stage shows in general they just do that much more to add to earthbounds world's feeling alive and real and populated with real people that there are people going out to the theater to listen to live music and we get to see it ourselves really makes foreside feel like a city so we get our autograph and a little smooch for the road and are able to go under the museum now as usual I don't really have anything to say about the dungeon leading up to the sanctuary here it's a stretch of sewer and you fight a bunch of rats and cockroaches and that's basically it so I guess I'll take this opportunity to talk about why you might choose to go to this sanctuary before going to Scarab ah I mean both are valid options that you can take only problem is that to get to scarab ah we have to cross the ocean and along the way we get attacked by a Kraken so players might attempt to do that get crushed and then decide to go somewhere else the sanctuary Guardian de jour is the plague rat of doom he is a big rat with the plague as always the sanctuary itself out chimes the combat leading up to it this time Ness gets another glimpse back in time he sees a baby's bottle for just an instant the sex bit is completely optional so there's no real good time to bring it up but it's so good that I have to mention it at the beginning of the game if we walk to the southwest side of our net we can find a cliffside facing the sea there there's a bit of oceanfront property on sale for $7,500 now at that point in the game that's a ton of money we don't have anywhere close to $7,500 when we began we're dealing with double digit sums of money but now that we've come a good chunk of the way through the game we got poo in our party our dad keeps giving us more and more in our bank account we can finally afford this place so $7,500 down the tube for this house better be good you can see you couldn't see the backside of the house from the map it didn't exist you know I did think that $7,500 was pretty cheap for a house in retrospect just to add insult to injury here the photo man spins down from the ceiling to take our picture in front of this masterpiece of a home this is one of my personal favorite moments in the entire game name it be thinking Oh a funny joke but do you get anything for this well well yeah not anything that'll help you but certainly something interesting in the dresser drawer we find a short story written by sugar Sato etoy my secret life chapter three I was neither a murder suspect nor a target for an international spy organization but I drove a car down the Jersey Turnpike at 80 miles an hour a police officer pulled me over and asked for my driver's license he said I was going 20 miles an hour over the speed limit I instantly pointed to my wife and said I'm in a hurry my wife is in labor fortunately my wife actually had a big stomach I hoped he let me go with this excuse Oh since it's an emergency I'll lead you to the hospital with my police car he said no it's not necessary why not ask the officer well let's see going to the officer no no we can't this baby is a demon child I don't know how else to describe the writing in this game then cute it's it's just adorable anyway back at the magnet Hill sanctuary in fourside we picked up the carrot key that allows us to work back to Pooh's homeland and clear out some rabbit shaped statues that were blocking our entrance to a cave we got more combat here but I will throw the game of bone earlier I mentioned that the game's combat suffered for being boring due to a lack of complexity with limited party members now that we have poo on our team we're running on also the combats never great northbound but at this point it's good this dungeon in particular is noteworthy for its super freaky enemy designs so we teach the sanctuary Guardian thunder and storm that's that are enlightening ain't so frightening and we emerge at the other end - pink cloud our next sanctuary the atmosphere here and the visual design is very serene and I love it this time necessarily sees a vision of his mother when she was young there must have been a time when she was necessay going on an adventure of her own maybe now this is we went a few times that I bring mother one up some people have theorized that neces father is actually Nintendo first game that may be true it may be not pointed it doesn't matter what does matter is that everybody in this world this mother universe more broadly they used to be young they used to have dreams they went on a journey of growth and that's how they ended up who they are today in the case of mrs. mom she was to come from somewhere Ness must have come from somewhere and when he visits this location he starts to think about that we already know that earthbound has a vested interest in turning a mirror to the player so when you think about what this means in the context of the real world paradoxically self-reflection is not all about thinking about yourself it's about thinking of the world that you're a part of where you came from and what the bigger picture is what matters family is certainly one of those things so it's only natural that at one of these points of reflection in the game we think about neces family then of course there's just that added bit of weight that necessarily comes from any reference to motherhood in this the second game in the mother series at this point I'd say we're ready to cross the ocean and head to scarab ax where we'll be attacked by a Kraken along the way now this Kraken was hyped out by the people in the seaside town of Somers for a while the little village is actually called toto and the sailors there all tell stories about the horrors of the Kraken now you can attempt this journey quite a bit earlier but you'll probably be beaten to a pulp by the Kraken hypothetically you can make this journey earlier if you're able to beat this thing then you can go to scarab book but really you probably shouldn't be doing this until after pink cloud it was after I arrived in scaruba that I realized that even by today's standards earthbound has a lot of content and very locations to visit we don't even stay in this town for very long but it's complete with its own theme its own architecture and a complete set of new NPC sprites now if you're a naysayer then you may