Highlights from Boss Fight Books (Earthbound) by Ken Baumann Last read on July 21, 2022
Highlights from this book
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Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreign-ness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
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I don’t think there’s a game that embraces and satirizes America’s sentimental mongrel spirit better than EarthBound.
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Market pressures majorly shaped the Super Nintendo’s precursor, the Nintendo Entertainment System, which was designed to look like VCRs in an attempt to distance itself from the catastrophic North American video game crash of 1983 (known in Japan as the “Atari shock”). In just two years video game revenues dropped nearly 97%. The structural evolution of gaming consoles, then, is not as linear as the march of Moore’s law (i.e. the observation that computational power—via the increasing number of transistors on integrated circuits—doubles every two-to-three years); consoles have oscillated between geometric slot-full bricks and sleek sportscar-esque parabolas, molded by the projected desires of millions of young humans.
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If EarthBound is the hospitable Milky Way, Mother is the experimental Big Bang.
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If you’d like to experience EarthBound directly and unspoiled, go play it on a Wii U or shell out $200+ for the SNES cartridge. Or there are ROMs and emulators. You can learn a great deal about yourself while doing something illegal.
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Shigesato Itoi’s experience in the cinema, then — similarly dark and magical by dint of cavernous space and projected light—was honored by EarthBound. And while both video game creators’ experiences had to be severely simplified to become produceable, these products contain considerations totally absent in the impartiality of nature.
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EarthBound reminds me of Pixar’s movies, in that it’s built to please kids and adults while strongly presenting the idea that kids — in their ability to trust each other, have faith, and be fearless — can be as heroic as their elders. And like most Pixar films — I’m thinking of the moment here where the toys in Toy Story 3 join hands in the face of death — EarthBound allows itself to be deeply mature. Mature, but simple. The game’s got a Zen master goofiness to it. Like a dedicated monk, it’s minimal with its mechanics (its action) and its graphics (its appearance). Some of the sillier Zen koans would be right at home among EarthBound’s dialogue. One of my favorites: A monk asked Tōzan, “What is Buddha?” Tōzan replied, “Masagin!” [three pounds of flax]
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Once again, a nascent inquiry holds the slingshot, but it faces the looming, agile goliath of subjectivity.
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If the hope of progress is an illusion, how – it will be asked – are we to live? Th e question assumes that humans can live well only if they believe they have the power to remake the world. Yet most humans who have ever lived have not believed this – and a great many have had happy lives. The question assumes the aim of life is action; but this is a modern heresy. For Plato contemplation was the highest form of human activity. A similar view existed in ancient India. The aim of life was not to change the world. It was to see it rightly.” Or as Heraclitus put it: Time is a game played beautifully by children. I’ve experienced EarthBound unbidden. Now I want to see EarthBound rightly.
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Touring performers being treated like shit is a recurring joke in the game, and encountering this for the first time as an adult who has worked as a professional entertainer makes me laugh. And so does Onett’s mayor, B. H. Pirkle, after delivering a few lines that would be right at home in The Wire: “For someone as great as you, giving you the key could help keep the town peaceful. However, if you encounter a dangerous situation, please don’t ask me to take any responsibility. I’ll be able to avoid any responsibility, right?”
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The protective nerd in me wants to say that TV tropes is a symptom of humanity’s desire to make encyclopedic the things it should keep sacred. If you play EarthBound fresh — without your critic hat on — and you win the lottery of aesthetic wonder, why risk irrevocably dissipating it with analysis? Because my drive to see EarthBound as deeply as I can is greater than my comfort with simply enjoying it. Simply put: Because I can’t help myself.
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The word nostalgia first appeared in a Swiss medical dissertation published in 1668, but the concept is ancient. While held captive on Calypso’s island, Odysseus sits still on a rock and weeps, thinking of Ithaca. And, providing earlier evidence of archaic religion’s yearning for return, Mircea Eliade argues that the central drive of homo religiosus is to reenact the creation of the universe; that all ancient religious rituals are stagings of the sacred moment of birth, or replays of mythical stories and adventures. So this yearning for a different quality of time—both dreamlike and sacred — is as old as Neanderthals. Yearning isn’t absent from the secular. As Eliade also shows in The Sacred and The Profane, the secular person still behaves in the grooves formed by religion. Which I’ll personally cop to—our earliest myths were mimetic (you repaired your canoe because the gods repaired their canoe; you ate human flesh because the gods, unfortunately, ate human flesh) — because even though I don’t consider myself religious, I find myself repeating the same stories over and over again. I’ll watch a familiar movie to cheer myself up. I’ll listen to Earthbound - the same song ten times in a row. I eat the same food because it’s familiar, it’s pleasurable. I keep routines, even if I don’t call them sacred. And I’m replaying an old video game. A video game that allows me — via my patient, unblinking avatar — to save the world. To make the world anew.
