Reviews from

in the past


I've been replaying this game every year since my first playthrough back in 2014, and now I speedrun it! While casually the gameplay isn't the most indepth thing in the world it's still always fun and engaging to me. Speedrun wise, things are quite a bit more complicated and I've begun to appreciate many of the mechanics in this game a whole lot more. Ofc I love everything outside of the gameplay as well, story, characters, dialogue, and especially the music are fantastic and the game's artstyle has charmed me like no other. This is a game that I'll continue to play & replay for ages to come. It is my favorite game afterall.

Good, but mother 3 is better.

Earthbound is one of my favorite games of all time, partly because I grew up with it. It does not have the most compelling story ever, but throughout the 20 hours of the game it stays fresh with its unique graphic style and set pieces.

One of the worst games I have ever played in my entire life


Lo compré en la DS shop antes de que cerrará pero ya no uso la DS

If you ever want to trauma bond with folks about a final boss — this is the game for you.

Easily the biggest inspiration for all modern games. The blueprint, if you will.

Esse jogo foi uma aventura linda, divertida e engraçada. Agora entendo o motivo dessa ser a maior inspiração pro Toby Fox

Love the theme of Onett. I'm a big fan of the "home" theme in games and Mother 2 has easily one of the best. Such warm and jovial feelings of childhood.

Someone called this "Undertale for RPG fans" once

Ness from smash bros.
Cons: smash fans
Pros: Ness from smash bros. an actual good rpg game.

Hey Buddy! Now that's what SOUL is !

Earthbound is the textbook example of Soul, what's Soul ? Well hmm .. uhhh.. It's what Earthbound have ?

The most striking thing with Eartbound is its setting, departing from a long tradition of a fantasy world, we arrive in a cliché view of the United States that manage to stay delightful while playing with its tropes in a whimsical manner, making it really refreshing to play.

With this in mind, know that the bestiary derives from this premise and is, therefore, really interesting to witness, and bears a lot of unique and funny ideas. There's a gas pump enemy with drowsy eyes ! Woah, now that's something else compared to those goblins !

So yeah, Earthbound manage to be unique by working hand in hand with its settings, add on top of that a really fresh colour palette and you're in for quite a visual ride !
Now, you might be aware that Earthbound OST is hailed as a pretty neat one, and if you go into the game with those assumptions... well you might be pleased to know that you were right to believe what people say. It's really lovely and the soundfont they used hold its own cartoony texture, making it instantly recognisable.

What else is unique to this game ? The writing ? Indeed. A herculean tour de force happened on this cartridge, Prometheus stole the fire of comedy and gave it to this JRPG. Now that might come as a surprise, even as a shock to some people, but Earthbound managed to be a funny game. It made me laugh audibly, rendering me stunned, because, first of all, the game was funny, and two, it was funny enough to make me chuckle. Now that's a feat ! The writing is also quite cute and touching when it needs to be, overall, they really nailed it.

The uniqueness of Earthbound is that every time you think it's unique, it ends up being even more unique.

This game has a Soul !

that boy Ness can use Psi Rockin Ω now huh? i better keep my ass in this office or i'm FINISHED!!

It has loads of charm and personality, and I completely understand why it's a major influence to lots of RPGs to come after this one. I really enjoyed the tone and overall vibe.

That being said, it's one of the most sluggish RPGs I've ever played, not only from the UI/UX side of things, but also from the game design side; inventory management is needlessly bureaucratic, item storage and money handling are tedious, walking speed is way too slow, menus take too long to show the contents or register your input, some of its mechanics are obscure and never explained.

Yes, it's an interesting game. It belongs in a museum.

não é atoa que undertale é tão bom

earthbound really is something special, you don't need me to tell you that. it's full to the brim with quotable dialog, memorable moments, and a personality unlike anything before it. (after it? now that's a different story) and it doesn't matter if you already know about giygas or have seen the final battle in a video or something, the first time you play the game and fight giygas yourself, that ALWAYS sticks with you. i remember i was on the bus playing the game on my 3ds for the first time, and even still that shit hits like a train

Earthbound is fantastic, it's one of the most charming rpgs you can ever play, everything about it from the characters to the world and everything in between, the combat is quite simple so it would be fun even if you don't know anything about the genre.
My only problem with it is that the difficulty is kinda weird, the game throws a ton of random encounters at you and the bosses aren't that hard, which makes the bosses feel less important since dealing with the dozens of encounters before them is more of a problem than the bosses themselves

"Consequences of Boy Moms" -Isa

NESS IS SANS UNDERTALE???????????????????

ive been putting off beating this one for the longest time but im glad i finally pulled up my britches and finished it it was an immensely fun and silly experience

Je n'ai jamais eu d'ami venant d'un autre pays. Mes voyages ont toujours été courts. Je n'étais jamais seul, et en y repensant, j'ai toujours été avec la même personne.

