Giygas

Giygas
Species	Alien
Debut	Mother

Giygas (alternately translated as Giegue or Gyiyg) is the alien conqueror who appears as the final boss and main antagonist of both Mother and its sequel, Earthbound.

Background

Mother

Giygas was born to an unspecified alien race and originally resembled a blue humanoid creature. His people abducted the humans George and Maria to raise him in the early 1900s. Maria came to love Giygas like a son, and he would often wag his tail out of happiness, except whenever Maria tried to sing him a lullaby. However, George betrayed Giygas's people by stealing valuable information from them (presumably related to PSI powers) and as punishment was sent back to Earth. Maria presumably cared for Giygas until her death. Many years later, Giygas was sent to lead an invasion of Earth around the 1980s, during the events of Mother. He began to corrupt various animals while sending robots and Starmen after the people of Earth, and he also captured various adults (all of whom seemed to be parents).

Many of his forces were defeated by Ninten, the great grandson of George and Maria, and his friends. Ninten finally found the captured humans on the peak of Mt. Itoi, where Giygas descended from his mother ship to face them. Giygas battled Ninten and his friends from within a pod while explaining his connection to George and Maria. However, Ninten and his friends began to sing the eight melodies which made up Maria's lullaby. Hearing these songs caused a severe mental strain on Giygas, likely as they reminded him of his repressed love for Maria, and he began begging them to stop. They did not, and Giygas eventually retreated into his spaceship and fled from Earth, but he left promising that he would meet Ninten again someday.

Earthbound

Giygas later resurfaced and mounted a second invasion of Earth in Earthbound, but he had changed. Apparently he had evolved from being an alien who wielded evil power into the embodiment of evil itself, with power he could not control, to the point where his mind and possibly his body were destroyed. He was incapable of rational thoughts and had to be contained within a device called the Devil's Machine that seemed to keep him under control. The Machine was pod-shaped, and nothing of Giygas could be seen from outside, except that during the final battle it sprouted a face mirroring Ness's.

Apparently he was able to take over the world in the future, but a prophecy from the Apple of Enlightenment (which in the Japanese version was eventually revealed to be a future-telling device used by Giygas) said that a group of four chosen ones led by a boy named Ness was capable of destroying Giygas. Giygas sent a Starman Jr. back in time to kill him before he could begin his quest, but a rebel named Buzz Buzz also traveled back in time to warn Ness and defended him from the assassination attempt. In the present, Giygas influenced the evil in the hearts of various men and creature, while his minions and aliens began terrorizing parts of the world. An illusion-creating device known as the Mani Mani Statue corrupted people such as Mr. Carpainter and Mr. Monotoli into becoming his servants, but they became normal after Ness defeated Carpainter and destroyed the Evil Mani Mani.

Despite the resistence that Ness put up, Giygas's most loyal servant turned out to be Ness's neighbor, Pokey. It is unknown exactly when Pokey reached Giygas, but he helped to interpret and coordinate Giygas's will, to the point where it was uncertain which of the two was the master and which was the servant. At the end of the game, Giygas and Pokey had taken refuge in a cave in the Lost Underworld in the distant past. Ness, Paula, Jeff and Poo traveled back in time in robotic bodies to face Giygas. As the ensuing battle went on, Pokey turned off the Devil's Machine so that they would be horrified by Giygas's true form, saying that his mind had been destroyed, making Giygas nothing more than an "all-mighty idiot".

After Giygas was released, he warped the area around him and bombarded them with incomprehensible attacks. At this point, everyone seemed to be located in some dimension created by Giygas, as Pokey laughed at the irony of Ness and his friends being the only beings in this dimension fighting for justice. However, Paula was able to pray, reaching out across time and space to the people they met during their adventure, who in turn prayed for their success. Their prayers actually reached through time to hurt Giygas and enraged him, causing him to take on increasingly abstract forms. This was the only time in the game that he spoke, but it was simple and child-like vocabulary. He talked about how the concept of friendship and feeling good hurt him. Eventually, he did nothing but repeat Ness's name over and over. They reached the point where the prayers seemed to be absorbed by the darkness, but then the player's prayers delivered the finishing blows that destroyed Giygas for good.

Trivia

• His name was originally given as Giegue in the unused English translation of Mother. The name Gyiyg was used in English letters in the opening for the Japanese version of Earthbound, but ultimately his name was changed to Giygas for the English release of Earthbound.
• His dialogue in Earthbound was inspired by a traumatic childhood experience Shigesato Itoi encountered, when he accidentally saw a sex scene in an adult movie (The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty) that he mistook for a rape scene.