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Who's Behind All This?

(This is the second draft of the thing I posted yesterday. I have privated the first draft. If you read it, read this one, too. If you didn't read it, read this one instead.)

It's time I talked about two games from my childhood that are near and dear to my heart: Earthbound and Chrono Trigger.

That's right. I'm back on my bullshit again.

I've already written a little about Chrono Trigger and how it features the single greatest moment in storytelling. Three years ago, in fact. You can read it here. It's about a little frog man who shouts his name, and I still get misty-eyed to this day when I think about it. I'm not kidding.

Earthbound might be my favorite RPG, but I won’t pretend it’s perfect. Hell, I won’t even pretend it’s good. It’s riddled with frustrating features, from an extremely limited inventory to balance issues that make the whole game just feel like a mess to anybody who’s spent their life playing more polished and honed works.

Towards the end of the game, one of the characters, Jeff, the boy genius, gets access to one-use items called multi bottle rockets, and those can kill any boss for the rest of the game in a single hit. The only limitation is that they cost money to buy and they take up space in his inventory. Even beyond that, he gets access to a multi-use item called the heavy bazooka little earlier that makes it so you really shouldn’t ever use his regular attack again, because the heavy bazooka is just more powerful. Again, the only limitation is that it takes up one of his precious inventory spaces. In the final dungeon, your fourth party member, Poo, gets his ultimate attack skill, and you have zero bosses or major encounters left where it makes sense to use it. Poo himself joins the party so late in the game that he feels like an extra guy tacked on who has little use, and then he leaves again only to come back a short while later.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m someone who owns a hardcover copy of Clyde Mandelin’s “Legends of Localization” book on Earthbound, as well as the “passport” and the guide to playing it in Japanese. I own the fucking hat, shirt, Franklin Badge, and yo-yo that Limited Run Games sold a decade ago. I have played Earthbound from start to finish half a dozen times, and that’s not including ROM hacks or my playthrough of Mother 2, the Japanese version.

In short, I love Earthbound. But I have to admit that it isn’t for everybody. I know people in real life who bounced off of it, and while that hurts me, I can’t really tell them to get back into it and force themselves because it gets better. If you aren’t hooked early on, you won’t get hooked later.

Earthbound is a silly game. It’s a game with atmosphere. Personality, you could say. You play as Ness, a young boy who beats his enemies with a baseball bat and his slowly growing psychic powers. Ness was named in a prophesy by a supercomputer called the Apple of Enlightenment as one of four children who could save Earth from an extraterrestrial threat led by someone named Giygas. A bee, or a rhinoceros beetle if you insist on sticking with the Japanese version of things, meets Ness from ten years in the future and gives Ness an object called the Sound Stone, which Ness has to physically carry to eight different places around the world.

“Each of these locations is ‘Your Sanctuary,’” the bee tells Ness.

And when Ness finds the first location, it’s guarded by a giant ant who tells him, “This is the first ‘Your Sanctuary’ location.”

If you don’t gel with that kind of humor, where the term “Your Sanctuary” is used when referring to Ness specifically and then later just as a general term, you’re not gonna like Earthbound. If you don’t love Ness, the little boy with a backpack and a red hat, you won’t love Earthbound. But if you do, then you will.

Earthbound oozes with personality. Every enemy, every NPC, every dungeon. It’s all fun, and lighthearted. Ness is on a quest to save the world. He rescues the second of the prophesized four children, Paula, from a cult leader who plans to sacrifice her because a golden statue is bringing him under the influence of Giygas. It’s a dark and scary idea, but the way it’s handled is totally silly and fun. The cultists wear blue robes and the cult is called Happy Happyism. Their goal is to paint the world blue with literal paint. Their leader is Mr. Carpainter, and you defeat him by using the Franklin Badge that Paula gives to Ness. It reflects lightning, you see, and Mr. Carpainter uses his own psychic powers to shoot Ness with lightning.

Ness beats him with a baseball bat until Mr. Carpainter is freed from Giygas’s influence and becomes a good person again.

Ness and Paula and Jeff and Poo travel the world, finding the eight “Your Sanctuary” locations, fighting monsters and aliens and animals and humans who are under the influence of Giygas, and they defeat them all, and none of them are scary, not really. The scariest ones are still silly cartoon monsters. The guy who enslaves an entire village of sentient non-humans is a giant pile of slime called Master Belch who threatens you by saying he’ll make you feel the pain of true nausea. Those sentient non-humans are little pink genderless mouthless armless balls with feet who wear bows in their single hairs and call themselves Mr. Saturn.