Mon expérience des pays étrangers et la même que la plupart des gens, c'est le hasard entrecoupé des lieux touristiques. La nourriture locale, les sandwichs et un peu de pâtes.
Un étudiant reste un étudiant, même sur un autre fuseau horaire.

Quand on lance Earthbound, on choisit son plat préféré, le nom de son cabot et de ses amis. On se crée un chez soi. Instantanément interrompu par une météorite. Par l'invasion alien. Par le voisin casse couille. Mais un chez soi quand même.

Je ne sais pas comment a été perçu Earthbound par les japonais, mais pour moi, l'environnement était familier. Merci au soft power, l'Amérique, c'est la maison. C'était d'autant plus la maison car moi aussi, j'ai du ranger mon vélo parce que certains amis n'en avaient pas.

On traverse le pays, on va dans la grande ville du coin. J'aurais aimé qu'il y ait un métro. C'est ma vision des grandes villes, le métro. On ne va pas sous terre à la campagne.

J'aime les dialogues d'earthbound.

J'ai dépanné une bouteille d'eau à un gars il y a quelques mois. Situation familiale, états d'âmes, parcours professionnel, sa collection de jeux vidéo, la hauteur sous plafond de son rez de chaussée. On ne prenait pas le métro dans la même direction. Si ça avait été le cas, j'aurais pu écrire ses mémoires. Là, seulement un profil Facebook convaicant.

Les personnages de earthbound sont un peu tarés de cette manière. Zinzins mais crédibles. Ancrés dans leur réalité. Chaleureusement caricatural. Il est impossible de ne pas vouloir leur parler.

Je ne me souviens d'aucun dialogue de pokemon. Ca n'est pas grave. Mais je me souviens de plusieurs d'earthbound.

Puis d'un coup, on part . A l'étranger d'abord, et puis encore plus loin. Je crois qu'on s'habitue au voyage. Passer de chez moi à l'Égypte m'a plus déstabilisé que de passer de l'Égypte à la terre des dinosaures.
J'étais chez moi, je n'étais plus chez moi.
Je n'étais pas chez moi, et je suis toujours loin de chez moi.
J'ai, à ce moment là, eu peur de moins aimer le jeu. Qu'il s'essouffle

Mais la fin est extraordinaire. Il était impossible d'imaginer ce dernier voyage. Ce dernier combat. On prie pour rentrer en sécurité à la maison, parce qu'on sait que l'on ne peut pas aller plus loin. Pas comme ça.

On a fait un beau voyage. C'était pénible car le jeu est vraiment difficile. On a mérité de voir cette fin, de regarder les photos, de parler une dernière fois aux copains puis de se dire au revoir.

Mes pensées reviennent fréquemment à Earthbound avec mélancolie. Car j'ai dû laisser mon vélo car des amis n'en avaient pas. Que j'ai déjà été coincé dans les embouteillages en plein soleil. Que la taille des buildings des grandes villes est impressionnante.
Je n'ai pas de casquette rouge et je n'ai pas sauvé le monde, mais ça aurait fait trop de points communs.

Le jeu m'a laissé deux frustrations.
Je ne parle pas assez aux gens en voyage
Les sacs à dos ne peuvent pas contenir assez de choses.

Je réécoute la musique et je suis de retour dans Earthbound. Je suis à la maison.

Merci à tout ceux impliqués dans le projet.

La chaleur humaine n'est pas fréquente dans les jeux vidéos.

J'ai joué à un jeu extraordinaire.

One of the biggest cult Nintendo classics ever, Earthbound is a game I honestly don’t know how to describe. Despite being an RPG.. there’s next to no story here, yes there’s identifiable characters, some of which are pretty memorable, but even within the main cast there’s literally no development or even any interaction between them.. which is so weird for an RPG.

Every town you visit has its own conflict l, and like how trippy some of these parts get, there are memorable moments for sure, but with no narrative driving it forward, I find it hard to care about anything or anyone in this game.

I do like the world design, the contemporary setting is really charming, I love how this game looks and the atmosphere it brings. The final boss is also awesome, so visually striking and alien.

The gameplay is a pretty simple RPG, you explore the overworld which is well designed, and work your way towards linear objectives.

Enemies roam the overworld, so you can choose your battles and even ambush enemies. Battles are simple but there’s a really interesting mechanic where your HP actually rolls down when you get hit. So if your able to use a heal spell before the number hits 0, you can actually save that party member. I really liked that, but otherwise these battles are pretty simple. This is a very simple game that has charm, and it’s good, just not great - 7/10

OH MY FUCKING GOD. GOD. HOW... CAN THIS BE SO PERFECT?!!! CRIED/10.

Started on my Super NES Mini, then later transferred the save data to my laptop, and finally onto my modded Wii, to be finished using SNES9x. Last time I played, the early game was giving me troubles, but I intend to return to this game soon to see it through to the end.


