The Power of Prayer: 30 Years of Earthbound

I missed Earthbound as a kid, and for that I am quite grateful. I don’t know that I would have appreciated how bizarre and complicated it gets. It wasn’t until Super Smash Bros. came out for the N64 that I met my dear friend Ness. Even then, it would be years until I went back and played his game. I remember it distinctly. I was sitting in a recording studio while my friend/engineer—let’s call him Rankle the Prince of Pranks—mixed what would be my old band’s final record. Rankle turned to me to ask a question and saw that I was tearing up. I had just completed my first playthrough of Earthbound, and it made me cry. I knew to expect this from  Earthbound’s successor, Mother 3, the game that seems to be actively begging you to cry the entire time, but this took me by surprise. I wasn’t sad. I was moved and honestly impressed by how the game’s final moments evoked so many feelings while reminding me that I wasn’t just watching a story. I was participating in one.

The final battles of these games tend to change the way you interact with the battle system. In the original Mother our heroes get a new command “Sing” which they use to subdue Giygas. In Mother 3, we see our protagonist Lucas alone and unable to attack, only to heal himself while facing the final boss. They are less battles in the conventional sense, and more attempts at changing the heart of your enemy rather than defeating them. Earthbound follows this pattern, but deviates from it in ways that feel unique and exciting. In the final battle we see our heroes pitted against an evil so powerful and elemental that it can’t be understood by the human mind. They can’t comprehend its attacks, only that they are rapidly losing health. On top of that, their own counterattacks do just about nothing. Even their most powerful abilities barely put a scratch in this unknowable force. Ness and his friends are losing and alone. The game cultivates a feeling of desperation and isolation, of hopelessness in the face of insurmountable odds, until there is only one thing left that our heroes can do. They can pray.

“Pray” in Earthbound is a special skill used by Paula, a young psychic in your party. It is one of the earliest ways to group heal your party, but much like the prayers in our world, it can go unanswered and be ineffective. Before long you’ll get more reliable and stronger healing abilities, and Paula will become one of your most powerful offensive team members, causing “Pray” to be forgotten. By the time you reach the final boss it’s likely been hours and hours since the player has even considered it as an option given that it’s never been that useful and most of the time it doesn’t work. But there, alone in the dark at the end of the world, with nothing else working and half your party likely already incapacitated, Paula can try it one last time. 

“Pray” is the only way to beat the game, which would make me quite annoyed if the prayer was to some deific benevolence that could be implored to swoop down and banish evil. Instead, prayer in Earthbound is the conduit that connects Paula and her friends to the world outside of the despair of their final battle. Paula’s prayers aren’t to a god, but to her family, to the friends of loved ones of the entire party. As she reaches them one by one, a connection is established allowing them to reach back, to offer support and strength and courage. Suddenly our party isn’t so alone. What’s more is that the command has been there the entire time, you just haven’t been desperate enough to use it. As the game crescendos, prayer is asking for help when you’re at your lowest, and having that call answered by the people who love you, even when they’re far away. In the world of Earthbound, that connection is what is sacred and holy. The earthly connections that bind us together.

Each of these games, from Mother to Earthbound to Mother 3, finds a way to acknowledge the player as an active participant in it, someone who has a role in the story outside of just operating the main party. Once Paula has exhausted just about everyone the party knows, she offers one final prayer, to someone, anyone, who might be there and willing to help. She ends up finding the one person who actually knows where her and her friends are and what they’re up against. She finds you, the player. Addressing you by the name you entered at that game’s beginning, she asks you to please believe in her and her friends. To pray for them even though you’ve never met. They need you. Yours is the final prayer that defeats the evil and saves Paula and her friends from the void. 

This wrecked me. I entered this thinking I was playing a game about a psychic little boy hitting aliens with a baseball bat and exited it crying and laughing on my friend Rankle’s couch. Earthbound is remarkable because of the subtlety with which it becomes emotional. There are all these moments tinged with sadness and joy woven into its story that climax in the prayers of its final battle, but they’re quiet and mundane until that moment. Its successor, Mother 3, is actively coming for your heart the entire time, but Earthbound’s approach is gentler, sillier. It takes you on a flippant and surreal journey through a parody of America until suddenly you’re confronted with the idea that connection is the most sacred thing we have in this world. It’s the only thing that can stand against desolation and despair.

Dave Tomaine is a comic writer and musician from Philadelphia. You can find him at @cavedomain and @FFBedtime on Twitter.