One of those Mr. Saturns later helps Jeff’s father, the famous Dr. Andonuts, to invent a machine that can travel through time, because they are secretly extremely scientifically intelligent.

So the game never takes itself too seriously, even when dark and serious things happen. It always holds your hand, gently telling you that things will be alright. You’re leveling up, you’re getting stronger, and you can take on anything that comes your way. And you do. You defeat every foe. There are no scripted losses in Earthbound. When Ness lifts his bat and squares up against an opponent, whether it’s five cops in the back of a police station who’ve brought him there specifically to beat him up or it’s the legendary kraken trying to destroy the ship he’s using to cross the ocean, Ness wins. His friends are there with him, and the four of them are going to save the world.

Throughout the game, Ness and his friends slowly accumulate power. Ness, Paula, and Poo through their psychic power and training. Jeff through his incredible genius and inventions. Eventually, Ness unlocks all the power of the Earth itself by visiting the eight "Your Sanctuary" locations. Doing this allows Ness to delve into his own mind, defeat his inner darkness, and unlock all the power that the world itself has to offer.

There's a dog you can speak with after Ness receives his ultimate powerup who asks you, via Ness's ability to psychically communicate with animals, "At this point, you guys just might be the strongest force in the world, don't you think?" And you are. And you believe it. Why wouldn’t you?

So when Dr. Andonuts and Mr. Saturn tell you that they’ve found where Giygas is, and that it’s in the distant past, you know that the only thing you can do is travel back in time and defeat him once and for all. You can do it. You can do anything.

But you can’t handle Giygas.

You’re the strongest force in the world. Giygas isn’t from this world. Giygas is stronger than anything this world can offer. Giygas is a different thing entirely.

The strongest ant in the world, with all its deadly venom and powerful jaws and durable exoskeleton, cannot bite and kill the sun. And, when you face Giygas in his true form, free from the Devil’s Machine that binds and controls his power, that’s all you are to him. He’s become so powerful that he’s lost his mind, his sanity, all rationality, and he’s going to kill you. You’ve come so far, and you’ve become so strong, and you’re going to die, because he’s not playing by the same rules that you are. You can be level 99 if you want. You could be level 255. You could be level 1,000. It doesn’t matter. Giygas doesn’t have a level like you do. His power can’t be measured in numbers.

Chrono Trigger is one of the greatest RPGs of all time. This isn't just me saying it. It's one of those widely-considered-to-be-true subjective statements that everybody who ranks RPGs agrees with partly because it's a great RPG and partly because, I suspect, they don't want to be murdered in their sleep by fans.

I won't argue that it isn't a great RPG. I won't even argue that it isn't one of the greatest. I do think it is. If nothing else, it invented (or at least made known) the concept of "New Game+." You ever play a game to the end and then start over with all your gear and levels and shit? Yeah, thank Chrono Trigger for that. Obviously, other games did something similar. Zelda 2 on the NES let you start the game over with all your levels once you beat it, just so you could steamroll the bosses and, I guess, have a really fun time. But New Game+ as we know it now came from Chrono Trigger.

You start off with Crono, whose name lacks the "h" in "Chrono" in English, but don't you worry your beautiful, beautiful head, because it's spelled クロノ there, just like the game, クロノ・トリガー, and the item, the クロノ・トリガー. Ku, Ro, No. Kurono.

Crono is just some guy. He's a nobody, living an unimportant life in an unimportant time period. He couldn't matter less. He isn’t part of a prophecy. He doesn’t draw power from the planet like Ness does. He doesn’t have psychic powers. He gets pulled into events bigger than himself, decides he wants to make a difference in them, and, for his trouble, he dies. He's obliterated by the strongest thing there is, and it uses a fucking laser beam to do it. Kills him dead. Vaporizes him. You, the player, see his body turn to dust, and then that dust is burned up by the same laser.

But before that, he does do some things.

He wakes up one day in the year 1000 AD, because, somehow, the world in which he lives uses the Gregorian calendar and had some kind of event in year 0 that caused everyone to decide that it was time to start counting years right fucking then, and everything that happened before that just counts backwards and is called BC.

I have no explanation for this.

But there's a local fair celebrating the fact that it's 1000 AD, called the Millennial Fair. Or 千年祭, in Japanese, which means thousand year festival. All things considered, pretty fucking good translation.

