So, What’s The Theme Here?

 

This one should be pretty obvious. The best-known video game exorcist vs the demon from Exorcist.

 

You know, we don’t get a lot of “natural enemies” fights in Death Battle. Most fights end up being “competing niche” themed, like the combatants both showed up for the same job interview. We get lots of superhero vs superhero fights, for instance, but rarely superhero vs supervillain fights. Fights are typically like “werewolf vs werewolf,” “Shonen protag vs Shonen protag,” and “hot chick vs hot chick.”

 

You know what’s shocking rare in the who-would-win sphere? Fights between guys that would actually fight if they met each other.

 

Doesn’t that seem weird?

 

Well, hopefully this fight marks a step in the right direction. You can’t find two characters more likely to fight on sight than a exorcist and a demon.

 

Father John Ward

 

 

“I will say of the Lord: He is my refuge and my fortress. My God, in Him I will trust. I shall not be afraid of the terror in the night, nor the evil that walketh in darkness, because I have made the Lord my refuge. Because I have set my love upon Him, therefore will He deliver me. I shall call upon Him, and He will answer me. He will be with min trouble. He will deliver me and honor me…I can’t explain what happened in that house. I can only have FAITH that I did the right thing.”

 

“Let’s go fight some demons.”

 

Okay. Stop reading right here.

 

Go out and get FAITH: The Unholy Trinity.

 

Go play it. Go on. It’s cheap, it’s short, its a fun experience.

 

Okay, you done?

 

Oh, you didn’t play it? Well damn. Okay, I see we got some readers who just don’t like good video games. I bet you play, I don’t know, what do the kids play these days? Fortnite? Yeah, I bet you play Fortnite.

 

Okay, here’s a complete play through, you can watch that, it’s only an hour and a half long (told you the game was short).

 

To make it even shorter, let me recap FAITH for you. FAITH is an indie horror game, and the best praise I can probably give it is me simply saying that I like it, because I despise virtually all indie horror games. And I’ll be real, if FAITH was just part I and II, I don’t think I would have liked the series as much as I do. But part III, specifically as the compilation FAITH: The Unholy Trinity, really tied the series together into something special. I haven’t had so much fun with a game series in a long time. I highly recommend FAITH, if you couldn’t tell that already.

 

There’s a sense of progression between the parts. Each not only tops the last but builds on the last. The first part is very derivative. Someone wanted to do Exorcist but as a quasi Atari 2600 game. Yeah, it’s another “retro clone” game. You walk through the woods at night collecting notes and dodging a wiry white monster guy, just like in the megahit Slender. Then you find a house and fight a fusion of Reagan McNeil and Sadako. There’s some OH MAYBE ALL IN JOHN’S HEAD AND HE’S JUST CRAZY stuff at the end, because damn near every indie horror has to imply that the whole experience is psychosis, because its the easiest and cheapest way to add a layer of quasi-depth to the story.

 

But even with part I, as derivative as it is, you can see a unique personality for the series emerging. The monochrome, high contrast graphics, the rotoscope cutscenes, the Microsoft SAM voices, they give the player the impression they aren’t looking directly at reality but reality as through John’s increasingly frayed psyche. The gameplay is just like something found in an Atari game. You move, and you press the button to do a special action, in this case, it’s to hold up a crucifix that harms bad supernatural stuff in front of you Dracula style. You move slow for a video game character which can make dodging even the most telegraphed attack a bit of a challenge. These elements come together to create gameplay that’s really easy, I can see the Atari instruction manual in my mind with a HOW TO PLAY page that’s just USE ARROW KEYS TO MOVE and PRESS FIRE BUTTON TO PRAY, but difficult to master.

 

Part II is a nightmare, and I don’t mean that like the game is bad, or hard to play, or that it’s scary, though it does have some really good moments, I mean that story wise it’s all John Ward having a nightmare. And you know, if I and II was all that FAITH was, I’d probably say that they exhausted their story telling abilities copying Exorcist with I and just threw their hands up with II and went “Eh, it’s all a dream.” But like I said, part III really works to lift the other parts up as parts of a greater story.