bring up a quality over quantity argument that your earthbound has a lot of different places to go but none of them are that particularly deep but keep in mind what earthbound is actually going for it's meant to be an exploration of the world in this way earthbound actually strikes its depths by packing itself to the gills with interesting people places and things to see a little aside here if we walk to the east of town we can find pokies rancid the farther along we come the more and more he seems like a cancer on everything good in the world so we have to do some light puzzle-solving in order to get into the pyramid to continue on i think it's creative but the hieroglyphs on the walls animate and attack our party it's when the more creative enemy designs in my opinion when we emerge through the underground passages in the pyramids to another landmass whose master shows up again to whisk him off to where in the art of starstorm now I was actually introduced to earthbound like I imagine most people in the United States were through Super Smash Brothers and if you recall from Super Smash Brothers Brawl PK starstorm is neces final smash and it's a pretty flashy audacious move so you can only imagine my excitement when I found out that we were going to get this ability it's still a real bummer to lose pou here though because he's already carved out his own role in our party at this point he has many useful offensive and healing abilities so losing him is a drag that said I think there's a point for doing this just like when we lost Paulo in the mall back and forth side the game makes you notice the value that your friends have by shining a spotlight on the hole that their absence leads anyway in this trunk of desert we find a very strange looking tower we use a key that one of the natives gives us and inside we find some signs some familiar signs welcome your inside of my body brick road yeah this is the same brick road that we met back in winters who designed that terrible dungeon he's finally realized his dream of becoming dungeon man this place is hilarious it's full of self conscious signs that over explain the choices that went into designing the dungeon in the way that was eventually put together is a great piece of satire on how video games are made most of the dungeons in earthbound and most other games are designed to be in universe obstacles for our heroes to overcome but the implicit assumption in a video game is that no matter how large or grave and in universe threat is it's a challenge made by game designers for players in the real world to experience and complete well it's really funny to have brick road demonstrate to us all the strings that allow his massive dungeon or body I guess they're one in the same at this point to stand up but really those strings are in place in any video game that we play the designers construct it in a way that it's completable by human beings and they make conscious decisions to guide us in certain directions VOC certain responses and in most cases prevent us from getting frustrated this whole section of earthbound is a very well constructed self-contained poke at how video games are made I love this and speaking of stuff that I love dungeon man is just the gift that keeps on giving he agrees to follow us around for a little while and he just wattles behind us while this hilarious music plays he's not just for show he actually helps us in battle once in a while he'll feel a tremendous amount of physical damage to the enemy which is great he's able to follow us as far as the southern tip of this Peninsula when he gets stuck in the trees because he's too big nest it makes me sad but I must say goodbye here this is my eternal resting place now my native tells us that the deep dark max is right on the other side of the river that's one of the places referenced in the prophecy that Pugh read back at the Museum and Summers mysteriously the river separating the gap is described as bottomless and we'll need a submarine to cross it thankfully dungeon man the ultimate bro a man's man true into the end has exactly the hook-up we need and so we set off and we travel so far by submarine that the water's color even changes the amount of distance that you travel in earthbound is huge there's a lot that earthbound excels at but one of the things it absolutely nails is the scale of its quest it feels like a massive all-encompassing journey around the as the English title suggests earth so the swamp here is shrouded in complete darkness but if we use the hawk eye that we pick up in the pyramid we are able to see the whole environment again like most of the combat sections and I found I don't have a whole lot to say here but one thing that I felt was worth mentioning was that we're able to find a reskin very of master belch wandering around the swamp he's now one of the standard enemies that we can fight this is a classic but effective technique used by RPGs and many other sorts of games where you take a boss from earlier in the game and make them a regular enemy later on it really gives a nice sense of progression you felt like you've grown a lot I guess it's also worth mentioning that the swamp in the deep darkness slows your movement speed and hurts you as you move through it this is annoying you already move so slow and earthbound that an additional hindrance is just obnoxious we also find the wreckage of the helicopter that poky stole as always he's one step ahead of us and curiously the engine is missing from the chopper he must have used it for something we'll find out what that is later the appearance of master belches long-lost cousins is no accident he's reappeared here at the end mini boss of this section as master barf new day new name new color he's fiercer than ever here and it's a tough fight but much as the run away 5 dead as we were fighting the clumsy robot in Monaco we cower gayest ex machina pou swoops in from out of nowhere and blasts master bark away with the power of star storm with master belch or barf defeated once and for all we end deep darkness by entering a small village in a cave full of these green people called pendous they only say one thing we're shy that is they all say that except for this one who is for some reason braver than the others the brave