Nintendo's Earthbound is about a young boy named Ness, who discovers he can wield psychic powers, and use them to defend and protect those he cares about. He journeys through a modern-era world traveling to different towns and cities, learning new ways to control his abilities, making friends and, eventually, venturing into his own mind to unblock the potential of his gift.
This last part... I've been thinking on it for a while.
Ness' power comes from his mind. Sure, he can whack a guy over the head with a bat made of the world's strongest metal, and Paula can then move in to flatten his head with a golden frying pan (yeah, this game is weird.) but not before Jeff can ram a bottle rocket down their throats, but Ness doesn't truly kick major arse until he starts thinking you to death, what with PSI Rockin and all manner of whatnot he can do. But it's only when he keeps fighting, making himself stronger as he goes, that he begins to learn new things he can do. It's not like the game is just giving you new powers simply because you're advancing the story and that's what's supposed to happen, it's that Ness himself is literally expanding his mind in the process of doing all this.
Ness, a human boy. Human. Boy. Not alien, not monster, human. And he eventually gets to the point where he is able to go from throwing sparks from his hand to PULLING FREAKING STARS FROM OUTER FRICKIN SPACE DOWN ONTO THE HEADS OF PEOPLE TRYING TO KILL HIM. Now, not to say that *real life* PSI can do that (it would take you literally decades to get yourself to that point), it certainly CAN do some things provided you build it that far but i already touched upon that.
It doesn't stop there. When the player has a full party and reaches Fire Spring, Ness defeats the final "Your Sanctuary" Guardian.... And falls asleep?
Yes, for...one reason or another, defeating the Carbon Dog is indeed another victory, and the Sound Stone does record the final melody, but then Ness, whether from pure exhaustion or some other universal purpose the rest don't understand, falls into a coma, and finds himself in Magicant, a floating island in Ness' mind where dreams happen.
Being that the place is part of a dream, since it takes place in Ness' mind, one can gather that everything he's seeing in this dream world is coming from his own potential. Not only is it coming from there, but the items, objects and entities coming from the source of his potential, a golden statue standing in the deepest part of Ness' mind, are being SENT to visit Ness directly, subliminally and carefully, without making it too obvious, telling him that he is there, in Magicant, in his mind, to do just that, break the final major blockage of his mind and free his true potential.
There are a few hints of this happening during this segment of the game. One is that when you first spawn in Magicant, one thing you'll see is the game's antagonist, Pokey (a little chubby kid with blonde hair) sitting on a couch from Ness' house. If you talk to him, he asks Ness to be friends forever. Throughout the main game, Pokey is actively making efforts to make life a living Hell for Ness, directly getting in his way at every opportunity, even getting involved with the freakin' mafia in Fourside (and stealing a million dollar helicopter in the process?!) But in case you forgot, at the beginning of the game, you were helping Pokey find his little brother. The interactions between Ness and Pokey up to this point seem to suggest that they were friends but then Pokey revealed his true colors and suddenly they were rivals.
Ness being able to even see Pokey at all, let alone speak to a projection of him in his own mind, suggests that despite all he's put him through, Ness actually forgives Pokey and wants to tell him so. This should give you the first clue to my theory about Magicant: Ness is an empath, or at least, he is capable of empathy. If Ness can expand his mind to the point of controlling fire, ice, lightning and other people's energies, who's to say he can't also expand it further to learn empathy? There is literally nothing stopping him.
Now we can move on to our second clue about Magicant. We've already seen that Magicant is a place where dreams happen, and we have seen that Ness' ultimate potential is speaking directly to him through all the abstract things he is seeing. Some of these include other memories, but there's something most people don't pay attention to in this part. Good memories that Ness has, including childhood friends, only trigger a text window with some wholesome dialogue, and sometimes an inventory item. But, there are two more things to notice here. First, notice how there are still enemy encounters, battles to fight. Even in Ness' dreams, his own mind, he still fights evil, but not other people's evil.... His own.