Very charming. one of a kind. Noticeably held back by antiquated mechanics. Mainly encounter rate/difficulty and inventory management. Created an entire new perspective on gaming tropes

After playing some games I'd never played before recently, I went back to playing games from my childhood (but in Japanese this time) with Mother 2! Earthbound was a game I played a TON growing up and always really loved. It's been a good few years since I played it last though, so I was excited to see the original version's text and get a new perspective on the overall quality of the game. It took me about 2 and a half days, so I'd reckon about 25 hours in total (I don't think the Wii U counts your play time for software like the Wii did?), and I didn't need to use a guide or anything because I just already knew my way through the game from how much I played it when I was little XD

So the story of Earthbound/Mother 2 is one that I've always felt is more the sum of its parts rather than the whole. The overall narrative is a story about how you are always ultimately your worst enemy, and that only by overcoming your inner reservations and inhibitions will you be able to become something larger than yourself. The four main characters of the story, Ness, Paula, Jeff, and Poo, are very light on characterization and have a very small amount of dialogue between them. Ness is definitely supposed to be a stand-in for the player character, but the whole party effectively plays this role with how little character they each have to them. However, there is SOME character there, and especially with how other characters talk to Ness, talk him up as this big figure of prophecy and this chosen child, and with how familiarly his friends and family talk to him, I don't think they do a very good job of making a "player avatar" character. Ness lies somewhere in-between a player avatar and a character of his own, and I believe this ultimately really undermines the "you're your own worst enemy" message for the player that the game ultimately has.

However, where Mother 2's writing really shines are in the myriad of vignettes that you encounter as you go through the story. So many colorful characters of roles both big and small, as bombastic as the silly (and VERY obviously Blues Brothers-inspired in the Japanese version) Runaway Five, to just simple NPC's walking around town with a quirky line to say. Mother 2 is packed with wacky and irreverent humor and charm that will turn of some, certainly, but will be very quickly endearing to others... at least in the first half. By the time you finish up Fourside, the story really gets bogged down in the overall plot of Ness being this chosen child, and the game's second half is far less interesting than the first. I remembered it being this way before I did this playthrough, and this replay reconfirmed that opinion. However, I will definitely add that the Japanese original does have a sense of humor and charm to it that the English version approaches but does not surpass. The only exception being enemy names, which are often quite dull in Japanese (the main wordplay around them often amounting to "it's an English word and/or an oddly specific description in Japanese") compared to the puns in English.

The gameplay of Mother 2 is really a pretty shameless copy of Dragon Quest, although there are MANY other beloved RPGs of this era, as with the 8-bit era, that that description can also be applied to. The way every character has their own inventory, each one fills a kind of specific role in a balance of different kinds of magic or special tool items, the first-person battle perspectives. The only truly remarkable innovation of the combat system is the way your health scrolls up and down instead of moving all at once, so a dying ally is actually in the process of dying (or healing), so can be saved with a heal before they actually get KO'd. Mother 2 is very much a sister game to Far East of Eden as far as its cultural memory goes: a DQ clone whose sense of humor and irreverent use of setting made it an enduring bit of culture among Japanese gamers.

Compared to something like FF6, another 1994 SFC RPG, the UI is honestly really fluid and brilliant, and Mother 2 is a fantastic first RPG for people new to the genre (something it succeeds at little better than Mario RPG, imo). This was the first time I'd played through the game really utilizing the L-button as a catch-all inspection and talking button and that is just SUCH a clever bit of design I can't get over it. Inventory management between party members can be a bit of a chore at times, but the menus move so quick that it really just goes as slowly as you'll make it go.

The game has some pacing and difficulty curve issues, with some bosses early in the game being very hard where most bosses are quite easy, and some later game areas like Magicant that force you to use only one party member yet again remind you just how not-fun having only one party member is just for the sake of a neat setting to explore. The game also has some points where the signposting just is not very good. I used to get stuck in Fourside ALL the time as a kid because there are just suddenly so many dialogue flags you need to trigger before plot elements can progress. Using the Hint Shop and just talking to everyone you see will get you past most of these, but not all. The game's signposting is about as good as it could be for 1994, but it's still rough enough in retrospect that it's worth mentioning here.

Verdict: Recommended. Mother 2/Earthbound is a game that a lot of people don't like, and I think that's a totally fair attitude to have towards the game. It has some pacing issues and the writing really doesn't carry the whole way through like it really needs to, so only the competent yet fairly bog-standard combat system is really there for a good portion of the game. There is little on the SNES like it, for sure, but I think a lot of this game's appeal lives and dies by its writing, and if you aren't captured within the first few hours/areas, chances are this is a game you're gonna have a hard time pushing through to the end on. It's a game that has a really unique and shining personality, especially among RPGs that made it to the West for that era, and there is a lot to enjoy if you're into what the game is delivering on.

Its so good.
It is janky even for a 90s RPG, I probably lost like 3 hours sorting inventory, storing items and buying stuff.
But dammit its got so much charm, the jokes always made me laugh, the visuals are nice, the music takes some liberties.
Just play it.

phenomenal fucking game man, my memories are hazy of it so look out for a replay!