This is your reward for having come this far: the faith of the people you have met along the way. The praying is not just a move conducted by Paula, the One Girl of this story - it is an action performed by the people who you, Ness, have met throughout your voyage through the game. I’m going to survive long enough in the crush against the final boss Gigyas that Paula begins to pray. I know how this story goes - we all do, surely, by now. Stored are my PencilEraser, my EraserEraser, all the now-arbitrary symbolic items that served only brief practical and slight narrative purpose - all I have left are healing items. When I get into this machine, I’m going to move into the final set piece of the game: the gothic, bodily corridor that brings you face to face with a pixelated eldritch hell. Surely, it can’t be that big a deal, right? I’m just going to give it the afternoon then it’ll be done, I tell myself, standing in the absurd landscape of Saturn Valley, having just travelled into my own psyche to confront my own nightmares in a land made of fragments of identity and memory. Paula Prayed From The Bottom of Her Heart Dragon Warrior Monsters Made Catching ’em All Horrifying.Eighteen Years In, Ace Attorney Is Stuck in Its Past.I have reached the final peak of the story twice before, but both times I’ve shut the game off, unable to face what happens after the prayers begin. I keep telling myself that I’m going to finish Earthbound. I’m here to make friends, or something I haven’t put my finger on just yet.

I’m not here to win, I’m here to wander through vast landscapes of pixels - I’m here to learn something, to be changed.

That way, the freshness of things never quite loses its edge. I can open up a game again from the beginning at any time, knowing that there are mysteries left untouched, that there is a crescendo left unheard. Leaving the world unsaved is something I am notorious for. The ones that have had the most powerful impact on me are also the ones I’ve never watched the ending sequences of. The games I’ve left unfinished aren’t the ones I didn’t care for, but those games I love most. I’m bad at endings, especially when it comes to video games. It’s the only videogame I’ve ever known to change people.” “Mother 2 ‘s voodoo curse is that it reflects something back at you if you put enough into it.

Earthbound coffee break text