ones not strong enough to move the rock blocking our way to our next sanctuary but the one next to the rock is unfortunately he lacks social skills he needs to overcome his shyness before he can help us conveniently as we leave the cave we get a call from Orange Kid he gave us an update on his important work of unboiled the egg keep at it buddy and he tells us that he was looking to borrow a copy of the book overcoming shyness from Apple kid who was last seen in winters with doctor and Ananse so we know our next destination but unfortunately when we get to Stonehenge we find that dr. and Ernest and Apple kid have been kidnapped by aliens meet Stonehenge oh my god at least appliquéd has finished his state-of-the-art latest invention the cutting edge eraser eraser that is able to erase the eraser that was blocking our way to this dungeon beneath Stonehenge now this is actually a Starman super base and it's the heart of jurgis's operation in the present ok I have to mention something about this section so when I was recording this it was my third playthrough of earthbound and I wanted to get a weapon called the sword of kings the sword of Kings is the only weapon that poo can equip other than his bare fists other members of the party can get yo-yos and neski all kinds of different bats and jeff has all these guns he can use but poo can only use his fists or the sword of kings how do you get the sword of kings well the sword of Kings has only dropped one out of 128 times by Star Men supers which you find in this Stonehenge base well I decided it would be a good idea to try to obtain this weapon in this playthrough and oh my god I don't recommend it I grinded this out for literally five hours it took me five hours to get this weapon and I understand that probabilistically that's longer than it will probably take you but it is just not worth it my first two times playing this game were totally fine without the sort of Kings and yours will be as well I would just ignore this weapon drop all designs you have on it unless you really want to do and see everything this game has to offer and if you do just oh I still I still don't think it's a very good idea most people aren't even going to be aware that this weapon exists but once you become aware it may trick you into wasting your life on this pointless endeavor I recommend you steer clear and you know if only just to preserve the enjoyment of the rest of the game for yourself because even if the sort of Kings dropped for you with the frequency that you would expect then you're still grinding so much that you'll probably be overpowered enough by the end of this process to trivialize the rest of the game it's just an ugly recipe I don't know why they even chose to have this drop here what is the sort of Kings like an ancient weapon used by poo have to do with this weird underground Stonehenge base is it just that Stonehenge is somehow related to Kings I don't know I will make no further effort to understand if it was just salty that I was so unlucky that it took me that long because it's not supposed to take that long okay I promise I'm done talking about that at the bottom of the Stonehenge base we find the Starman deluxe he's the leader of this contingent of gigas army that's wreaking havoc in the present he tells us that the Apple of enlightenment has predicted guy gooses defeat at the hands of ness which is something that buzz-buzz told us at the very beginning of the game so whatever this Apple of enlightenment is it's clearly prophetic but we don't know much more we don't know if it's a literal Apple some sort of machine all we know is that it's put the pressure on gigas to get things rolling and so get things rolling he has you've kidnapped basically every major character in the winters region so one thing I want to say about that earthbounds plot is generally low-key there's not much urgency to the things that you do you're just sort of drifting from location to location exploring the world meeting people and uncovering sanctuaries and taking their experiences into yourself but the Stonehenge segment is a clear escalation of things we have a high-ranking member of guy gooses army kidnapping a number of major characters and the threat seems pretty dire so it's time to get moving on our side - we came a long way through this base time to finally get that book from Apple kid and take it to the tenders and he didn't even have it he returned it to the library in Annette which I guess is a logical place for a book to be ha so we slip our sorry keisters all the way back across the world to on it and borrow the book overcoming shyness spring it back to the tenders after curing the tendons of their shyness we're asked to reconfirm our real name that we entered earlier back in summers immediately next to the guy who asked us this is a tender who offers us some tea which brings us to the sequel to the coffee break the tea break now in case there was any question if the first coffee break was directed at us and Ness then the proximity of being asked to reconfirm our name and the scene should put that to bed now I actually think that the text of the tea break seemed encapsulate s'what earthbounds all about better than anything I could say so I'm going to read it right now and then we can unpack like a great tapestry vertical and horizontal threads have met and become intertwined creating a huge beautiful image you may have cursed this never-ending journey you have known injury and defeat but you have struggled on to reach this place your inborn intelligence and courage have helped bring you here you've believed in your friends and as a group you have supported each other have you ever stopped to consider how much your power is grown now you could sell enemies in on that and Tucson with one blow as you certainly know you cannot turn back guy guess the archfiend of the universe is growing frightened of you and your power he's searching for ways to end your journey from here the challenge grows and your adventure will take you beyond anything you ever imagined you are drawing near to gigas remember when you are suffering hardships your enemy is also struggling by the way do you know where pokey went when this cup of tea is finished your adventure will continue your destiny pulls