 

Because part II is a dream, the devs were able to string together various set pieces together with the flimsiest of justifications, and I have a strong suspicion that II came about through the devs brainstorming stuff they thought would be cool and then putting it all together. Here’s tunnel full of drug addicts and a reference to Puppet Combo. Here’s a creepy graveyard three demons you have to hunt down to open a gate. Here’s a little country church in the middle of a cornfield with a spooky scarecrow (they get points for that, I love spooky scarecrows) and its got the confessional from Exorcist Legion. II is fun, in the same way a bunch of spooky set pieces in a haunted house is fun, but the narrative is barely coherent.

 

But then comes part III, and while part II is revealed to literally be all a dream, the things John dreams about are either prescient to real events in III or serve as dream metaphors for the trauma he experienced in I. III was the rising tide that lifted all boats. It topped I and II but didn’t just leave them behind, it provided context for I and II that makes them fun to play in marathon mode, the most important bit of context being that John isn’t actually insane. All the insanity teases are gaslighting by the forces of evil to break John’s FAITH.

 

I can’t think of another indie horror game where the guy implied to be insane actually isn’t and has to reject the world telling him that he’s insane in order to save it. I love that twist.

 

That John actually isn’t a crazy man, that the demons are real and they’re trying to gaslight him into thinking he is so he will question his FAITH, was the best possible way of resolving the insanity implications from the previous games. It reframes what would otherwise be a lazy excuse for depth in parts I and II as elements of a greater theme. As cliché as it may sound, FAITH really is about faith. In part I, Father John Ward encounters a traumatic event that tests his FAITH, then encounters it again, but is frustrated because he can’t find a satisfying resolution. In part II, John is tormented by dreams that both presage the burden he has to take up and prey upon the burden he failed to alleviate. In part III, John gets to make peace with his past and his future and fully restore his FAITH.

 

Faith doesn’t have a particularly deep narrative, but in the world of indie horror it’s got one of the best, if not the best, story. The sense of progression is well developed. You go from fighting two demon kids out in the sticks, to fighting a small army of demons through nightmarish dream environments in II, to defeating a cult attempting to birth the Anti-Christ and end the world in III. The gonzo heights reached by III are cool on their own, but in light of I and II they’re rewarding. It’s great to watch Father Ward, this rookie priest, who failed his first exorcism, and then failed to correct his mistake, who is then put into an insane asylum for doing nothing wrong and tormented night after night by nightmares send to break his spirit, rise up and save the world.

 

They say that saving one man’s soul is the same as saving the entire world. And in Father Ward’s case, the saying is true.

 

Father John Ward’s Powers And Abilities

 

 

John Ward is, on the whole, a pretty regular guy. Guns kill him easily, as demonstrated when you try and go out the front door of the preschool. By Death Battle standards, he’s kind of shrimpy, but if you think he’s just a normal preacher, you need to put a little more FAITH in Father Ward.

 

Crucifix

 

 

Father Ward’s trusty weapon of choice is a crucifix which focuses and channels his FAITH into a form that can harm, drive out, repel, and destroy demons. When John wants to castigate some evil, he holds his crucifix before him and lets FAITH do the rest. Objects possessed by unclean spirits flash briefly before the spirits are driven out (often leaving behind collectible lore notes, because its a video game). Demons are driven out of hosts, and then destroyed, though depending on the strength of the demon this can take some time. The strongest feat the crucifix has is forcibly defusing the combined form of Gary (Astaroth), Malphas, and Miriam (who, while a “normal” human, has been corrupted by demonic forces to the point of having power on par with the demons, if not more) after a long boss fight. This fusion was intended to give birth to the Anti-Christ and end the world, so it’s wayyyyy above a standard demon. But do note that they re-fuse if not finished off by John setting himself on fire and throwing himself at Miriam.

 

There are limits to the crucifix’s power. In the default ending of III, Father Garcia, a shotgun wielding priest, teams up with John to seal the Unholy Trinity, and demons that take a few seconds for John to kill with his crucifix die instantly to Garcia’s shotgun. That being said, the crucifix works on things a shotgun can’t. In the same battle, John was the one that had to break a magical seal, because you can’t shoot a magic ward. The crucifix also works on ghosts and intangible spirits, and you can’t exactly shoot those to death. It also works on particularly evil humans, as seen in the Candy Tunnel section of II and the various cultists in III.