I will try not to keep doing this thing of telling you what things are called in Japanese, but I can't help myself sometimes.

There he meets a random girl named Marle. Marle is also nobody. She's not important. She's a nothing, in the grand scheme of the world, though you might think she is, because she's secretly the princess Nadia.

Remember how I said I can't help myself sometimes? Marle is called マール (Ma-ru)in Japanese, and her real name is マールディア (Maldia). But you can change her name from Marle or マール to whatever you want. It doesn't have to be Marle or マール. But in the Japanese game, the only difference between マール and マールディア is the ending ディア, so whatever you name her in Japanese, they just add ディア to the end. You wanna name her クロノ instead of the main guy? Guess what, now there's a princess クロノディア (Kuronodia) in your game.

Anyway.

Marle insists on trying out a teleportation pod invented by Crono's childhood friend Lucca.

Lucca, though she doesn't realize it, has invented a device with which she can travel through time and change all of history, and she does so. Lucca's inventions, her scientific abilities, are what kick off all of the events in Chrono Trigger.

Everything that happens from here is thanks to her. She deserves the credit and the blame for all of it. She is the catalyst that changes history. That changes the fate of the world. Lucca discovers Time Gates, and she invents a device that allows her to open them as she wishes, and so she is the reason why you can travel through time to different eras.

At first, it’s an accident. Lucca’s teleportation pod interacts with Marle’s pendant, and it sends Marle through a Time Gate. Crono picks up the same pendant, Marle having left it behind, and follows. Lucca follows later, once she invents her Gate Key.

Eventually, through circumstances that might be worth getting into in a different essay, Crono, Marle, and Lucca find themselves visiting not just one time period, the distant past of 600 AD where they meet Frog for the first time, but also the distant future of 2300 AD. There they learn that the world has been destroyed by a creature named Lavos. Lavos emerged in the year 1999 AD, which a lot of us made jokes about when 1999 AD actually rolled around in real life, believe it or not, and rained fire and death upon the entire world.

It's… unclear why Lavos did this, to say the least.

But Lucca and Marle decide that they aren't willing to let this future happen. They insist that they want to change the future, just like they altered time before, in their trip to 600 AD earlier. Whether you as Crono decide you want to go along with this plan or not, you are forced to, and so the three of you, along with a robot Lucca has repaired and named Robo, are going to do it.

This is where the game starts letting you choose party members. You need to have Crono and Robo in your party for a while, but you can have either Lucca or Marle as your third party member. This is because of a story contrivance at first (and an even worse one later), but the point is that you have to choose whether you want to see the next few story events with Lucca by your side, or with Marle.

The only ways to see them both is to reload your save, or choose differently in New Game+.

And that's the gimmick. The rest of the game is like this. Things turn out the same no matter what you choose, but you do have to choose, and those choices determine what you see along the way. Your path up the mountain, as it were.

Believe it or not, none of this is actually relevant to the point I want to make in this whole fucking thing, but it's useful background info and might help you understand a little better when I get there.

There's a point in the game where the party contemplates how it is the Time Gates came to exist at all. For much of the game, they've suspected it was because of Lavos. They've learned how Lavos first crash-landed on the planet from outer space in the year 65,000,000 BC and burrowed deep below ground. Presumably, this is a rough estimate, but it might well be exactly 65,000,000 BC, and Lavos needed exactly 65,001,999 years to decide it was finally time to poke his head back up and destroy everything.

They've learned how, in the year 12,000 BC, a family of magically-gifted people attempted to harness the power of Lavos to gain immortality, and they failed, and Lavos destroyed them.

And they've learned how, in the year 600 AD, one of those same magically-gifted people attempted to summon Lavos from below ground to kill him personally, and he failed, and Lavos destroyed him, too.

But they've changed history. Changed the past. That guy in 600 AD? They stopped him from summoning Lavos, and instead another Time Gate was created, scattering the player party (which must include Crono and Frog, but could have Lucca, Marle, or Robo as the third) to one time period and that guy who was trying to summon Lavos to 12,000 BC.

Then they followed that guy, though they didn't know it, and interfered with history again. This time, the family trying to summon Lavos and harness his power succeeded. Their ocean palace didn't get destroyed. It rose from the ocean, and its queen attained immortality. Also, when Lavos was summoned, he killed Crono.

Oops!