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Stuff like this means nothing or it means everything. We’re set amid these billion instances and we connect some if we’re lucky.
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“Game translations almost NEVER got this much careful treatment; just like Square’s RPGs from the time, EarthBound was one of the earliest text-heavy console games to be given a truly serious, competent, and enjoyable localization.”
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EarthBound feels bigger, maybe only because of the wider temporal boundaries that video games provide.
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24 megabits — the largest storage capacity for Super Nintendo cartridges — is equivalent to just 3 megabytes. Or we can look at the game this way: Since 1 megabit = 1,000,000 bits, the entire world of EarthBound is manifested by 24,000,000 binary decisions. To be able to casually interact with entertainment that complex and laborious still blows my mind, and deeper still when I remember that I was doing it as a kid, innocent of any given product’s measure and human cost;
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I played EarthBound the first time without dwelling on the real-life tragedies that made the game’s colorful kidnappings stick in my throat, without knowing that play only has gravity because of the danger it softly mimics. But now I’m able to plumb the decade that contained my childhood more impartially. I can see the latent unresolvable horrors that exist alongside me, waiting to be discovered by curious adults or people just doing their jobs. * More young American girls who were lost but became free again: Carlina White, Katie Beers, Jaycee Dugard, Elizabeth Smart, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry. Rescued by suspicion, accident, or self-inquiry. You get to rescue Paula from a cult that worships the color blue. *
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When we give ourselves over to someone or something — a partner, a school, a cult, or a color — we do so out of the feeling that we’ve found a perfectly inevitable opportunity. For all our claims of agency, some circumstances feel so ripe as to feel impossible not to pluck and eat.
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“nearly everything that is most important in our lives is unchosen. The time and place we are born, our parents, the first language we speak – these are chance, not choice. It is the causal drift of things that shapes our most fateful relationships. The life of each of us is a chapter of accidents.”
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EarthBound tends to feel like a salve more often than an abrasive. Considered among the other media I gleaned before I lost the grace of a kid’s self-unconsciousness, EarthBound stands out as feeling continually kind and reassuring. In this way, it is like a good parent.
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“Yes, like a caregiver. Someone who doesn’t say or do anything to interfere – just watches from afar. In one sense, I think that might be the ideal image of a parent. “I absolutely love the Pippi Longstocking stories. In them, her father is gone. He’s a sailor who’s gone missing. Despite that, Pippi is really strong and full of life. Her father’s absence isn’t used as a way to give the reader sadness to indulge in; instead, it’s simply given as a fact of life as the story continues forward. “I think that might be the same thing here. That’s why, looking back at the Mother series, I feel like I had a reason for making Mother 1 through 3. But now my kid is all grown up.”
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EarthBound’s enemies are randomly generated, so if you find an upcoming area filled with baddies you’d rather avoid, you can walk away and then come back to a hopefully less threatening number of on-screen enemies. Game designer Michel McBride-Charpentier beautifully notices: “It recently occurred to me that my little maneuvers used to exploit a “bug” reflected the hesitation Ness must feel. A few steps forward, run away, gather courage, approach again, and yes, it turns out the enemies weren’t so bad after all. We can both go on.”
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
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I was raised to feel like an impostor among the rich because my family was middle class and they therefore healthily distrusted the wealthy.
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Starched Prick was now constantly muttering. Loudly. He started shouting at the porter in clipped, whiny ejections, the kind that come from a creature ossified into a sort of immovable fuckwad exoskeleton by years of money and privilege.
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Rich humans are humans still, but they’re humans who can freely use the most powerful tool in human history: a surplus of money. Tools impartially magnify our powers, which means they magnify our cruelty just as well as our magnanimity.
