If this week's duo of played games (that would be Asura's Wrath and Mass Effect 3) have a shared characteristic, it would be how poorly they treat the big blue marble we, and all other currently known lifeforms, call home: Earth. Yeah, that old thing. When you talk about an endangered Earth, those two take it a little beyond the usual messages of environmentalism that games are often fond of invoking, either figuratively or literally. When you've got colossal crayfish whoosits shooting lasers at it, or giant rock worm things bursting out of a (hopefully unpopulated) continent, turning the lights off when you leave a room no longer seems like a matter of import. Might be best to redirect that effort towards contacting loved ones for the last time or working out which part of the country has the least amount of apocalyptic monsters and then making a beeline for it.

So like I do with most of these blogs, I'll discuss what I played this week with a weak-ass framing device; in this case exploring some of the ways that we've seen the Earth gets its figurative butt kicked and how effectively those games evoke the affection we have for a giant wet rock that floats in the darkness around an immense sphere of superheated plasma that will one day destroy it regardless. Astronomy can be such a downer, you guys.

Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect has let you visit Earth before, though previously only from orbit with the customary planetary information blurb some tourist center satellite must be handing out. Of note, though, is that in each game the depiction of our homeworld varies quite significantly: In Mass Effect 1, we get the impression that humans are spreading themselves across the galaxy (hence why half the population of the Citadel seems to be of a race that had only discovered it relatively recently) because Earth has been turned into a giant ball of crap. As in, we'd let our love of SUVs and littering run wild like so much Hulkamania and deteriorated the environment to something barely survivable. People seemed keen to leave Earth and establish colonies all over the place, leading to much of the suspicion and anger that other races are purported to have towards us. That asshole Salarian Administrator on Noveria even explicitly rubs it in about how much we've been treating Earth like a toilet.

When Mass Effect 2 rolled around the Earth seemed like a much better place to live, if only because you were significantly less likely to get captured by bug aliens and turned into human slurry for the construction of a stupid looking robot. I don't seem to recall any talk from NPCs about spearheading efforts to fix the planet's pollution problems with advanced terraforming methods or what have you, but like before our home planet's role was so minimal that it would be easy for the player to simply pass it by as they focus on the vital mission of probing Uranus.

But then Mass Effect 3 happened and its time for a Reaper invasion to undo all that hard work cleaning up the planet that we never hear about, probably. Our first impression of Earth from the intro/demo is one of a pristine utopia in the mold of Star Trek, rather than the grimy hellhole the earlier games had previously alluded to. Clearly the goal was to make us think "Oh man, what are they doing to our beautiful planet Earth? I have to save it! All my stuff is there!" rather than "Oh man, that hot crustacean band is probably doing us a favor torching that dump. It'd certainly be cheaper than hiring a planetary hazmat team to do the same thing." I guess what I'm saying is that Mass Effect treats the Earth badly by retconning the awful shit we did to it to better provoke an emotional reaction from the audience when it becomes imperilled. Getting incinerated by space neon lobsters falls a distant second to that.

I suppose since I'm writing about Mass Effect 3, I should follow standard blogging protocol: the ending sucked, Tali's a stock photo, default Shepard let everyone die, rabble rabble rhubarb rhubarb and so on and so forth.

Asura's Wrath

Asura's Wrath is a little more trippy with its depiction of the Earth for the most part, given how much of its content is directly inspired by thousands of years of Buddhist mythology. Essentially, the Earth is possessed by an evil magma ghost thing named the Gohma and the various divinities of the planet are endlessly fighting to keep it at bay to protect the Bronze Age era mortals that are just trying to make their way in a world full of lava elephants and planet-sized fat guys. The game doesn't really explain the background of the Gohma all too well, even towards the end where we're told it's "the will of the planet" and could really use some further elaboration on why our own planet is trying to kill us, choosing instead to focus on protagonist Asura and his "The Bride" style rampage against his former peers and current betrayers. While they're fighting each other, lesser Gohma minions will occasionally appear to give Asura something to beat up between the QTE-driven showdowns.

Narratively, they're treated as some peripheral potential apocalypse that the other characters ought to be getting on with, sort of like the aforementioned Reapers (or the White Walkers from Game of Thrones, even). Similar to Mass Effect 3 too is how the villains' actions are depicted with a little more moral ambiguity, given how their ruthless "means to an end" methods to deal with the greater threat only come about because they believe a softer course of action will be insufficient to ensure survival.

When Gohma Vlitra (or "Vritra" according to this wiki article - that eternal l/r Japanese localization issue learing its ugry head again) shows up early on and then inevitably once again towards the end of the game, it bursts from the planet like a worm from an apple. The scope of what's happening is incredible, like so much of everything else in that game, but it sure doesn't look like it's doing the planet any favours. Neither are the many tectonic-shifting explosions and attacks that the demi-gods dole out to each other. You wonder how anyone without the benefit of immortality or spaceships is supposed to survive the events of that game.

So it seems that, inversely to Mass Effect 3's central "Save the Earth" theme, in Asura's Wrath the safety of the Earth and its inhabitants pales to irrelevancy in the minds of its ostensible saviors as they duke it out with their ludicrous powers, despite the fact that they probably cause enough collateral damage to wipe out mankind several times over. But then it looks cool, so I guess the planet's just going to have to bite the bullet on this one.

Also Some Others Too, I Guess

Here's a brief recap of other games that play fast and loose with Earth's well-being:

• Terranigma: Terranigma actually blows up the planet before the game starts, tasking the hero Ark with reforming the continents and bringing back all life, like some global scale equivalent of Verlin putting the Lego Death Star together. Then it gets even weirder.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Each of the core SMT games will at some point destroy the Earth and eliminate all mankind, with the protagonist procuring the enviable task of recreating the world based on some vaguely defined philosophies espoused by random nutcases you'll run into.
• Chrono Trigger: I think the last descriptor you would use to describe Lavos' treatment of the planet should it ever awaken is "kind". You see it happen more than once.
• Final Fantasy: Likewise, in the Final Fantasy games you're attempting to prevent the end of the world, which is probably the most common video game end goal there is. In FF6 (and FF9, sort of) it happens anyway. Sephiroth's "supernova" attack doesn't count, because it's stupid and he's stupid.
• Mortal Kombat 3: Cyber-Smoke goes a little overboard with the chest cavity bombs in one memorable fatality which seems more like a Pyrrhic victory.
• Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Dammit, Galactus. Hadokens apparently have nothing on the Power Cosmic. Who would have thought.

Feel free to talk about your own favorite video game examples of planeticide in the comments below. As much as I'd rather it stick around, thus allowing me to keep on existing, there is something undeniably awesome about watching the Earth explode. Talking of catastrophic, it's time for...

BONUS COMICS!

Mass Effect 3

Asura's Wrath