 

Another key limitation to the crucifix is that it only works on objects in front of Father Ward. It doesn’t work on objects to the side or John, or to his side. If the albino chupacabra freak is coming at you from the back, and you don’t turn around before you press the “raise cross” button, it’s MORTIS.

 

The crucifix is also necessary for projecting FAITH at enemies. No crucifix, no FAITH projection. John can’t radiate it from his bare hands. In III, there’s a section where John gets separated from his crucifix, and all he can do is run from the demons until he gets it back.

 

If John is separated from his crucifix, as can happen in the Gary boss fight, he can pick it back up, and when he does, he emits a 360% pulse wave of FAITH that stuns demonic forces around John. This pulse wave likely results from Johns elation at narrowing avoiding a MORTIS, a temporary power that results from his FAITH briefly reaching an emotional high. This is the only time the crucifix doesn’t work off “flashlight” rules.

 

Something cool to note about the crucifix–it changes throughout the series. In part I, it’s a gold, in II, it’s silver, and in III, it’s either bronze or wood. This represents how John’s FAITH gradually erodes through his trauma, nightmares, and mental assaults. In the true ending of III, when the demons are shut down and John makes his peace with Amy, the cross turns back to gold to symbolize his restored FAITH.

 

Keep this in mind. Post-game John is likely much more powerful than his game feats imply, as he’s operating off eroded FAITH until the very last cutscene.

 

Physical Abilities

 

Though his medical file describes John as suffering from dormant asthma and decreased mobility due to a childhood injury to his right knee, he’s pretty spry for a guy without an athletic background. Yes, by video game standards he’s kind of slow, and his sluggishness was likely what the medical file was referencing, but by real life standards I wouldn’t say John is slow. You try walking around for hours on end, see how fast you go.

 

His many, many boss fights show that John is capable of keeping ahead of pursuing enemies, dodging projectiles, and turning on a dime to shine his crucifix on demons sneaking up behind him. He’s no action hero, but he’s got pretty good reflexes.

 

Want to hear something silly? I bet someone could successfully argue for a supersonic John Ward on like, VSBW or some other place whose debaters have brain worms. The argument goes that because John can move while bullets from Father Garcia’s shotgun fly, he can move almost as fast as bullets.

 

Yeah, it’s a stupid, stupid argument, but you can’t say VSBW hasn’t accepted dumber.

 

John isn’t physically strong. He needed to find a crowbar to open up a door in the clinic level. But he’s got a little durability on his side, more than you would think from a guy that dies to one hit. He was able to survive briefly setting himself on fire in the final boss battle and whenever he’s possessed by Malphas in the apartment level, his insides become so twisted that he projectile vomits blood. Don’t get me wrong though, John is still physically very much a man. A cultist gets close enough to stab him, he MORTIS. He accidentally walks in front of some cops, they gun him down like he just announced he has dirt on Hillary Clinton.

 

That being said, there’s one moment in part III that shows that John Ward has quite a surprisingly high level of suppressed power.

 

While trying to solve an unsolvable puzzle, John is ambushed by Gary in a reference to the famous jumpscare from Exorcist Legion, known for being one of, if not the best, jumpscares of all time. Gary shoots him up with a super drug that makes John hallucinate the lyrics from The Police’s King of Pain (good choice, devs) and when he comes to, he finds himself at the end of a hallway covered in gore and dying cultists. Now, when I played through this part, I thought Gary tossed him down the discarded cultist chute. That’s not actually what happened. It turns out that John Ward went through a Doomslayer moment and killed all those cultists with his bare hands.

 

Pretty good for a dude with asthma and a bum leg!

 

Dude wrote REPENT in blood over their broken bodies! He went biblical on them! Man, I hope FAITH IV has a flashback where we can see him going  Father McGruder on the cultists while King of Pain plays in his mind.

 

I’VE STOOD HERE BEFORE INSIDE THE POURING RAIN

WITH THE WORLD TURNING CIRCLES  RUNNING AROUND MY BRAIN

I GUESS I’M ALWAYS HOPING THAT YOU’LL END THIS REIGN

BUT IT’S MY DESTINY TO BE THE KING OF PAIN

 

You know, the devs did a good job picking King of Pain. It really works as a Father Ward theme song.