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Lumine Hall, to me, reminds me of all the hidden potential in a healthy child. Even if a child’s parents are poor or geographically stranded, a child can live within an imaginative realm of transformation and experience, all shifting with and within his or her whims, morphing in and out of fantasy at the speed of thought. I marvel at the distance that a kid’s mind can cover, navigating such disparate and promising realms. EarthBound, like all good art, can work as a sieve. The child’s rough, unlimited desires can reach a finer grain with its help. EarthBound, in its thematic width and variety, and in its emotional openness and honesty, forms a uniquely powerful shape that you or I can fill with our attention and further fantasy. Like Lumine Hall, the game is a sanctuary in which you can see yourself connected to and reflected by its simple structure.
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“Everyone would get together to watch shows like Lucy, Gunsmoke, Flipper, The Beverly Hillbillies and Twilight Zone. That was our picture of America—Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver. I love to think of America as a place like that.”
EarthBound’s gentle idealism, though honest in its depiction of the spread of evil, could only have been born out of a rosy reading of a distant culture. The manicured lawns, well-paid jobs, and respectful proms of America were girded with the post-war spoils of World War II’s productive boom. America, in the wake of such a massive, global atrocity, looked like a peaceful place. It’s easy to see how Itoi could admire it, especially the carefully constructed fantasy of America presented on television—a fantasy built by writers ultimately paid to stoke the viewer’s desire to consume, a desire that Itoi grew up to stoke professionally and profit greatly by doing so.
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Please:
Close your eyes and ask for help.
I know this may feel silly, but it doesn’t have to. As someone alive only because of a confluence of circumstances so singular and complex that it is impossible to understand, do you think it silly to acknowledge that union? With your mind? Your voice? And if you don’t find it silly, then why not speak to that fate in a humble way?
You can ask for help from the god you worship. You can ask if you’re unable to name one at all. You can ask without expecting an answer. You can ask solely to know that you are wounded and that you are here.
Ask for your safety, for your victories, for forgiveness, empathy, and understanding. Ask for help, for order, for life. Ask for the world to thrive without you. Ask to be given access to old graces, and ask to be able to make new ones.
Please:
I will do it with you: Let’s close our eyes and ask.
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EarthBound’s grandest act is self-transcendence. As Ness, you must give up the comforting regularity of your childhood to save humanity. But to do so, you need the help of three friends. Paula leaves the bubble of her local popularity as a gifted child in order to accompany Ness, a fellow psychic who saves her from captivity. Paula and Ness are then trapped and must rely on a physically transcendent plea for help to reach Jeff, who has pursued scientific excellence in lieu of a normal childhood’s free play since he was a little boy. And then comes Poo, who must transcend the most basic human desire—self-preservation—to fully realize his powers and join you. Together you face a Giygas, the ultimate schizophrenic evil, but not before having your very beings separated from your bodies and inserted into makeshift shells. In the final confrontation, it does not matter how powerful you are; again you are left with no other option but to ask for help from your family, your friends, strangers, and, finally, you, the unseen player. It takes a multitude in prayer to defeat Giygas. The challenge finally over, you return to your bodies and can explore the world in solemnity.
The game’s last act — the last event that you can enact with a press of a button—is sitting down with your mother and showing her photographs of your journey. Transcendence by way of storytelling.
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The person who passed away has to be in all sorts of different people’s memories.
What they’ve done, how stupid they were, what kind of things they did for fun,
and how kind that person was sometimes.
All the people who are still alive are laughing, wanting to be the first one to bring up those things to everyone around them.
The life I want to live is something that can be concluded with that kind of a party-like wake.
Fame and fortune, setting records and accomplishments are all meaningless.
That person is inside those stories that are told,
where people talk about their episodes, casually and sincerely.
Well, it’s not dead, and it’s not even human,
but to me Earthbound is a game that’s kind of like that guy.
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EarthBound isn’t just an incredible memory from my childhood, and it’s not only a strong wellspring for my nostalgia; EarthBound is a game made whole by its jokes and its peacefulness, by its references and poignancies, and by its lessons, challenges, and thrills. It is made completely alive by its variety and its familiarity. EarthBound feels like family, too.