So our heroes are left looking at all they've done throughout history and see that all they've really done is make things worse. Now, not only is Lavos still going to destroy everything in 1999 AD, there's an immortal queen living in a floating palace forever, and Crono, some random guy who had nothing to do with any of this, is fucking dead!

You know how I mentioned how Lavos is, like, really relevant in every other time period? You know the one time period you can visit where he isn't, at all? 1000 AD! Lavos doesn't do SHIT in the year 1000 AD! He arrives in 65,000,000 AD, he gets summoned by people who want to either leech off of his power or kill him in 12,000 BC and 600 AD, he destroys everything in 1999 AD, and then, in 2300 AD, he's just comfortably hanging around, I guess, him and his kids, preparing them to go off and destroy planets of their own.

Crono had no reason to get involved in any of this. Neither did Lucca, or Marle, for that matter. They weren’t relevant to Lavos or anything that Lavos does during his sixty-five million year sleep beneath the surface of the planet.

So why did they? Well, I said it already, right? Because they could, and that meant they felt that they had to. But that just opens up the next question. Why is is that they could?

And that’s the question being contemplated by the party themselves. Who is responsible for the Time Gates? Lucca didn’t create them. She just learned how to open them. And why do they specifically go to points in history where Lavos is relevant?

The most common theory, and one I subscribe to myself, is that the planet itself, in an attempt to save itself, creates its own Time Gates and nudges Crono, Marle, and Lucca into their first one. It helps them to learn the history of their world, specifically in the context of Lavos. They don’t learn, for example, the history of agriculture. Or architecture. Or war. Or language. They learn about Lavos. Because whoever this “entity” is, they want you to stop Lavos from wrecking shit.

And so, you, the player, are left at the point after Crono dies, realizing how badly you've fucked up, and you need to decide how you're going to fix it. The game opens up, and everything from here on out is optional. The game ends when you confront and kill Lavos, but what you do to prepare for that is up to you.

You can, for a start, find a way to save Crono. A lot of people talk about resurrecting Crono, but that's not what happens. Instead, you travel back to the moment immediately before Crono's death and swap him out with an identical doll given or sold to you by an unexplained wizard.

Seriously, that wizard is just… there. No background information is given about him. Even the Chrono Compendium doesn't have solid info on the guy. They just say he might be from the same kingdom as those other magic guys, but all we know from the game itself is that he can create perfect replicas of people as dolls and he can send them to any time period. It's bonkers. Just really shitty writing.

Anyway. This tactic means that, from Crono's perspective, he never died. He was ABOUT to be vaporized by Lavos, and then suddenly he's in a totally different time and place, totally fine. Time travel! You can use it to fix things! Things you fucked up!

So get fixing!

Destroy that floating palace!

Soothe the restless ghost of the knight Frog idolized!

Prevent Lucca's mother from having her legs mangled in a machine!

Mend things between Marle and her father, the king!

Stop the robots in the year 2300 AD from systemically committing genocide against what few humans remain!

Crush the remaining generals who worked for the guy who summoned Lavos in 600 AD!

Each of these sidequests, along with others, rewards you, the player, with powerful items and status boosts, not to mention experience points to level up. You use these to become strong enough to defeat Lavos.

Lavos isn't just the strongest thing in the world. He's stronger than the world. He's stronger than anything there is. He shows up in the year 1999 AD, bursting from the ground like lava from the world's most powerful volcano, and he fucks things up so bad that the fallout is still ruining things three centuries later. He isn't even doing anything by that point! The world was just that damaged by what he did in 1999!

And you have to stop him, and the only way to do that is to figure out how to use everything the planet has from every time period you can visit to put together a team of three people strong enough to physically confront and kill him.

Lavos has one thing in common with Crono, and it’s this: Lavos is also just some guy. He's not evil. He's not cruel. He is, as far as the game tells us, a mindless animal following his genetic programming. He arrives on the planet from someplace far, far away. It's possible that he was spawned by a creature just like him who destroyed a planet of his own, and that's the most likely explanation, but that's not confirmed. He could have been built by a crazy wizard for all we know. He could be unique. It could be that every other planet in the universe has already been destroyed by his species. Or it could be that most other planets evolve life that's capable of detecting one of those giant monsters deep underground and they kill it with a powerful drill and a bomb.

You can kill Lavos with a bomb, if you want to. Lucca can throw bombs. They damage Lavos.

But you do have to kill him, if you want to survive, and that's the most difficult thing there is to do in the world. Throughout history, many have tried. Lavos, mindless and ancient and powerful, rolled over them all.