Even as pure and good-natured as Ness is, there are still dark, evil thoughts in his mind, taking the form of freaky enemies to fight. The French Kiss of Death for example, could represent an encounter he had with a less-than-appealing girl who liked him as a kid but he didn't, and maybe he lost a bet to some of his friends at school one day; yep, nobody likes a kiss from fish-breath. Others, like Molecule Man, could suggest a time in school where a strict science teacher overseeing detention may have made doing homework quite a nightmare for poor Ness, and it may have brought him lots of anxiety; one of the Molecule Man's attack patterns is to use PSI Magnet, which is a PSI attack that drains a few points of PSI from Ness himself during battle. Here we see Ness recalling his inability to concentrate on said homework because there's a 35-year-old man smacking a ruler against his desk because the answer was C) not A) like he ALWAYS PICKS BECAUSE HE DOESN'T PAY ATTENTION IN CLASS, YOUNG MAN!
See where this is going? (i hope my sense of humor isn't making reading this difficult
)
Then, after all that, he reaches the deepest part of his mind, a cave-like structure, dripping with murky water filling up to his ankles, leading to a path to a golden statue.... The most evil part of Ness' mind. Ness' Nightmare. It speaks to him and tells him that it's not just his evil, but HIM.
And guess what you have to do? That's right. You must fight it.
And lo and behold, it knows everything Ness knows. Every PSI technique he's learned, every strategy, it's being used against him, but somehow he pulls through and manages to take it down. And when he does, he levels up not once, not twice, but EIGHT TIMES; one for each Melody he's collected over the course of his adventure.
When Buzz Buzz died at the beginning of the game, he told Ness that by doing this and collecting these melodies, and finally accessing his full potential, the Earth would "channel your power and multiply it".
Buzz Buzz wasn't joking, and he wasn't just talking about the game.
By Ness diving into his own mind, destroying the evil part of himself and gaining all this power, he didn't just open blockages; he communicated with the Earth and Universe itself to draw this power to him. When Ness finally wakes up again, and his friends are all clamoring around him asking what the hell happened, he has an entire list of new powers.
So where am I going with this? It's simple, and the full depth of it would take forty pages to explain, so I'll just sum it up for you.
TLDR
Magicant is a real place, and it adjusts itself in order for whoever goes there to comprehend it in a way that they understand. The frequency you possess as a base rate when you go to sleep or fall unconscious in any way is taken with you, fron your etheric body, upon reaching the wavelength that dreams operate on; in other words, whatever kind of person you are, and whatever kind of feelings you have that are strongest when you go there, subconscious or no, THAT is what Magicant will look like for you.
Just think long and hard about this one. I promise it will eventually make sense.
This last part... I've been thinking on it for a while.
Ness' power comes from his mind. Sure, he can whack a guy over the head with a bat made of the world's strongest metal, and Paula can then move in to flatten his head with a golden frying pan (yeah, this game is weird.) but not before Jeff can ram a bottle rocket down their throats, but Ness doesn't truly kick major arse until he starts thinking you to death, what with PSI Rockin and all manner of whatnot he can do. But it's only when he keeps fighting, making himself stronger as he goes, that he begins to learn new things he can do. It's not like the game is just giving you new powers simply because you're advancing the story and that's what's supposed to happen, it's that Ness himself is literally expanding his mind in the process of doing all this.
Ness, a human boy. Human. Boy. Not alien, not monster, human. And he eventually gets to the point where he is able to go from throwing sparks from his hand to PULLING FREAKING STARS FROM OUTER FRICKIN SPACE DOWN ONTO THE HEADS OF PEOPLE TRYING TO KILL HIM. Now, not to say that *real life* PSI can do that (it would take you literally decades to get yourself to that point), it certainly CAN do some things provided you build it that far but i already touched upon that.
It doesn't stop there. When the player has a full party and reaches Fire Spring, Ness defeats the final "Your Sanctuary" Guardian.... And falls asleep?
Yes, for...one reason or another, defeating the Carbon Dog is indeed another victory, and the Sound Stone does record the final melody, but then Ness, whether from pure exhaustion or some other universal purpose the rest don't understand, falls into a coma, and finds himself in Magicant, a floating island in Ness' mind where dreams happen.
Being that the place is part of a dream, since it takes place in Ness' mind, one can gather that everything he's seeing in this dream world is coming from his own potential. Not only is it coming from there, but the items, objects and entities coming from the source of his potential, a golden statue standing in the deepest part of Ness' mind, are being SENT to visit Ness directly, subliminally and carefully, without making it too obvious, telling him that he is there, in Magicant, in his mind, to do just that, break the final major blockage of his mind and free his true potential.
