Jamie Cannon

Well, to start my review category off right, I’m going to write about something that I played on a whim and was immediately sucked in beyond all hope of rescue. That would be Earthbound, a game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System originally released in 1994 and developed by Ape, Inc. Like many games of this time, it is a sequel to a title that was Japan-exclusive; its Japanese title is Mother 2: Gyiyg Strikes Back. Anyway, let’s get on with it.

The Gist of It: Earthbound is a role-playing game following the adventures of Ness, a boy living a regular life in America in the 1990s. When the game begins, you are literally controlling a pajama-clad Ness while you run around your hometown of Onette at night to see what all the commotion is about. Turns out, a meteor crashed near your house during the night – or that’s what everyone believes! In actuality an alien lifeform from the future – an insect named Buzz Buzz represented by very few pixels – has come to warn of another alien named Giygas who controls the world in the future. Naturally, Giygas is evil and horrible, and of course Ness must go on an adventure to prevent this from happening.

Apparently everyone is cool with the idea of a kid running out to save the world because your mom only suggests you change out of your pajamas, your sister gives you a baseball bat to fight with – and your dad, as follows throughout the game, talks to you on the phone in weird metaphors and monologues before asking if you’d like to save your progress. It comes out pretty early on that Ness has some sort of psychic powers as you’re contacted early on by a girl named Paula calling for help. Throughout the adventure, not only do you rescue and join up with Paula, there’s also Jeff, the boy genius who fixes random household objects into powerful weapons, and Poo, who is the prince of distant Dalaam and fights with martial arts (translation: there is hardly any gear for him to equip in the entire game).

Technical Notes: The sound quality and animation is very good for its time. Though Ness looks a lot like an emoticon (._. to be exact), the scenery will be nice looking on your newfangled televisions because, well, it’s colorful and pretty, like most SNES games appear on modern TVs. I was pleasantly surprised to find Ness has an “auto fight” option for those times when all your party members can melee and be done with it – but also surprised that it took care of things like using items to restore health or revive dead characters. I guess I was expecting “auto fight” to mean “just like mashing A but you don’t have to burn the calories,” but it actually attempts to fight in a way that makes sense. You’d still probably get owned most of the time for using it, but only because the SNES-level of artificial intelligence is thankfully not up to par with a human’s… well, not mine anyway.

Control Freak: No problems with the controls. I never had to look into configuring anything because it was all fine and dandy. Not like you have to worry about “To Invert Y or Not to Invert Y” on the SNES anyway.

Sweet Details: First, the design. Nothing I can write here will accurately describe the sort of bizarre actions you must go through to save the world. Maybe it’s just me, but when a game makes me do something completely weird and unexpected, no matter how mundane, I think it’s awesome. In my experience playing games for the SNES, that frequently translated to strange levels, enemies, bosses, or actions. By ‘actions’ I mean things like Enix’s Illusion of Gaia making you stand around on a raft, lost at sea, for several minutes of serious nothing (except eating raw fish) or wait in line with a bunch of NPCs. Earthbound, however, took all my ideas of ‘weird but cool’ and threw them in the Crazy Blender. My first example, the most similar to what I mentioned from Illusion of Gaia, is the way you break into Belch’s Factory, in the first half of the game. (Belch is a boss enemy that is literally a pile of goo – it might be vomit, I’m not sure – who belchs a lot and controls an army of zombies. Zombies which you best by catching them on sticky paper. Hmm.) In order to get inside, you have to go behind a waterfall (standard) and say the password (duh). However, the password is three minutes of silence. So you have to put down the controller and do nothing for three minutes. Maybe I haven’t been playing the right games, but three minutes of nothing is certainly not very common in my dungeon-diving experience.

Another, more disturbing example is when you are first getting Prince Poo in your party. (Don’t ask me about the name, because I couldn’t begin to explain it. You do have the option of renaming all the characters, though, if you can’t take a monk named Poo seriously.) Poo has to pass his final test of Mu training before he can learn the last technique and, you know, go join up with everyone else. You take control of Poo, who you have never seen before, and spend a little while running around his hometown before climbing to the top of a very tall hill for your ‘meditation.’ After you’ve meditated for a little bit, a woman comes up to say your master wants you to stop right away and come back to the palace. Silly me, I listened, and wasted a good three minutes of my life because you’re supposed to ignore her. So I climbed the hill, waited again, and this time ignored the servant. Afterwards, the screen goes into combat mode and a strange ghost appears as your enemy. It’s ‘the spirit of your ancestors,’ and it’s not very nice, because it asks if it can break your arms and legs, poke out your eyes, and finally, take your mind. You have to say yes to all of these to proceed. Once you lose your eyes, the screen goes completely black; when you agree to lose your mind, the trial is over.