 

Divine Conduit

 

During the true final boss fight, John actually gets something like a health bar.

 

Through most of the game, one hit kills John. It can be a demon munching your head, or body checking you, or what have you, but one touch equals one MORTIS. There are only three exceptions. In the creepy mother of demons fight in the clinic, she summons a mob of crying baby demons to attack you. These don’t kill you if they touch you, but they slow you down and leave you vulnerable to the attacks that do. In the Gary boss battle, if you take a hit, John doesn’t die, but instead drops his crucifix, and you have to reach it before Gary finishes you off. And in the final battle with the fusion of Miriam, Astaroth, and  Malphas, which is officially known as “Super Miriam,” John channels the power of God to withstand Super Miriam’s attacks.

 

It’s really, really cool. John prays, and his eyes glow, and he withstands the attacks of a demon meant to end the world…but only for a time, and props to the devs. A lesser, lamer game like Undertale would have made John straight-on invincible for the final boss fight, because Undertale is maudlin trash. No no no, FAITH is a game of a much higher caliber. As John himself says, “How often we forget, FAITH without works is…MORTIS.”

 

What makes the 10 hit health bar so cool is that John gets his FAITH rewarded with a little taste of divine power, but it’s still a fight that can be lost. God gives aid, but he does not act in place of his followers. You can’t just coast off God’s power. FAITH without works is truly dead. And let me tell you, nothing is better than watching soy boys go into the fight thinking it’s going to be like Undertale and taking their MORTIS.

 

And it’s a painful MORTIS as it kicks you back to the Astaroth + Malphas boss fight.

 

Theoretically, John can take more than 10 hits with divine powers, as his FAITH was only fully restored after talking to Amy in the final cutscene, but I wouldn’t say he was completely invincible.

 

Miscellaneous Tools

 

You know how when people do write-ups for characters they always like, make a section of the random crap they used circumstantially? Like if some guy picked up and hit someone with a rake in episode 12, it’s going to be recorded and remarked upon as if the character always has a rake in their back pocket.

 

…Usefulness in vs battle debates aside, I can’t deny it’s fun…

 

At the end of I, John came across a GUN WITH ONE BULLET, and how he used that one bullet determined what sort of ending you would get.

 

The best and canonical ending is to ignore the blood writing that says for you to take the gun and finish off Amy, because shooting Amy is an admission that your FAITH can’t rescue her, and really, following blood writing that wasn’t there a minute ago is always a bad idea. Instead, you want to go to your car, get ambushed by Michael, and put him out of his misery. But I think the ending you get for wasting the bullet on an innocent deer in the woods is the best. Shout out to Danny from Martin’s School RPG, and if you don’t know what that is, you check out some of that Capeworld Worldbuilding stuff on the site.

 

It’s a gun with one bullet. Father Garcia’s gun is much better because it’s a gun with many, many bullets, and a shotgun to boot. It was likely left by demonic forces in an attempt to  get John to finish off Amy, or perhaps even himself.

 

In III, John was fortunate to find a camera with a bright flash left behind by a dead cultist. This camera came in use during a section of the game in which, left without his crucifix, John has to navigate through an apartment complex with the power out. John uses the flash of the camera to give him brief moments of sight. The things he sees in brief moments are, of course, nightmarish and surreal. It’s one of the best parts of the game.

 

Oh, fun Easter Egg–let the game go while its dark after picking up the camera and eventually John will start hearing whispering. Turn up the volume and you’ll be able to hear that the whispering is about the real-life Finders and McMartin Preschool case. TLDR, the CIA created a fake Satanic sex abuse cult, likely with the intention of using it to catfish, it became real, and they’ve been covering it up ever since, and people that pretend that the CIA is anything other than pure evil like to lie to themselves and call it a conspiracy theory.

 

Anyway, back to the videogame, John has…a gun with one bullet and a camera.

 

I suppose that’s better than not having a gun without one bullet and a camera.

 

What, should I also include the lantern and flashlight from part I? You only get those as optional add-ons after you beat the game to make it harder and more Slender like. I wouldn’t include them. Should I include the key from II? It’s a key. and its from a dream.

 

Maybe I should include John’s car? Yeah, he has a car. That’s kind of impressive if you’re like, 16 years old.