There are a few hints of this happening during this segment of the game. One is that when you first spawn in Magicant, one thing you'll see is the game's antagonist, Pokey (a little chubby kid with blonde hair) sitting on a couch from Ness' house. If you talk to him, he asks Ness to be friends forever. Throughout the main game, Pokey is actively making efforts to make life a living Hell for Ness, directly getting in his way at every opportunity, even getting involved with the freakin' mafia in Fourside (and stealing a million dollar helicopter in the process?!) But in case you forgot, at the beginning of the game, you were helping Pokey find his little brother. The interactions between Ness and Pokey up to this point seem to suggest that they were friends but then Pokey revealed his true colors and suddenly they were rivals.
Ness being able to even see Pokey at all, let alone speak to a projection of him in his own mind, suggests that despite all he's put him through, Ness actually forgives Pokey and wants to tell him so. This should give you the first clue to my theory about Magicant: Ness is an empath, or at least, he is capable of empathy. If Ness can expand his mind to the point of controlling fire, ice, lightning and other people's energies, who's to say he can't also expand it further to learn empathy? There is literally nothing stopping him.
Now we can move on to our second clue about Magicant. We've already seen that Magicant is a place where dreams happen, and we have seen that Ness' ultimate potential is speaking directly to him through all the abstract things he is seeing. Some of these include other memories, but there's something most people don't pay attention to in this part. Good memories that Ness has, including childhood friends, only trigger a text window with some wholesome dialogue, and sometimes an inventory item. But, there are two more things to notice here. First, notice how there are still enemy encounters, battles to fight. Even in Ness' dreams, his own mind, he still fights evil, but not other people's evil.... His own.
Even as pure and good-natured as Ness is, there are still dark, evil thoughts in his mind, taking the form of freaky enemies to fight. The French Kiss of Death for example, could represent an encounter he had with a less-than-appealing girl who liked him as a kid but he didn't, and maybe he lost a bet to some of his friends at school one day; yep, nobody likes a kiss from fish-breath. Others, like Molecule Man, could suggest a time in school where a strict science teacher overseeing detention may have made doing homework quite a nightmare for poor Ness, and it may have brought him lots of anxiety; one of the Molecule Man's attack patterns is to use PSI Magnet, which is a PSI attack that drains a few points of PSI from Ness himself during battle. Here we see Ness recalling his inability to concentrate on said homework because there's a 35-year-old man smacking a ruler against his desk because the answer was C) not A) like he ALWAYS PICKS BECAUSE HE DOESN'T PAY ATTENTION IN CLASS, YOUNG MAN!
See where this is going? (i hope my sense of humor isn't making reading this difficult
)Then, after all that, he reaches the deepest part of his mind, a cave-like structure, dripping with murky water filling up to his ankles, leading to a path to a golden statue.... The most evil part of Ness' mind. Ness' Nightmare. It speaks to him and tells him that it's not just his evil, but HIM.
And guess what you have to do? That's right. You must fight it.
And lo and behold, it knows everything Ness knows. Every PSI technique he's learned, every strategy, it's being used against him, but somehow he pulls through and manages to take it down. And when he does, he levels up not once, not twice, but EIGHT TIMES; one for each Melody he's collected over the course of his adventure.
When Buzz Buzz died at the beginning of the game, he told Ness that by doing this and collecting these melodies, and finally accessing his full potential, the Earth would "channel your power and multiply it".
Buzz Buzz wasn't joking, and he wasn't just talking about the game.
By Ness diving into his own mind, destroying the evil part of himself and gaining all this power, he didn't just open blockages; he communicated with the Earth and Universe itself to draw this power to him. When Ness finally wakes up again, and his friends are all clamoring around him asking what the hell happened, he has an entire list of new powers.
So where am I going with this? It's simple, and the full depth of it would take forty pages to explain, so I'll just sum it up for you.
TLDR
Magicant is a real place, and it adjusts itself in order for whoever goes there to comprehend it in a way that they understand. The frequency you possess as a base rate when you go to sleep or fall unconscious in any way is taken with you, fron your etheric body, upon reaching the wavelength that dreams operate on; in other words, whatever kind of person you are, and whatever kind of feelings you have that are strongest when you go there, subconscious or no, THAT is what Magicant will look like for you.
Just think long and hard about this one. I promise it will eventually make sense.