you in the right direction believe in yourself and press forward next Paula Jeff's poo I wish you luck ok let's unpack that a little bit so they line up to start there about the individual threads of the tapestry intertwining and forming a large beautiful hole that is exactly what the earthbound outlook on life is all about it's about the little moments adding up to a sum greater than their individual parts the tea break in general also serves as a kind of book to the coffee break from earlier so yeah on the one hand we're literally told look how far you've come but on the other hand it shows us well it tells us by giving us this parallel scene repetition is a fantastic way to build context and the repetition of the tea and coffee breaks gives us a kind of scaffolding to situate our encounters with the wonderful and wild people in places of earthbound these two scenes along with some other structural elements of earthbounds design like the eight-part sanctuary checklist allow earthbound tests um out to something coherent instead of ending up an endearing but disjointed mess of wacky moment and fittingly to close the scene out it ends the same way the coffee break did the game wishes us luck and with that we're nearing the homestretch of our adventure another great credit to earthbound is that despite all the reflection and ass of the player it never gets masturbatory immediately following the tea break we descend under the newly opened hole by the tendo's where we encounter a talking rock who tells us that the most talkative rock of all is hidden deep deep underground this kicks us off into yet another sanctuary dungeon that will lead us to our seventh sanctuary the pacing here is pretty good the game follows up it's serious chat with us with some jokes and some light-hearted gameplay speaking of the gameplay sometimes the game makes me laugh with just how dumb its enemies are like sometimes it's not even trying and I don't even mind let me introduce you all to Fabi it's so dumb but it makes me smile anyway now the electro spectre is a pretty cool sanctuary Guardian and really the second half of the game has far better sanctuary Guardians more memorable ones than the first in the beginning we were fighting mostly large animals it was a big rat a big mole a big ant and here we're fighting increasingly abstract creatures and entities it makes sense that the more remote places of the world that we explore the more strange and unfamiliar our enemies will become I don't want to harp on this point too much but it's really worth stressing just how much variety or stat presented the same game that gives us the New Age retro hippie also gives us Fabi after beating the electro specter we drop through a hole and come to what in my opinion is easily the best in the whole game the lumen a Hall the walls of this cave deep deep underground in a far remote corner of the earth light up and react to our thoughts I'm s it's been a long road getting here soon I'll be soon I'll be soon I'll be what will happen to us what what's happening my thoughts are being written out on the wall or are they God I don't know if it's possible to have a more literal demonstration of what it means to reflect neces thoughts are literally projected on the wall in front of him and after this happens he sees a vision of his father holding him as a baby now that also is just so great neces dad is not around like his mother is we only talked to him over the phone and while he expressed his concern and interest in our journey he basically just puts money in our bank account it's nice to see that tender moment after falling what seems like forever we end up in this massive prehistoric landscape with dinosaurs stomping around and the scale here is just so large that the player sprites are a fraction of their usual size everything about this place how old it is how large it is how dwarfish we are in comparison gives us a real sense of the scale and scope of the world that were just a small part of and really that's what the appeal of real world travel is confronting via experience the fact that the world is so much grander than our tiny slices of it are individually the loss underworld itself is populated entirely by tendons and dinosaurs there are geysers that are constantly spouting off that we can ride up to the surface and earthquakes being this close to the center of the earth constantly shake us to our core now if we poke around enough we'll find a small unassuming cave and inside we've rented a horrifying preview of what's to come [Music] well hot damn and speaking of hot damn the last proper dungeon in the game is the fire spring all the enemies are obviously fire themes I don't have much to say about that so I'll just talk about the area itself instead it makes a whole lot of sense that after we circumnavigate the globe as we have in earthbound the last leg of our journey takes us into the fiery pulsating furnace of the world now the last sanctuary Guardian it's actually a two-parter which is strange it's the only Guardian like this he begins to fight as carbon dogs but once you do enough damage to him he transforms into Diamond Dogs now at this point on my first playthru I was barely even concentrating on the fight to be honest because that carrot on a stick we've been chasing the whole game find all the sanctuaries and take the eight melodies of our song into ourselves we are at the end of that what will happen next we can only wait to see with the diamond dog defeated we descend into what feels like the very center of the earth the fire spring and there Nessie's one last fission he has the feeling that he's being watched by himself as a baby this next scene I'm going to let play out on muddled by my commentary because it's just executed so well and I'd like you to be able to get a taste of what this moment actually feels like [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music] wait wait slow down here back up I'm not going to let that scene go by without talking about it it's my favorite scene in the game and it's able to get me choked up every time without fail so where do you start let's dive in with the melodies this is the first time that you hear the complete version of your song smiles and tears over the course of the game you can