EarthBound is over, and there's nothing left to talk about, except the postgame, the credits, the other credits, and maybe a couple other things we forgot. And then it's time for Final Thoughts. Thank you for listening to the Third Strongest Podcast.

In a 153-minute audio tour de force, the Third Strongest Podcast hurtles toward its thrilling climax as we trudge through the Cave of the Past, up the pulsating hallway of doom, and come face to face with Giygas and his little friend.

It falls to us to scour the Shire in search of a shiny stone lodged in the crevices of a still-burning meteorite. It also falls to us to get really deep into time travel talk and run a serious risk of reading a bunch of Chrono Compendium articles. What is time travel, anyway? Is it, as some contend, a form of travel?

Ryan lives in Australia and the time delay on Discord calls makes it sound like he's talking over people more than he thinks he is. He does talk over people, but, you gotta understand, part of that is the latency of transmitting the conversation back and forth across the entire planet. Jason McIntosh joins us in this episode about Magicant.

Live from Central Park! Jason McIntosh finishes what he was talking about when he was talking about the psychosexual implications of Magicant.

Having concluded our business among the Surface Tenda, we descend into the Lumine Hole, so that we may descend into the Lost Underworld, so that we may descend into the Fire Spring, where hopefully we won't deal too much damage to Carbon Dog at the wrong moment. And then, hopefully, we can be done descending for a little while.

Zach serves as Dungeon Master as Ryan and Sarah attempt to navigate Nyaasu Nekoban's translation of Akio Higuchi's gamebook adaptation of EarthBound 0, titled MOTHER: Invasion of the Unknown. Wherein Ninten's name is "Douglas."

Having concluded a bit of backtracking, EarthBound demands that we take a step back and recall our journey so far. So we drink some tea, and we reflect on details that slipped our mind, such as fate and time travel and David Lynch's version of Dune. To learn more about how battle backgrounds are generated, go find that YouTube video from Retro Game Mechanics Explained. To learn more about the Brain Stone, just try googling slightly harder than Ryan did during the recording session.

We must now venture into the catacombs beneath Stonehenge, where a new contender for Favorite EarthBound Character emerges in the form of Sebastian. If you're playing along with us, we urge you to Make, Don't Grind in this playthrough and in every playthrough. And in all other aspects of your life. Thank you.

The Deep Darkness is home to a dizzying array of wildlife (mostly meaner versions of other wildlife), and also to some monkeys, and also to a human businessman who could have leapt straight from the pages of The Kids in the Hall. And a bat!