Giygas

Giygas, also known as Giegue, and in Japan, is a character in the Mother video game series by Nintendo, created by Shigesato Itoi. The character serves as the main antagonist and final boss of Mother and its sequel, Mother 2/EarthBound. In the series, he invades Earth in an attempt to wipe out humanity in Mother, and returns in EarthBound where he conquers the world and sends his forces into the past to prevent protagonist Ness from defeating him. The battle against Giygas, which depicts him in turmoil, drew inspiration from a Japanese film which traumatized Itoi as a child. He has received positive reception with critics referring to his battle as one of the creepiest in video games, and considered one of the greatest and most iconic video game antagonists of all time. Concept and creation Giygas was designed and written by the creator of the EarthBound series, Shigesato Itoi, and debuted in the original Mother. He is known as Gyiyg in Japanese and Giegue in the canceled English localization. In an interview on his website, Itoi describes how his inspiration for the final battle with Giygas in EarthBound resulted from a traumatic childhood event where he accidentally viewed the wrong movie at a theater, a Shintoho film entitled Kenpei to Barabara Shibijin. The film featured a murder scene near a river that Itoi mistook for a rape scene which affected him so much that his parents began to worry about his well-being. Years later, Itoi integrated the experience into Giygas' dialogue for the final battle. Itoi described Giygas as something that people cannot make sense of, but also as a living being who deserves love. He described the film scene as a combination of atrocity and eroticism, and that is what his lines are in the end. While designing this battle, Itoi spoke all of the text out loud while another staff member, Matchan Miura, wrote it down. He spoke each hiragana character one-after-another because he found it scarier. There has been a misunderstanding regarding the influence of the film on Giygas, with some believing that imagery, dialogue, or audio from that film were used here, when the only thing Itoi took from it was the ability to "manipulate an audience's emotional state". Music composer Hirokazu Tanaka described Giygas as the "embodiment of evil". As a result, he composed the music in a certain way based on the player's proximity to him.