access the sound stone in your inventory and hear whatever portion of the song that you found up to that point so if you found up to magnet Hill you'll hear half of the song so seeing this progress build over the course of the game and having it finally pay off here is definitely one major reason this moment stands out after this a much more traditionally arranged version of smiles and tears begins to play as ness curiously approaches his own house the scene is directed very well that it's able to communicate neces trepidation and curiosity with just a little bit of pacing work done to the sprite animations is awesome another fantastic little touch is how an extra instrumental layer slowly builds as nest phases out of sight and through the door [Music] Ness walks through the house like a ghost we see King back when he was a puppy just like we saw in our very first sanctuary reflection back of the giant step in on that where we caught a glimpse of a small cute puppy we then approach our own crib as our parents are naming us nests God how important our names in earthbound the very first thing that we do is name every character we'll control we're asked twice once to enter it and once again to reconfirm our real name names are important we are our names they are the way that we differentiate ourselves from the rest of the world names Center us and we get our names from our home from our family by giving us a name and raising us right our families lay the foundation we need to face the world with courage and understanding our existence is celebrated with our parents favorite food which will become our favorite food the flavor of our home of our life our mother wishes for us to become a thoughtful strong boy and it's the spirit of that wish and that upbringing that allows us to stand up to any ill intent that might cross our path this is what our family gave us that pokies family could not give him as the scene ends we dive headfirst into the bowels of neces spirit and mind magic ant magic ant is the world of our mind everything within it is constructed from necess thoughts and experiences we're told that every facet of human emotion is on display here including an evil and violent side but now we're ready to face it every avatar of our mind we speak with causes the world to shift in color this may be a literalization of the many different lenses through which we can view the world in ourselves the color shifts also serve to add to the wild strangeness of this place most everyone from neces past can be spoken with here including a snowman we had fun one snowy day I melted but I'm still real in your memory we're also able to talk with pokey it seems like deep down inside Ness knows what his problem is he envies us he says that it's having no luck but we know that the problem is deeply rooted in the family that produced him he asks us if we'll be friends forever with him layering back to the very beginning of the game when the police officer and on that asked us is pokey our friend pokey I'm sure hook that the answer was yes we're also able to find buzz-buzz his tombstone he appeared earlier in the game the game tells us and gave up the ghost before he achieved his goal well that's ok we're going to do it for him because we have the help of the legendary flying men the flying men are the manifest forms of neces courage and we're going to need them because we have to descend deeper and deeper into neces mind fighting enemies all on our own we don't have a party with us anymore keep in mind we are in neces mind along the way we'll find a version of ourselves who gives us the baseball cap that we lost it's been referenced in the sanctuaries and in the scene that we just watched with the baby in the crib NESTA's calf has been a part of him since he was a baby it's almost like his name one way that he situates himself in the world so regaining this is symbolic the flying men are able to protect us from enemy damage much in the same way that we can have teddy bears take hits from enemies for us just in the main game if you're taking the flying men with you they will almost all certainly die they can only take so many hits and if you go back to their house you'll see the tombstones accumulate this is a way of showing literally how Nessa's using every ounce of his courage to face the darkness that lies deep at the center of his self we reach a little silver curlicue that teleports us to the Sea of Eden this is the deepest our mind goes just like the big piles of puke in the deep darkness swamp area the sea of Eden resurrects an old boss as a common enemy this time the Kraken without fearsome this enemy was earlier it really shows us how far we've come what lies at the center of the Sea of Eden the mani mani statue this is the manifestation of the evil part of ourselves this is the slice of our personality that is open to manipulation greed and cruelty this is not the same statue that we saw in foresight and happy happy village that statue set off the distorted hearts of car painter and mr. mana tolling but the only reason it was able to exert that evil influence is because those people just by virtue of being humans leading unexamined lives were open to this sort of evil so we're not actually fighting a statue here we're fighting the portion of our heart that would be open to that sort of control in the first place put simply we're fighting our inner demons and just further driving home the point that this is a part of ourselves the nightmare uses the same psychic abilities that ness uses down to his favorite thing against him after overcoming the nightmare Ness hears his own voice guiding himself to Saturn Valley to finish his quest to save the world this is the transcendental moment this is what earthbound has been building to over the course of the entire game we received massive boost to all our stats courtesy each individual sanctuary we've taken into ourselves listed one by one and true to form the magic hand sequence ends with a moment of reflection we flash back through each place we've made our own around the world over our journey before returning to our friends armed with the spiritual understanding we need to execute our task and be the world's salvation when we go to Saturn Valley we try to use the faceless order