BTCGuru81
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- Joined
- Mar 26, 2013
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For those of you who don't know, Earthbound was a JRPG on the Super Nintendo which combined time tested RPG mechanics with a sense of style that lampooned small town American asthetic to comical results. "Quirky" is probably the best word I can use to describe virtually any aspect of the game: It's music was unusual, bouncy, even scary sometimes; the graphic and character designs were all over the place, featuring people, cult memebers, lake monsters, yetis, aliens, bees and even sentient blobs of filth; and the story line was equally full of humorous moments in which you fight a 50's biker gang in control of a homemade tank and a trip through a city with a strange, neon, parallel world.
But this silliness hid a darker secret. The end of the game featured Ness and party being transformed into robots and entering this organic space to fight the game's main protagonist, Giygas. You enter a structure suspiciously reminiscent of a medical journal picture of a cervix and encounter a maddened, proto Giygas. As the fight progresses, you see the outline of an infant slowly coming into view. Suddenly, you realize, you were sent back to destroy Giygas when he was most vulnerable!
This is a highly disturbing theme even by modern standards and I wondered, do you think it was appropriate or was it too gruesome for a kid's game? Did you know what was going on when you were playing? The game does not bluntly state "Ness, go perform an abortion", but it is more than fairly suggestive that this is exactly what is going on. Though Earthbound had it's creepy moments, it was always tempered with cartoonish levity until this end moment. Thoughts?
But this silliness hid a darker secret. The end of the game featured Ness and party being transformed into robots and entering this organic space to fight the game's main protagonist, Giygas. You enter a structure suspiciously reminiscent of a medical journal picture of a cervix and encounter a maddened, proto Giygas. As the fight progresses, you see the outline of an infant slowly coming into view. Suddenly, you realize, you were sent back to destroy Giygas when he was most vulnerable!
This is a highly disturbing theme even by modern standards and I wondered, do you think it was appropriate or was it too gruesome for a kid's game? Did you know what was going on when you were playing? The game does not bluntly state "Ness, go perform an abortion", but it is more than fairly suggestive that this is exactly what is going on. Though Earthbound had it's creepy moments, it was always tempered with cartoonish levity until this end moment. Thoughts?