Pazuzu 

 

 

 

“Why her? Why this girl?”

 

“I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as…animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.”

 

–Father Karras to Father Merrin, Exorcist

 

 

“You again. You’ve interrupted me. Have you come to save God’s servant? Well, I must save mine, my son, the Gemini. He has work to do, much more. But come in, Father Morning. Enter, night. This time you’re going to lose.”

 

–Pazuzu to Father Morning, Legion

 

Father Karras knew him as the Devil. The Gemini Killer knew him as the Master. Innocent Reagan McNeil knew him as Captain Howdy. And the ancient Mesopotamians knew him as Pazuzu, god of wind and plague, prayed to not because of his virtue but because of his power. He was an evil spirit who, when placated, would protect against other evil spirits. At the cost of human dignity, he would offer his protection.

 

Human dignity is what he’s after. He wishes to drive mankind to despair by attacking what mankind values–youth, innocence, science, and religion. He preys on anything mankind uses to orient himself through life, anything mankind uses to make life worth living. He is evil in its purest form. He is, to paraphrase detective Kinderman, death, and disease, and injustice, and inhumanity, and torture, and anger, and hate. He is murder. He is pain. He is cruelty and infidelity. He is slime, and stink, and every crawling, putrid thing, every possible ugliness and corruption.

 

As the antagonist of one of the most critically acclaimed, well-known, and referenced films of all-time, most people know about Pazuzu, but most don’t know much about Pazuzu. To most people, he’s the guy that possessed the girl in that exorcist film. Whether Pazuzu is meant to be just a demon, or the Devil himself, is left intentionally vague throughout the Exorcist series. It’s certainly possible he’s the Devil, he even calls himself the Devil in Exorcist. It is also implied in Legion that he’s the Legion demon from the Bible. Satan, Pazuzu, Legion, the Devil, these could all be names for the same entity.

 

Pazuzu can best be thought of as a living spiritual spider web. He can not only trap bodies under his thrall, but souls. In Exorcist, he only ensnared Reagan McNeil, and then when Father Karras attacked him, he jumped into his body. In Legion, things got a lot more complicated.  He controlled Father Karras’s soul, as well as the soul of a serial killer known as the Gemini, the Exorcistverse’s version of the Zodiac killer. You had at lot of those in stories written in the 70’s and 80’s (The Legion film was filmed in the 90’s, but it was based on an earlier book), like Scorpio from Dirty Harry. He also may have other souls. He showed Detectiver Kinderman the souls of several of the Gemini’s victims, but this very well might have been an illusion cast to break Kinderman’s spirit. Pazuzu lies. The Devil, after all, is the prince of lies. Recall in the first film how he tried to claim that Karras’ mother was inside him, only for Karras to disprove the claim by asking Pazuzu to tell him his mother’s maiden name.

 

If you want to get really into the deep lore, the Legion book end with Detective Kinderman in a burger bar musing with his partner Atkins over the very weird supernatural stuff he recently had to deal with. Kindermann muses that perhaps Lucifer was the big bang. Back when the cosmos began, Lucifer got his ass evicted from Heaven, and the fall shattered him. That was the big bang, Lucifer dividing into the physical universe, including mankind, and evolution is the gradual process of Lucifer reassembling himself back into an angel. The journey of mankind is thus the Christian journey, the journey of fallen man back to a state of grace.

 

How very William Blake! I wonder if Blatty knew about Blake’s Albion? I bet he did!

 

Beings like Pazuzu would thus be pieces of Lucifer stuck together through force, not redemptive grace, atavistic clusters within the growing noosphere (which was mentioned in Exorcist II of all things) that must be exorcised from their pirated souls for true growth to occur. If the human noosphere can be thought of as the growing body of the redeemed Lucifer, then Pazuzu is a cancerous infection within the body trying to drag the rest of mankind into the condemnation reserved for himself.

 

…Man, the deepest lore is always in the written material, isn’t it?

 

I wonder if VSBW would make Pazuzu universe level off Kinderman’s theory? I bet they would. They seem to really like giving Swank jobs to horror characters off tenuous bullshit.