to take us to gigas but it's not complete it needs one more material that can only be obtained from a meteorite conveniently there's a meteorite singing at the top of the mountain above our house so it's time to head back to our net make sense that our journey would take a full circle in this way when we arrive back home we find on that shrouded in darkness and full of the strongest enemies we face thus far in the game it shouldn't be a problem for us we're sufficiently leveled from our time and magic ant at this point but it's not me I'm worried about here our sister our dog and of course our mother are terrified because oh my god there's aliens everywhere this is earthbound at its most urgent for the first time we have an extremely pressing reason that we need to take care of guy gets once and for all because now he's attacking our home and by extension our family earthbound just got done demonstrating beautifully to us the vital importance of our family so it makes perfect dramatic sense to have our homeland threatened now as opposed to at any other point in the game in your bog-standard RPG story the player characters home is destroyed by the evil army at the beginning of the game or whatever which launches a campaign against the big bad motivated by revenge but in earthbound we're sent off on our journey with only a vague notion of destiny and an eight-part quest to fulfill then later after experiencing the world and confronting the deepest darkest parts of ourselves we come to understand what truly matters in life being a thoughtful person is what matters your home is what matters your family is what matters earthbound waits to introduce the threat to the player's home until the end of the game after it thoroughly demonstrates through the some of your experiences the philosophical truth that home and family are everything now that is a truly compelling reason to go after a final boss if I've ever heard one so after retrieving the piece of meteorite we're transported to a mysterious place we only caught a glimpse of down in the lost underworld a stretch of land in an endless abyss the trumpets here are really haunting something about this place feels final and deeply wrong who's master sweeps in to teach him one last Power Star storm Omega one of the most powerful side moves in the game aside from neces own ultimate ability sigh rockin or whatever your favorite thing is Omega talking to a mr. Saturn he tells us that a bad guy kidnapped him and then escaped to the past there's only one bad guy still unaccounted for at this point in earthbound pokey so doctor and Oh nuts and Apple kid had determined that Gaius is attacking from this exact location but from far far in the past in what is basically doctor and Oh nuts only serious conversation with us in the game he informs us that we aren't going to be able to travel to the past aside gigas in our current forms only inanimate matter can make the jump back in time this means that our souls are going to need to be ripped from our bodies and transplanted into robot bodies to make the trip and even then there's no guarantee that our spirits will ever be able to return to the present now at this point this is no deterrent to us the gravity of our task is to clear so we'll go but that doesn't mean earthbound is going to shy away from the brutality of this process we're shown or rather we here every excruciating bit of this process one by one each member of our party is drilled sawed and generally violated in horrifying ways and our souls are relocated into robot bodies the way the scene is presented it's just great you only see the character sprite lying down and you hear what's being done to them the ending of earthbound is such a sharp departure from the tone of the rest of the game but it feels earned if after ness has transcended through the course of the game that he's able to tee off against a truly horrifying threat when we wake up we don't even get to see what we look like we are right off to the past in the phase disorder to the final area of earthbound to fight gigas and save the world once and for all we finally see what's happened to us when we exit the phase disorder and step out into this hellish nightmare the cave of the past as identified earlier the music here samples gear drew from the Beach Boys in a truly innovative and chilling way from the soundtrack to the visual design this is an extremely off-putting place we have no idea how long ago in the past we've traveled back but I would venture to guess millions of years because wherever we are right now it looks nothing like Earth or at least not any earth that we've seen and as you know we've seen quite a lot of it the changes to our bodies are disturbing as well aside from NASA's red cap there's nothing recognizably human about us anymore there's even been a footstep sound effect added we're clunky metal is hitting the rocks the enemies that you encounter here are miles tougher than any other in the game couple that with the fact that this stretch between here and gigas is longer than any bit of gameplay in the whole of earthbound and we're looking at a real gauntlet before the final boss again the design of this place is just so weird and unsettling but you have to slog through it this long amplifies that effect for sure after a grueling push to the end of the cave of the past we find ourselves at a crack in a rock formation a cave in a cave in the center of the earth when the earth was young this is the site of our final showdown with gigas the scene were presented with when we pushed through was genuinely horrifying a slithering network of tubes half mechanical and half umbilical these ropes twist and ride their way deeper in I'll address a commonly held view of gigas in this room now a lot of people have suggested gigas is a cosmic fetus of some kind that we've come to abort pointing to these tubes and his vaguely fetal appearance I don't see it so literally guy guesses true nature is too mysterious to simplify in terms like that but the imagery speaks for itself standing among other things as a perversion of life and motherhood Nessa's face emerges from the center of whatever this is we're looking into the abyss and it's staring back at us with our own face but that's okay we faced ourselves