Earthbound + Skiing

skiing is suffering

So it's been an interesting couple of days.  I've learned that skiing is fun again, but it's stupidly cold.  If you do go skiing, my advice is to bundle up.  If you get too hot, at least you have layers you can take off and puts somewhere else.  If you're cold.... Well you're screwed unless someone's willing to give you some clothes, but I'm pretty sure there's not too many people that would be willing to do that.  A side effect of going to ski has forced me from my play through of Final Fantasy XIII and instead, I thought that I would finally finish playing Earthbound.



Now that I've finished Earthbound, I can say that I can begin to understand why it has such a strong cult following behind it.  There's a lot of amusing little bits in the game that can be quite charming.  The NPCs often break the 4th wall with information about the game or when trying to present information.  If there's a NPC that isn't very relevant to the storyline or what you need to do, the game is not afraid to make sure that the NPC will tell you that.  And if all hope is lost and you have no idea where to go, you can always visit the Hint Man who will gladly give you tips where to go, but for a fee of course.

SUPER KAWAII DESU NE?! owait

The game itself is charming (at least to me) with sprites that are quite cute.  There's even a cute Loch Ness monster like thing called Tessie who is damn awesome.  You get to ride on it when a monkey with bubble gum floats on top of the monster's head and then takes you over the lake.  Not only there's cute things, but there's some quite vicsious sprites.  The sprites that they have for each 8 guardians of the light thing (I don't actually remember what they were), are quite... vicious with blood coming out of their mouth.  Long story short, I think this game looks great especially a game of SNES era and has aged well.

Much better :3
Unrelated to this paragraph though :/

I would have to say the most interesting thing about this game for me, was the final battle with Gigyas.  There's obvious spoilers after this, so if you don't want to know them, skip.  In this battle, you first fight against Pokey and Gigyas and as per usual, after you damage Gigyas and Pokey enough, Pokey eventually retreats and you begin to fight against Gigyas.  At first, this battle seems doable although you tend to take more on the receiving end.  At one point for me, Poo and Jeff both died and Ness and Paula were both pretty screwed.  Paula has a character specific move called Pray which a random spell happens, sometimes positive or negative.  Considering I didn't have anything better to do on Paula, I decided to Pray, and hoped something would happen.  The screen then blacks out, and goes to some of the people that you met along your travels who then pray for your safety and your return.  As you continue to Pray, you reach out to all of the friends that you have made through your travels and continue to weaken Gigyas through that.

Eventually, you reach the last phase of Gigyas.  As you continue to pray, Paula's prayers only reach out to darkness.  But as you continue to pray you first reach out to ***n*on.  As you continue, a little more is uncovered **and*n.  Then *randon and finally Brandon.  And with that, the final hit is dealt to Gigyas and Gigyas dies and becomes nothing.  This whole time I myself had been hoping that I would be able to defeat Gigyas and the game itself in a way showed that to me in a really meaningful way.  I was on my last legs essentially and through the power of everyone that you've met and even yourself, you're able to defeat Gigyas.  As cheesy as it sounds, it really was heart touching to me and something that was awesome to feel and experience.

A fun and enjoyable game ^^

That being said, I definitely enjoyed the game overall, but I know some people wouldn't be able to get themselves in the game.  The game is really old almost 20 years at this point which can turn off alot of people.  But, if you do get the chance to even play a little bit of it, then I definitely recommend you to.  If not, there's the sequel Mother 3 which although has never been released in America, has a fan translation somewhere on the internet.
In random unrelated news, I really want to play Blazblue ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ;___;