Earthbound, was the first game in Shigesato Itoi’s Mother series to be released in the United States, but the second installment overall. It was released in 1995 for the Super Nintendo and sold poorly. It reviewed well enough but Earthbound’s marketing campaign was intensely bad. For starters, the game cost more than other SNES games because each copy came bundled with a strategy guide. Each copy also came with a scratch and sniff page that smelled like vomit. There were also advertisements in gaming magazines with the same schtick The tagline on those scratch and sniff pages were “This Game Stinks!” which is admittedly not the best campaign for when you’re trying to sell a product. There’s also some talk that JRPGs just weren’t that popular in America and the ones that were popular were more mature like Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger. That said, being expensive and smelling up the GameStop is reason enough the game flopped. However, Earthbound has become a cult classic, especially with the series’ being represented in Smash Bros. Is the game deserving of the cult classic status? Or does it stink like the advertisements said? Well, I have some thoughts on that.
You play as Ness, a stock American boy, who wakes up one night to find a meteor has crashed in his town. After investigating, he meets a warrior from the future in the shape of a bee. The future bee warrior, Buzz Buzz, tells the protagonist about Giygas, the game's antagonist. Giygas is an evil entity who has made adults, animals, and stop signs, behave in malicious ways and must be stopped at all costs. Thus begins your adventure to find the other 3 party members and collect the eight macguffins needed to kill Giygas. The game’s plot is a bit silly, but that’s what it's going for. The whole game has a silly tone about it that makes it feel like it was made by a child, whimsical imagination intact. The game’s plot isn’t going to win any awards, but it's the charm and funny dialogue that makes Earthbound special. Earthbound is a JRPG where talking to a bunch of different NPCs doesn’t feel like a waste of time as all their dialogue has some of that juvenile humor I enjoy. You’ll notice that besides naming the playable characters, you can also name your favorite food when the game starts up. It gets said a bunch in dialogue so you can call it something like ‘crack’ and giggle to nobody in particular when the mom character tells Ness that she made a fresh batch of crack for him.
All that said, the game has a fair amount of dark and surreal moments. The final boss’ first form is famously an intestinal tract, there is a cult of people trying to paint the world a single color and dresses like the Klu Klux Klan, and there are one or two scenes with intense body horror going on. Moments like those give the game an edge, especially in the theming of the life of a child. Yeah, a child sees the world in a silly and juvenile way, whose imagination can take him on wondrous adventures, but there is still that kind of fucked up trauma that comes with it.
The game’s presentation also adds to the childlike whimsicality theme. All the graphics are extremely simple, and the enemy design is goofy as hell. Even the user interface is quite simple. The music, however, is one of the game’s largest strengths. The music makes Earthbound that fun childhood adventure, or conversely that fucked up body horror, stick. Summers is one of my favorite areas because of the music and design that make that area feel like a warm beach town. One of the more famous aspects of the soundtrack is that many tracks use samples from popular music. The sampling is kind of a double-edged sword. The final area uses the horns from The Beatles “All You Need is Love,” which works really well for the area, but makes the game so difficult to localize. The sampling is part of the reason Earthbound took so long to come to the virtual console.
On the gameplay side of things, Earthbound does some things to differentiate itself from other JRPGs. All enemies are on-screen and what angle you bump into them determines whether or not you or the enemy get an extra turn in battle. Running into an enemy from behind gets you an extra turn at the start of the battle and vice versa. If you’re at the point that you can kill an enemy in one turn then the game will just give you the XP without needing to enter the battle. Both things alleviate some of the problems that most JRPGs have. Grinding, for example, becomes much easier because of those mechanics. The major innovation to the formula is the damage slider. Once hit your HP rolls down one point at a time. This means that if you take mortal damage and can end the fight before the slider hits zero you can leave the fight with whatever health the slider was on when you won. The gameplay has a more tactical and hectic edge than many JRPGs at the time.
Despite the quality of life improvements from most JRPGs, the game is quite difficult. Sometimes the game will spawn enough enemies that will both completely wipe the floor with you and drop the frame rate. You’re going to have to master the technique of walking off-screen and walking back to see if the random set of enemies spawned this time are doable. There are a number of status effects that can seem like cheating if they’re used on you. Not to mention there are moments of the game where the party loses a member or two for plot reasons, meaning that the enemies you’ve been used to fighting with four characters has to be done with 3 or less. Nor does it help how little there are save points compared to dungeons and areas. In fact, the amount of enemies, dungeons, and bosses make the game drag on for a bit. So the game is difficult, but not impossible.
Final Thoughts: Earthbound is probably my favorite Super Nintendo game. It’s charming, funny, and is filled with childhood wonder. The music is good and the design all around is fantastic. The game deserves all the praise it gets and is most certainly deserving of a spot in Smash Bros. The Mother series as a whole holds a special place in my heart. It's Nintendo’s short but complete franchise that feels like it was made with an artist’s intent rather than a series that has to have an installment on every console. I do think that the game is a bit too difficult, however. The amount of content makes the game a bit long and slow to get going, not uncommon for JRPGs but nonetheless. The game’s difficulty and save points that could be more frequent makes me recommend Earthbound, but with the caveat that you should probably play the Virtual Console version on the WiiU or 3DS. Trust me, you will abuse the save state function.
4/5
I enjoyed it
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