once before back in magic ant before we can even wrap our heads around what we're looking at who shows up but pokey Minch the wisdom of the world that we've taken into ourselves from our experience has led us to one side of this battle and pokey has been led to the other by master gigas or just gigas as pokey explains master would be inaccurate gigas is evil itself and it is completely unable to control itself it is wild and a slave to its own nature in earthbounds metaphysics evil is not intent necessarily it's a substantial thing that exerts influence on people it's not conscious necessarily but it touches people and they're seduced this is true of carpenter of mana Thole and in a much more extreme and terrifying way pokey just like the nightmare that we faced earlier gigas here uses our own attacks against us he uses psychic abilities rooted in our favorite thing but aside from this and the general creepy vibe was the area leading up to this this is a pretty traditional boss flight we have the main boss dealing heavy damage and a cohort pokey helping also just listen to the music here it's about as upbeat and traditional you'd expect final boss music in an RPG to be an intense chiptune riff that keeps the energy of the flight high but this familiarity will not last after we deal enough damage the battle lets up and pokey suggests you must feel pretty stupid to keep fighting without even knowing what gigas looks like he dropped this chiller if you were to ever see gigas you'd be so petrified with fear you'd never be able to run away he offers to turn off the devils machine which we have to assume is the nightmarish network of tubes and machinery we've been fighting to this point and sheilas guy guesses true face so isn't this terrifying I'm terrified too guy just cannot think rationally anymore and he isn't even aware of what he's doing now his own mind was destroyed by his incredible power what an almighty idiot yup that's what he is and you you'll be just another meal to him guy guesses true form is terrifying he if you can call it a he looks like the essence of pain and suffering a twisted face filling our whole field of vision with screens this portion of the battle makes brilliant use of earthbounds trippy background technology guy gues has no sprite he is the background itself and he warps and shifts constantly were unable to pin down any true shape that we can wrap our heads around speaking of when gigas attacks us we don't even know what's being done to us the text reads you cannot grasp the true form of gigas attack this move if you want to call it that can do anything like there did nothing to nest it made Paulo start crying it left Jeff numb and it instantly killed who gigas is unconstrained rampaging malice itself a cosmically horrific being we don't have the faintest chance of making sense of Gaius at this point we just need to keep attacking and hope for the best but in a way pokey is almost scarier than gigas assist nobody says must be at the end of your rope in this bizarre dimension you're the only force fighting for justice you're waiting to be burned up with all the rest of the garbage of this universe that's so sad I can't help but shed a tear you know my heart's beating incredibly fast I must be experiencing absolute terror do you want to scream for help here in the dark why not call your mommy nest say mommy daddy I'm so frightened I think I'm gonna wet my pants gigas is so alien so strange so mysterious but pokey is a clear and instantiated form of human evil he is taking pleasure in our suffering and that's something that we can identify with and hate guy guess is the nature of evil itself but pokey pokey is a person a morally failed person much easier to make sense of and therefore much easier to be repulsed by him on the other hand I don't think it'd be accurate to say I hate gigas I'm terrified of God yes I don't know what it is this fear certainly isn't helped by gigas talking to us once in a while Ness he'll say I'm happy holy at this point all we can do is cry out for help in the dark psychically we pray as Paula please give us strength if it's possible somebody help us our prayers reached gerardo montague dr. anne donuts apple kid and all the mr. Saturn's in Saturn Valley in return they all start praying for our safety in this time of need the effects of these prayers on gigas are devastating his form twists even more horribly and even worse he starts to talk to us more Ness go back Ness Ness Ness Ness now anything that gigas says the one that stuck with me the most is I feel good it hurt in a way that's exactly what you'd expect if he is evil itself than these well-intentioned prayers that we're getting from the people around the world right now must be hurting him ness and pokies radically different moral character demonstrates that human beings are creatures capable of great good and great evil alike gigas is not this way he is not human he is just gigas evil itself pleasure and everything good is antithetical and utterly destructive to gigas it's like matter touching antimatter gigas and the concept of good cannot coexist paula continues to pray for us and as we do we're answered by souls all around the world who we've encountered on our quest they hear our cries and send their prayers back to help us seems like your standard anime spirit bomb to me you know what I mean the classic trope where the chips are down a true hero draws strength not from within but from without to defeat the enemy the players pour in culminating in some final wishes for meses own family [Music] now this is when you'd expect our anime spirit bomb to be complete all the prayers from everywhere in the world concentrated on helping our heroes in this one moment but gigas simply becomes more violent and unhinged what happened who else can we even reach out to Paula prays again Paula's call was absorbed by the darkness known as unacceptable I won't let this end here there's got to be someone still out there who can answer this prayer Paula and her friends calls touch the heart of M K prays through the kids having never met them before that's right Paula is now reaching out to me Mike to the player directly we're being personally invited into the Spirit Bomb us the people playing or found hell yeah