 

Pazuzu’s Powers And Abilities

 

 

Pazuzu prefers to be as hands-off as possible when it comes to corrupting mankind. While he’s certainly able to do more than make heads turn around and vomit up pea soup, he wants to nudge humanity to ruin, not push them. It hurts his ego to use more power than necessary in his schemes. He won’t even kill if he can avoid it. He prefers to make others, like the Gemini killer, do his dirty business. When Father Karras asked him why didn’t use his devil powers to break the straps holding down Reagan McNeil, Pazuzu memorably replied that it would be much too vulgar a display of power. To “go loud” with all his power on display would be an admission that Pazuzu cannot corrupt through more subtle means. Satan’s big sin was pride, after all.

 

But when backed into a corner, such as when faced with Father Morning, Pazuzu will crank up the dials. Satan has been called the god of the Earth (John 12:31, 2nd Corinthians 4:4) as opposed to Christ, the prince of heaven, and that’s not a title you earn by being a weenie.

 

Possession

 

 

Pazuzu’s bread and butter. He can jump into the bodies of victims, twisting their bodies as he assaults their souls. Catatonics and the mentally compromised are particularly vulnerable to his possession. Victims have their bodies twisted. Their faces become pallid and their eyes become yellow, but their faces don’t have to change. When Pazuzu possessed the catatonic in Legion, she didn’t exhibit any overt signs of possession like Reagan.

 

More radical physical alterations include a low degree of superhuman strength, enough to allow a small girl or an elderly woman to backhand grown men across rooms. Heads can spin around. Victims contort and twist and can crawl like spiders down stairs. Powerful, foul odors can emit from the body. Victims can vomit up pea soup. Pazuzu can either speak with the voice of the victim, or copy the voices of others. While in Father Karras’ body, he was able to project the voice of a choir boy. While in Reagan’s body, he was able to project the voice of a panhandler. Victims also have a low-grade healing factor, very low grade. After Father Karras broke his neck, Pazuzu was still inside his dead body, and gradually repaired that body until Karras came back to life. Pazuzu’s bodies aren’t Wolverine, but Father Karras wasn’t wrong in asking Detective Kinderman to finish him off with a headshot during the end of Legion.

 

When driven out of a host, the host instantly returns to normal. Reagan’s body should have had several broken bones, but she was fine after Pazuzu left. She didn’t even keep the yellow eyes.

 

Pazuzu is able to shift between several bodies, but has to maintain one “main” host body. For instance, in Legion, Pazuzu had Father Karras, Patient X, as his main body, but could project himself and the soul of the Gemini killer out into the environment to possess various catatonics in the clinic and use them to commit more Gemini killings, all while the “Gemini killer” remained in his cell. Though Pazuzu is able to tether several souls at a time to himself, he is not able to do the same for bodies. Patient X had to fall asleep before Pazuzu could put himself and the Gemini killer in another body. And when Pazuzu sensed Father Morning’s presence back at the clinic, he had to jump back to Father Karras body and leave his catatonic host behind in the middle of a hit on Detective Kinderman’s family.

 

WHAT’S THIS?
MORRRRRRRNNNIIIIINNNNGGGGGGG!!!!

 

In other words, Pazuzu can dominate several bodies and mind at once, but he can only control one at a time. He can’t like, put himself in one body, Gemini in another, and tag team an opponent.

 

If the main body is destroyed, Pazuzu isn’t destroyed, but he’s incapacitated. After Father Karras jumped and broke his own neck, Pazuzu was out for some time, and Reagan was beyond his power to effect. After Father Karras was shot in the head by his friend Detective Kinderman (poor Father Karras, he had such a hard life…), Pazuzu lost the Gemini killer, and the city was safe from his slayings. Pazuzu can always come back, but it’ll take some time and work.

 

Telekinesis

 

This is the big one. In Exorcist, Pazuzu only used a little telekinesis. He opened drawers, slammed doors, levitated beds, but he never like, picked up someone and shoved them against the wall.

 

But that’s exactly what he did in Legion. Dude TK slammed Father Morning against a wall and then peeled off his scalp and back. Pinhead would have approved! He went at Father Morning like a child peeling his first crawdad. He can’t find the good meat, but he knows its in there somewhere. Later on, he slammed Detective Kinderman against a wall and held him against the ceiling.

