It may look like another innocent series made by Nintendo...but it's far worse than the outside implies, which delving deep into its subconscious may end up driving you mad. Case in point and putting it short, it may as well be the darkest Nintendo series to date. And that's saying a lot.
Mother 2/Earthbound
The final battle against Giygas in EarthBound . You spend the entire game fighting cartoonish monsters with baseball bats and frying pans, and end up battling a Cosmic Horror with a terrifying, amorphous visage that looks like a screaming face, a demonic ghost, and a fetus. The creepy, atonal, jarring background music and the dialogue inspired by the creator's trauma of seeing a glimpse of a murder scene, which he thought was a rape scene, in a movie as a young child only adds to this. Then when you finally defeat Giygas, the visual and audio distortions get worse and louder until they peak, then instantly blip out like a TV set turned off. The fact that most of the rest of the game is so childlike and cartoonish only makes this more terrifying.
The music for that battle is not truly atonal. It's more like Prokofiev in style. There is a clear tonal center unlike in true atonality. However, it is still terrifying, especially since Earthbound is cartoonish normally.
It eats prayer. Also,
Giygas: It hurts. It feels... G O O D.
And just before Paula prays for the last time (which is when you come in), she gets no response from anybody.
Actually you DO fight the Giygas from the present, who fled into the past. Still this doesnt make him less terrifying.
Read the explanation Pokey gave as you fighting Giygas in the past, his future evil has become so powerful that it retroactively made his past self more powerful.
Poo's Mu Training in Earthbound. You're controlling an unfamiliar character who is told to go attend to a training session. The training initiates a battle, where an outline of a stylized Chinese-ancestor head appears. It then proceeds to (all in text, mind you) break your legs, tear off your arms, cut off your ears, poke out your eyes, and tear out your tongue. Worst of all, before each step, it asks for confirmation. After each step, your health drops. The final step reminds the player that all they have remaining to them is their mind—which they are then asked to give up as well.
The Japanese version is even scarier; where in English the spirit informs you that he will "take your sight," in Japanese he says he will "crush your eyeballs." See here for the comparison between the Japanese and English versions.
Wait through the logos for Nintendo, Ape (now Creatures), and Halken. Eerie red static flashes on the screen, with an quiet, high-pitched noise, and as the flashing slows down, we see a scene of UF Os shooting lightning at a city. Does This Remind You of Anything? Cue Scare Chord.
Mother 3/Earthbound 2
Mother 3 would have a terrifying (even for adults!) scene at the final boss fight, but it is cut off. You still can see the unused scenes by special code (or by this link) if you dare...
The Ultimate Chimera. After the duel with the Almost-Mecha Lion in the Chimera Laboratory, your fellow Pigmask co-worker alerts you to pretty much get the hell out of a room if you see it, and for good reason: RUNNING INTO IT KILLS YOU. INSTANTLY. NO IFS, ANDS, OR BATTLES. If that warning doesn't scare you, the next part will: the creepy music will cut out, replaced with background sounds of other Pigmasks fleeing for their lives only to get devoured by that thing. Can you confidently traverse from one room to another knowing that such a powerful creature is loose inside the lab?
In Bathroom Dungeon, get near one of the doors to the women's restroom and hear an all-too-familiar Ba-DEET! noise. Go inside the room and see THE CHIMERA, INCHES AWAY FROM YOU, ON A TOILET. \ IT'S A GIRL!
The horrible change that occurs to your hometown. In the beginning, no one locked their doors, there was no crime, and everyone helped one another if the need arose... there was no concept of 'money'.
By Chapter 7, everyone is gone. All the doors are locked, and the only people left behind are complaining about their lot. The town is still there, but its soul is sucked away bit... by bit... by bit until everyone's gone. Shudder.
Tanetane Island. Oh God. The trip went bad, the trip went bad, the trip went bad...
To clarify if you haven't played: You have to eat the funky-looking mushrooms, which send you into a trippy world of pink trees and creepy music, plus the occasional mailbox (see page quote). Oh yes, and all the enemies look like people you know, most notably your father and your dead brother. They spout insane dialogue ranging from funny, "I'm going to lick you all up, ice cream!" to threatening, "I'm gonna beat you, boy. Daddy's gonna beat you." to batshit insane. "Touch my heart. See how it beats in and out? Lucas! There's noooothing to worry about now."
"Everyone's waiting for you, Lucas. Waiting to throw rocks at you, and spit on you, and make your life Hell. Who's everyone? Everyone you love."
More specifically your father and your allegedly dead brother.
After waking up from the mushroom-induced trip, you can backtrack to an area where a healing hot spring is located. It's essentially a toxic waste dump.
The creator himself said that it was completely intentional and that one of his worst nightmares was having his family and friends being evil. He even said that he wanted to approach it from an adult's viewpoint, so many of the sequences that are under nightmare fuel right now could be placed here.
The People Jars in the Empire Porky Building. Made all the more disturbing by the fact that you can talk to them, and they're all quite 'happy' being there. There's even a cow, who will say he's going to become a wonderful steak.Yeesh.
If you've seen the unused sprites you can pretty much tell what happened between the prologue and chapter 1. As seen in this vid here To make matters worse this happens BEFORE the twins were found in the river WHILE they were still with Hinawa.
There is also Porky/Pokey Minch's original (or unused) death scene. While some people like to see what's coming to him for all he's done, others might find it disturbing when they see him in a sympathetic light. His machine crashes into the ground after his supposed defeat, breaking the glass on it. Pokey tries to reach out to get out of it, but he starts to go limp and he dies. What a way to go.