we will answer that call we've made it this far by continuing to play we've gotten invested not just in earthbounds world but more importantly in earthbounds world view we accept the game's values we affirm that openness curiosity goodwill humor home family are things worth standing up for in game as Ness and personally within us as ourselves me Mike so I will keep praying and keep praying and keep praying Mike kept praying only by accepting these values as important and worth hoping for with full sincerity are we able to finally defeat gigas the gigas sequence is earthbounds crown jewel it resolves the game's mission of personal reflection perfectly the game is just as much about us as it is about Ness more so even the encounter is so unique disturbing and legitimately well written on a thematic level that it stands easily as one of the greatest climaxes to a game ever constructed despite gigas defeat pokey is too far gone he tells us that he'll see again and runs off somewhere someone now Ness will never see poki again but players certainly will in mother 3 nearly 10 years later but that's neither here nor there there's an extended sequence where we just look at the riving remains of guy gets flicker and flash as it resolves into increasingly dense and horrible static at the end of the day I almost feel bad for gigas it didn't know what it was doing I don't know what it was I don't know if it knew what it was all I know is that it seemed to be in constant pain and suffering because it is pain and suffering it's for the betterment of everyone that it and all the mysteries of its nature are washed away forever after catching a fleeting image of home we wake up outside of gigas caves a long last the war against gigas is over our souls drift out of our robot bodies and find their way back to the present reuniting with our real flesh and blood bodies thank God I mean it'd be a real bummer if after all that we just died we say goodbye to our party members who goes back to the LOM Jeff heads back up to winters and it's up to us to take Paulo back to her home in Tucson but there's nothing saying we need to go straight there when we have Paulo until we can either take her right back to Tucson or we can just wander around the world until we're ready to be done tons of NPCs all over the game have new lines of dialogue just for this epilogue section it's really up to you how much of this you want to see I know I personally wandered around for hours just talking to people whenever you've had your fill you can bring Paulo back to our house in Tucson where the two of you exchange what can only be described as an adorable goodbye with our mission fulfilled and our friends bid farewell there's only one thing left to do come back home of course for coming full circle this is earthbound after all we face the world for all it had to offer whether humorists are horrifying we've met friends from all walks of life all over the world we've been through so much now is when we take those experiences back home with us we integrate them into ourselves so we can be better a very last thing we do is share everything we've experienced with our mom who's eager to listen and that is earthbound I just want to thank everybody who's made it this far earthbound is one of my favorite games of all time and I hope that this video did something to explain why that may be earthbound is made up of many many tiny parts that add up to a huge powerful whole it can be hard to communicate why it's so appealing unless you are able to experience all those little bits along the way I hope I've been able to do some of that in this video but honestly it's a 30-hour game and this is a two hour video there's so much that I couldn't include so many great little characters so many little lines of dialogue that make me laugh every time but you just can't show it all it's too much the process of making this video actually it's been a great opportunity for me to reflect on what earthbound is all about and I think I understand the game better for it now than when I started this process but earthbounds not trying to beat you over the head with any one message I'm sure many people could get drastically different things out of this game than I did that's a huge part of the appeal and I'm excited to see what your guys experience with this game has been in the comments it's a much looser game than most it's pretty easygoing and it holds a mirror up directly to the player all those factors combined means that different people can get very different value out of the game now it may feel like an awkward time to bring this up but I kind of have to the game's not actually over until the credits are done rolling this is the payoff to the photo man taking our picture through all the different iconic areas and moments in the game all those snapshots are added to a photo album that we get to sum through once everything is said and done and honestly revisiting this game feel sort of like flipping through a photo album the game leaves such a strong impression and is founded in themes that are so close to home that it's really easy to feel nostalgic for chickasaw to etoys up the feeling in his own voice pretty well during the credits song at least soon it's truly an unforgettable game now it's inspired a great many other creators who have made quality games in their own right but none have achieved quite what earthbound has fittingly to close the game out the player is thanked personally by name for their role in this experience unlike most games it literally couldn't have been done without you you the player are integral to the experience of earthbound much like you the audience are integral in making this video work wink wink now thanks for watching and I'll catch you all another time bye Oh [Music] you [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: BruTalc

Views: 39,110

Rating: 4.9025049 out of 5

Keywords: EarthBound, Commentary, Analysis, Front to Back, Breakdown, Blow by blow, SNES, brutalcumpowder, review

Id: tfMbPDbMXjA

Length: 122min 44sec (7364 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/brutalcumpowder]

Hi fellas--I made a detailed commentary video for Earthbound and just wanted to share it with you all

[u/PM_ME_BAD_FEELINGS]

Holy shit this is great