 

Man, telekinesis is such a cool power. I wish bad guys used it more in movies. Nothing says “the threat level has escalated” quite like slamming someone against the ceiling with the power of your brain.

GOODBYE, DETECTIVE!!!!

 

Illusion Casting

 

When fighting Pazuzu, you can never be sure what’s real and what isn’t. Remember, he’s a trickster sort of Devil, and the greatest trick he ever proved was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.

 

Pazuzu can show people visions to mess with their heads such as when he showed Detective Kinderman all the souls he (may have) consumed. He split open the ground with a bolt of lightning and brought forward an army of lost souls…which vanished the moment Kinderman called out for God. He can also create illusion of fires and snakes which he used in an attempt to intimidate Father Morning.

 

Pazuzu can look inside people’s hearts to know what bothers them in a limited form of mind reading. This allows him to project the best possible illusions to mess with people, but there are limits. For instance, in Exorcist, he knew that Karras’ mother was dead, and that he felt guilty about it, and he could even speak in her voice, but he did not know her maiden name.

 

Environmental Manipulation

 

Pazuzu can work some demonic magic on the environment to intimidate and harm those that try and and oppose him as well as make scenes look really cool and cinematic. He can lower the temperature, dim the lights, and make a big Pazuzu statue show up. None of this is really decisive in a fight, unless you’re a VSBW brain worm victim and like, calculate the energy it would take to make a statue appear and assume this means Pazuzu can fire a kamehameha with that much energy because you can’t conceive of fiction as behaving outside the paradigm of Dragon Ball.

 

So, Who Wins?

 

John sends Pazuzu to cry in Hell next to Malphas and Astaroth. No MORTIS for him.

 

Sure, Pazuzu has gotten the better of priests before, before John has gotten the better of demon lords before. Though Pazuzu has a lot of different abilities that makes him the Prince of the Earth, John ended up having counters to virtually all of them.

 

Possessing John? John was able to throw out Malphas when possessed by him, and Malphas possessed him so hard he projectile vomited blood. He later had a boss fight with Malphas where Malphas continually possessed him to try and get him to kill his childhood friend and love interest Lisa (and if you suck at the boss fight, he ends up possessing John quite a number of times) but Malphas can never get the possession to stick. All it takes is a little keyboard banging and John’s free. And it’s not like Malphas was some runt demon that sucked at possession. He was able to indefinitely body jack normal people like Lisa. John’s willpower is something else. Gary even loaded him up with a demonic super drug made to produce hallucinations and catatonic slumber to prepare one’s body to be a host for infernal powers, but John wouldn’t go down. One King of Pain reference later and John wakes up and finds that he’s gone full Doomslayer on a small army of cultists. He took a super drug designed to knock him out and turned it into a berserker pack.

 

Telekinetically slamming John against the wall and cracking him open like Father Morning? John was able to resist Gary holding him in place during his boss fight. John’s ability to hurt Pazuzu just by holding out his cross also diminished the effect of being held in place. So long as John keeps a grip on his cross, it doesn’t matter if Pazuzu levitates him, and that’s assuming Pazuzu even can, given the Gary feat. And lets assume for the sake of argument that Pazuzu is able to slap John around like he’s Dangaioh and hurt him. John’s tough, especially when channeling the holy spirit, and Pazuzu isn’t used to guys that get up after he blasts them with telekinesis. He was surprised when Father Morning got up after being cracked open and left for dead, and that surprised cost him.

 

Assaulting John with illusions cast from his own fears in an effort to break his spirit? John’s been there, done that. Pazuzu can go ahead and conjure up Amy and the house, John’s made his peace with her in the ending of III.

 

Jumping to other hosts to confuse John and give him more to fight against? That’s a circumstantial ability and at best a time waster. John is used to fighting mobs. Just look at the secret hospital boss fight.

 

Pazuzu ducks out of his host body to protect himself as pure spirit? Haha, cross go brrrrrrrrr.

 

Father Ward isn’t a powerhouse by any measure. In terms of raw power and ability, he’s inferior to Pazuzu. John dies to handgun fire while Pazuzu laughs at the very idea of conventional harm. But John’s got the right counters, the right experience, and most importantly, the right FAITH to take down Captain Howdy.