This game has some serious problems. The balance is off in the beginning, and there's several points that have terrible conveyance, especially near the start (where do I go, what do I do?). The inventory / shop system is really clunky, and take an unnecessary amount of time to do simple things.

...And yet, in spite of it's glaring issues, I adore this game. It's unique and has incredible atmosphere, surprisingly epic and horrendously dark sometimes. It's a game that started off feeling like a chore, and the longer you play it the more and more it grows on you, until it finally ends, and you're not ready to say goodbye. Personally, I found that, in the end, the masterful elements make up for some of its clunkiness, and in some ways, the clunkiness may be part of the charm.

Doesn't really do much for me now as an adult like it did to me as a child. The game mostly relies on a charm that I think has entirely worn off, both with me having seen this game for a decade at this point and the sheer amount of stuff that's just ripped it off, and once that charm is gone this game doesn't really have much. I wasn't engaged through most of it. This is, until the ending. The entire final act of this is absolutely phenomenal in basically every aspect, and it amazes me that such a great end was tacked onto this thoroughly middling and boring story.

Combat's cool! The mechanic of the rolling hp bars is super unique and it'd be cool if other games did something similar. Game's insanely easy tho if you know what you're doing, basically nothing can't be beaten by just spamming PK Freeze and bottle rockets. After the department store nothing's really very difficult or engaging. Also, the music's good.

Frankly I just kinda think that Mom 3 is an improvement on this game in basically every way; Better characters, a story worth caring about, better gameplay, better humor, better music. Earthbound's still good, just not really for me.

EarthBound is as good as all of the indie RPG designers will tell you, and then some. I think this is going to manage to be one of my favorite games of all time. Honestly, this thing is a work of goddamn art.

The story is charming, and perfectly captures that youthful sense of adventure, still harrowing during its darkest moments, but with a permeating feeling of happiness and silliness through it all. The writing is spectacular even at its most absurd, there are some fantastic mechanical touches that set it apart from other JRPGs of the era, and there are some remarkably modern-feeling touches to a game coming up on its thirty year anniversary.

If I had any complaints, they're a pair of small ones: many overworld enemy sprites don't have well-defined "backs" which makes it hard to land sneak attacks, and the inventory management is a bit clunky. That's pretty much it.

Seriously, EarthBound is amazing, and it's as amazing in 2020 as it was in 1994. This game makes me want to be a kid again.

Played this on an old and fairly mediocre SNES emulator a couple years back. If I'm going to be honest, I think Earthbound is kinda overrated. Don't get me wrong, the game has this charm and weird sense of humor I really like, the graphics look pretty good and stick out from other RPGs of the time, and I do like the mechanics of the battle in concept. But that's where my praises stop. Firstly, the first part of the game is a brutally difficult chore to get through, thanks to all of the enemies being ridiculously overpowered and Ness being ridiculously underpowerd. It does get a bit easier once Paula joins your party, but even then battling doesn't become truly manageable until Jeff joins the party. Secondly, all of the main characters-Save for Porky/Pokey-are either incredibly one-note or have pretty much no personality whatsoever. Thirdly, while I do like the concept of the Rolling Health Bar, it is not implemented vary well. Compared to Mother 3, the numbers scroll way too fast, meaning it's much harder to use PP points to raise the bar back up in time. Fourthly, all the shops and save points are way too far apart, especially the further you get into the game. Fifthly, pretty much all of the boss fights-Save for Porky/Pokey and Giygas-are hardly distinguishable from normal enemies and end up feeling super underwhelming. And for my final point, if you're not using savestates, the acts and mechanics behind saving, loosing partners, and getting a game over are laughably archaic, even by 1994 standards. They're so archaic that no joke, I would just simply prefer it if your partners stayed permanently dead if they died, if everytime you died the game reset itself back to the start, and if you had to play the entire game in one sitting else it would reset back to the start.

Earthbound has potential, but is held back by questionable design choices that really hindered my enjoyment. At least Mother 3 fixed most of these issues.

Earthbound, a highly influential title (although their intuitions wouldn't be applied until several years later) offered a creative take on JRPGs. Each facet, from its equipment, save points, shops, status effects, etc. was a quirky approach to basic RPG mechanics that was generally clownish and naive, but also subversive and erudite. Combat - while mechanically conventional, was enhanced greatly by cartoony enemy design and narration that mostly told exaggerated, bizarre parodies on ordinary life, running the gamut from strange to even disturbing. Dialogue shared the same idea, and even occasionally winked at goofy satire when it's not busy indulging in its strange sense of humor. Even outside these aspects, the gameplay was inventive - deconstructing past ideas and adding several new ones to the canon of JRPGs. Another major success lies in its soundtrack, that covered an impressive range of styles from skewed, awkward, demented tracks to desolate atmospheres, from simple pleasant melodies to even unsettling scores, most songs succeeding in its own niche while others stumbled around trying to make sense of the whole ordeal. Above all else, the few but effective horror-tinged moments represents the most important concept EarthBound introduced, that underneath the guise of harmless childish irreverence existed genuinely creepy themes. This bizarre and terrifying display gradually reared its head in the final hours, culminating in one of the most psychologically exhausting final bosses of all time. A triumph; very few JRPGs can boast such wild imagination within such a conventional framework.