Call me crazy but in the context of the rest of the game I was thoroughly disturbed. I could go on and on with examples of how this game is just nothing like anything else I’d played in terms of level design - Moonside, the town where everything is opposite and colored like it’s made of neon lights; Saturn Valley, where every resident looks the same (a little like Ziggy), speaks in weird handwriting-style font, and spouts total gibberish; or maybe the dungeon that’s actually a man whose body you run around in (which actually looks like a brown cave). However, hopefully you get the idea that Earthbound doesn’t follow conventional rules in storytelling or progression – and it’s infinitely better this way.

Another pleasant detail is that Earthbound attempts to use ‘modern technology’ in everything (the game does take place in the 90s). That means that enemies drop regular old dollars, which you can lose half of if you die, so you better keep your money in the bank and only visit the ATM when you are ready to shop! (Yes, Ness has an ATM card. It’s annoying just like it is in real life.) You also have to use a phone to save which means you will sometimes have to suck it up and use a payphone (most of them cost $1. Damn high prices!)

It should also be noted that Earthbound received critical acclaim for the quality of its music. I’m currently on a Depeche Mode kick so I enjoyed it, but it’s what you would expect from an RPG circa 1994 – electronic, just above a MIDI, but jammin’.

Annoying Stuff: Combat. The system itself is fine – it’s better than some new RPGs I’ve played, actually, as far as abilities, and it’s certainly up to SNES standards with a turn-based system and enemies that can stand in multiple rows. But you just have to see it to realize why it doesn’t get to be a Sweet Detail. Here are a couple of screenshots (I took them from the Starmen.Net Earthbound walkthrough, which is amazingly useful if you decide to play the game):

Okay, you might be able to see what’s wrong with this. First, the background is, and always is, a trippy blend of colors a la a very early iTunes Visualizer. The music, however, never at any point corresponds to the “ooh pretty colors” backgrounds. Instead, it’s sort of like very early electronica or techno. The color of the boxes representing your party members is adjustable to your liking (mine are pink!) but there is never any animation beyond full-screen effects.

In the first picture you see Buzz Buzz is casting a spell on Starman Jr – the spell is that horizontal-line effect making a nice diamond pattern. Second you see Master Belch floating in his boss-battle chartreuse and maroon ocean.

The last picture is nothing in particular except a very great example of how truly bizarre the combat settings are. Yeah the enemies look weird – but it’s from 1994, and the fact that there even are so many unique enemies is enough for me. But the morphing colors and sound really don’t do anything except make you try and get out of combat as fast as humanly possible. A real shame considering, like most RPGs, you can certainly benefit from grinding experience points out of dungeons.

Aside from this, most of my annoyances with the game could be applied to nearly every RPG in existence. You can’t save anywhere. Items that restore characters from death are ridiculously hard to find for most of the game. Getting a new member in your party means you will have someone ridiculously low level and useless for a while (so Ness ends up being ridiculously powerful by the end of the game; for me, he could solo a lot of bosses thanks to all the grinding I needed to get Poo up to a level where he could survive).

Is It Worth It: Earthbound is not a short game. I spent probably close to a month playing it for a couple hours several times a week (yay, unemployment). I found myself addicted in the usual “must level up” sense as well as greatly enjoying the story, as you’ve by now realized. It’s definitely worth playing once. For one thing, it’s a cult classic and will make you seem like a well-learned gamer in suitably nerdy conversations. Other than the fact that anyone who comes over will take one look at the combat screen and say “What the #@!$ are you playing??” it’s actually enjoyable to watch due to the humorous story and well-written dialog. And things like “wait 3 minutes” are good for having a friend or significant other around, so you can get into a conversation like “Who really DOES that in a game????”

Fun Facts: Ness is playable in all the Smash Bros. games! Go hit things with that bat!

My Rating:

• 5/5 Originality
• 5/5 Storytelling
• 4/5 Technical
• 4/5 Difficulty Scaling
• 3/5 Replay Value
• 21/25 points = 84% Kickass.