Earthbound and Chrono Trigger both feature a team of unlikely heroes, the leader of whom is a literal child, fighting an extraterrestrial threat that is more powerful than anything in the world, and they fight him by traveling through time, and they have to win.

In Chrono Trigger, by traveling through time, you can gather all of the power of the world’s people throughout history, and accomplish things that couldn’t be accomplished through linear time. You fetch tools from the year 1000 AD to restore the grave of Cyrus, Frog’s best friend and the greatest knight of his generation, and allow Frog to bring peace to Cyrus and unlock Frog’s true power. You fetch a stone from the year 2300 AD and charge it with sunlight by placing it somewhere in the year 65,000,000 BC to charge until it’s 2300 AD again, and you use that to build Lucca’s most powerful gun. You find someone who looked for the legendary rainbow shell in the year 600 AD, travel forward in time to speak to his ghost to learn what he learned before dying, and then you go back to get it yourself, and you craft the strongest armor in the game and Crono’s strongest sword.

Without time travel, none of this would be possible. With time travel, you can scrape and claw your way to a higher level than anyone else ever has in all of history, in all of the world. You can become strong enough to take on Lavos. Because Lavos, just like you, has a level. And you can surpass that level.

Chrono Trigger tells you that if you work hard enough, you can overcome any obstacle, even if you have to bend time and space to your will to do it.

Earthbound tells you that sometimes, there's nothing at all you can do, and that some things truly are impossible.

Giygas can’t be beaten the same way that Lavos can. In the face of Giygas, Ness and his friends don’t have the option to flee through a Time Gate and power up again. You can't go back at all.

There's only one thing left to do. The only thing you can do. You pray.

Paula has the ability to call out for help to unseen forces. Her guardian angel, her mother calls it, in English. God, in Japanese. But no angel replies, no god answers. Instead, the real power is the friends you made along the way. People in the distant future you left behind, people affected by you, hear Paula's prayers, and they, too, begin to pray for your safety. They wish for you to win, even though they don't even know that you're struggling.

This is what hurts Giygas. This is how you can fight him. Not with force. With wishing really, really hard. Eventually, Paula runs out of people to pray to. Even this, it turns out, isn't enough. Even with all the wishes of everyone it's ever known, an ant on the surface of the sun is still going to die.

And that's when Earthbound does the ultimate rugpull. Paula keeps praying, if you tell her to, and one more person finally joins in. You, the player, known by the name you were asked to enter partway through the game by an NPC who broke the fourth wall to ask you to do so. You join in. You want them to win, too, right?

It's the game's director, Shigesato Itoi himself, looking you dead in the eye and saying, "You know this sucks, right?”

He sits down across from you, between you and the game, and he says, "You know that the game can't end this way, right? This would be a terrible ending. Why don't you do something about it? Oh, you can't? Because I wrote it so you couldn't? But you'd like to, wouldn't you? You'd really prefer it if the game ended in some way other than the only way that makes sense? With four children who never should have been asked to save the world dying, alone and afraid, as they face down the ultimate power?"

You are having a dialogue with the creator of the game in a way that you never can with the author of a book, or the director of a movie. He is asking you a real question, in this moment, and he looks back over his shoulder at the game you’re playing, and then he watches you, waiting, to see what you’ll do next.

And you look him back in the eye and you select the "Pray" command again and again, stubbornly, hammering on it, in pure desperation, knowing in your heart that you have sent Ness and Paula and Jeff and Poo to their deaths and that this is all you can do now, and in doing so you say, "Yes, please. I don't want it to end this way. I want these children to survive. I want a happy ending."

And he nods, and he says, "Alright."

And Giygas is destroyed. Not because of anything Ness and his friends did. Because of what you, the player, wished, and hoped for. Because of the power of that desire, and that desire alone, to rewrite the story, to make it into something different.

Chrono Trigger and Earthbound are both just stories. Neither of them is real. They offer you a way to see the story play out, and both end the same way: you do the impossible, and you win against a foe that's more powerful than anything the planet could muster on its own. You get your happy ending either way. So what's the difference? No matter what you do, you wind up seeing the same credits, the same final screen.

The difference is that you were there, the whole way, making choices, seeing the consequences, seeing where you could make a difference and where you couldn't. And, in the end, when you turn off the game, and you will, eventually, have to turn off the game, you'll know that it mattered. Maybe only to you, but isn't that enough?

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