Okay, I did it. I played Insert Credit’s #1 Favorite Game of All Time, Earthbound
You can praise me now.
I really enjoyed my time with it! I have some lingering thoughts that are bouncing around which may or may not add up to something. My mind drifted to a lot of different places and comparisons while I was playing so here’s an attempt to reconcile some of those:
I think upon visiting any sort of media as heralded as Earthbound there’s naturally a little bit of distance at first - a sort of feeling that the game belongs to someone else, not you. It can be a little hard to calibrate yourself, especially with a nagging preoccupation of “am I liking this thing as much as I’m supposed to?”.
Luckily, it didn’t take too long for me to like the game. Comparing to a game of similar stature, Chrono Trigger went down a little bit easier when I played it a few years back, but I had some of those same feelings then as well.
I like the 90s Americana-ness (no pun). Even with the current 90s nostalgia oversaturation, I felt very comforted by the aesthetic. Pizza parlors really used to be the third place… It brought to mind a few 90s artifacts like Clarissa Explains it All and The Adventures of Pete and Pete that I haven’t thought about in years and certainly not recently or enough to know if they are apt comparisons.
What’s interesting is that Earthbound often feels like a parody of the 90s made decades later, accentuating simple things (e.g. landlines) that just don’t really exist that way anymore. I spent a lot of time going back and forth with regards to whether there was something satirical going on here or not.
Catherine was a comparison my mind went to because that game has a real bizzaro version of ““Brooklyn”” that kinda raises the same question… maybe the Japanese just think we’re like that. I don’t know. Brooklyn? Without Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, or Shoshanna???
The other place my mind went was The Sims and how Will Wright specifically said somewhere that it is not commenting on consumerism/American suburban life via a 1950s pastiche, which, like… what is this then??
Where I really started loving the game was in the last 10-15% of the runtime. I’d liked the mix of fantastical elements in a grounded setting, but the more surreal and somber places the game goes (e.g. Lumine Hall, Magicant, the Ending) in the final few hours are what really stuck out to me. I particularly liked one of the final moments, when after defeating Giygas the game doesn’t just end but makes you teleport to Onett and walk home.
I mostly enjoyed the story of Earthbound. By the end, I felt as though both Porky and Giygas were too slight and the eight melody macguffins were a little too close to eight Kantonian gym badges to really earn all that much praise. I enjoyed the journey though!
I think the game has been done a disservice by those who lead with “it’s funny!” or “it’s quirky!”. The game has its funny moments but the quality is more consistent on the somber side than the funny side. The elephant in the room is Undertale. There were a number of moments when I felt like Earthbound’s humor veered into too quirky and too winking territory and all of the unpleasantness of Undertale would come rushing in. These were the absolute lowest parts of the experience for me - the few moments when I’d question if I even liked the game. I don’t want to penalize Earthbound for the sins of its sons but Undertale came to mind much more frequently while playing Earthbound than, say, any of the games inspired by Chrono Trigger came to mind while playing Chrono Trigger.
I want to also touch on two other aspects of the game: the item management system and the combat. I see both as imperfect systems that are sometimes enjoyable because of their imperfections, but ultimately grate on the player more than they need to.
With respect to the items, I like that you’re constrained, having a limited number of slots and being forced to use some of those slots on key items. It’s a nice approach to anti-hoarding. But it is way too annoying to move/sell/equip items in this game. And I ran into the issue of the Escargo storage running out of space because there’s just so many key items you don’t need by the end of the game. Compounding this issue is that the game throws so much superfluous crap at you and with very thin item descriptions (the “Monkey’s Love” item says “can be used in battle.” So helpful) it’s hard to know what items do, how many times they can be used, when you can dump them, etc. There’s so much bloat that I ended up not even touching half the stuff. I’m sure “Trout Yogurt” is a joke well worth the punchline but it’s clutter and I don’t want it in my inventory.
As for combat, I’ve never been partial to this style of traditional turn-based (select everyones’ moves and then speed/randomness gives you an order). On the whole though, there’s enough stuff here to make battles interesting and with a full party, the battles have a very nice rhythm to them. It takes much too long to get to a full party, but… whatever.
The much-lauded scrolling HP is cool but kind of a nothingburger for how much everyone talks about it. In the early game when the enemies are doing 30 damage… that stops scrolling before the animation is even over. Up until the endgame it’s only really a factor with the exploding enemies. In the grand scheme of things you get maybe 5 hours out of a 35 hour RPG where that mechanic is present and functional. I like it though - just would tweak the implementation.
I have two main beefs with the combat:
First, kinda like the items, the game throws way too many options at you. There are so many PSI abilities and it’s hard to learn how they work (esp the defensive ones) because the enemies are very squishy and don’t do much to test you. A lot of those abilities sat unused for most/all of the game and without thorough descriptions, it’s hard to know why I should care about them.
Second, the numbers/progression in the game deflate the fun quite a bit. It’s hard to feel accomplished/strategic when most of the time it feels like the game is just making up numbers. The first time you’ll see this is through the every-fourth-level-up thing the game is doing, but there’s little things sprinkled throughout the game all the way until the end. In the final battle Ness took 100 damage from an attack, defended the next turn, and took 150 damage from the same attack (???). Boss HP seems to vary wildly with the only consistency being that none of them have enough. Multi-Bottle Rockets are probably the most egregious example of a made up number, doing 600% of my next strongest attack, essentially killing the need to battle, strategize, or use any of the mechanics at all. There’s a moment toward the end of the game when Ness undergoes character development and the game just starts inflating his stats to astronomical levels (“Sweet! Gained 350 HP!”) - it’s supposed to be heartfelt moment but because of the game’s Whose Line Is It Anyway-esque approach to combat (rules are made up and the points don’t matter), it ended up being the funniest moment of the playthrough
Overall, I see these issues as failed implementations of interesting ideas. While they do damper the RPG-ness of Earthbound, there’s still a good RPG here that understands the strengths of the genre. I did not come away from this feeling how I felt with Undertale - a game whose anti-RPG missteps are due to hating and misunderstanding the genre and thus failing to satirize it.
Okay no one is reading by this point but finally I want to touch on the Persona 3 Reload of it all.
When playing an older game it’s really tempting to try to fix it in your head, to clear up any bit of fuzziness. And in my head, while playing Earthbound, I’d sometimes picture a version of the game with that new Link’s Awakening/Super Mario RPG style that looks like those original Earthbound clay figures. NPCs would have little (…) dialogue bubbles above their head that would grey out when you exhaust all of their dialogue. Escargo Express wouldn’t be the most annoying thing ever. You could buy and sell multiple items at the same time. Ness would be voice acted by Timothee Chalamet.
But… Persona 3 Reload… which is a good game, but even as someone who hadn’t played FES it left me a little cold with how clean it was. Earthbound’s fuzziness provides a lot of charm. Something like the “talk to” command was a little off-putting at first but grew on me. While I’m sure there are ways they could do an updated version that still feels true to the original, I don’t have the knowledge to know which Jenga blocks to pull while keeping the thing intact. So maybe it’s best to only think about the game I did play because, well, I really liked that game