EarthBound is love in a bottle, and the idea that people continued to question video games as an artistic medium a decade after its release fills me with disgust.

EarthBound is not a product on purpose. If it were feasible for him to do responsibly, I believe with my whole heart that Itoi would have given it away for free. It is the amorphous experience of a man's life, coagulated into a twisting mass of wonder, joy, terror and the cold, beautiful strength that is maturity. It features all of the childly insight of a Steven King novel and all the friendly comfort of a Dragon Quest. It is, in my opinion, the first true great artistic success of the medium, and I include the then-just-released Final Fantasy VI.

And yet... PLAYING it...

EarthBound, despite its divine importance and unlimited heart, fails to thrill with its more traditional video game trappings. Its dungeons, inventory management and combat are all rote and often frustrating. This helps evoke a nostalgia for the Dragon Quests of yore for those who grew up with them, but gives an unfamiliar or undesiring player little to latch onto. Honestly when I'm bogged down with the "video game" parts rather than exploring the world and its characters, I'm not having fun with EarthBound, and that happens to be a quite sizable percentage of the game. This is why I cannot give this, one of the most important, most beautiful games ever made, a full-throated set of all five stars. It cannot truly deliver on its gameplay fronts... at least not for me, someone who didn't turn to Dragon Quest until their 20's.

The next question I always ask myself whenever I think this about an RPG (and it rarely comes up elsewhere), is one of degrees. To what extent do these inadequacies Get In The Way? A game like Final Fantasy VII is too easy for its own good (from a modern perspective anyway) but its gameplay blazes by so quickly and smoothly that one barely even notices that all they did in that boss fight was spam the attack command. It does not Get In The Way, even if it doesn't maximize its potential. By contrast, in Persona 2: Innocent Sin, battles might be similarly trivial, but they are so incessantly drawn out and so disorientingly frequent that they DO become a damaging annoyance rather than just a missed opportunity. Earthbound, tragically, falls into the latter camp... if only slightly.

I can give full marks to Final Fantasy VI because its underbaked character gimmicks are so harmless that it's seldom even noticed that there's anything wrong with them. Like many Final Fantasy games, it's a smoothie that goes down easy. Conversely, every playthrough I do of Earthbound goes on a year long hiatus shortly after I get through the monkey caves.

I would be lying through my teeth if I said that I was not still constantly tempted to just give Earthbound the full score anyway. It is one of the most important video games ever made. I implicitly trust each of the children of EarthBound with my life... but my desires to play EarthBound never last long, and that has to count for something.

Edit: Nah, screw it. I've let other games get away with worse.

What FF4 sought to make with fumbling, whimsical, childish hands, FF6 has mastered in adulthood. There is no story more richly and gorgeously told in the 16-bit era, and the gameplay... well the gameplay mostly just manages to stay out of the way. The ATB system is a hand-me-down, but for now, in this snappy sprite-based environment, it's still a pretty good one.

It's a perfectly paced emotional thrill ride that is gushing with heart, and while its gameplay systems might not soar as high as a few other FF games, (including FFV directly preceding it) those systems represent a good, sturdy effort and are unlikely to menace anyone's good time.

Final Fantasy VI isn't even in my top three Final Fantasies, and it came out in the same year as Super Metroid, Earthbound, and Tokimeki Memorial. 1994 has such a brutal Game of the Year contest that no matter how much I'd like to give that GotY slot to something that ISN'T yet another Final Fantasy game, the only way I could settle the affair was to ask myself which of those games I would most want to replay at any given moment. No matter how I throw the bones, the answer is Final Fantasy VI every time. Super Metroid might be the best Metroid game, and Metroid probably deserves the recognition, but I will not commit such dishonesty for the sake of checking a box. My heart does not belong to Super Metroid. Tokimeki Memorial is later eclipsed so thoroughly by Tokimeki Memorial 2 that I feel no great need to elevate it, and every one of my Earthbound runs ends up bisected by a multi-year hiatus.

My winner for the bloodiest, most vicious GotY brawl in our known history, is Final Fantasy VI, and I will entertain no more relitigation.

Let's keep it short. It's cute. It's charming. The overworld is an exhausting navigational nightmare. There are mandatory doors that open when you throw pots at them, and there are no hints toward this. There are mandatory areas in dungeons as well as optional areas with heart pieces that are behind completely unmarked, unhinted bombable walls that even Zelda 1 would have pointed out. Having like five sentences of text pop up every time the player brushes up against a bombable rock, a pot, or a crystal is excruciating. Sword powerups and defense acorns ruin the music for extended periods of time so I just avoid them both. Dungeons send the player running around in circles because so many areas are only accessible through sidescroller tunnels that aren't on the map.

The Switch remake fixes pretty much all of this, and is the better way to play. Even with that being the case, I would still rather play Seasons, Ages, Link Between Worlds, or Link to the Past.

The job system is much adored and with good reason, but the story is just... it's so dumb. It's so very dumb. At some point though, that stops being a negative. In replaying, I have to give some more credit to these characters, particularly Bartz, as there's a bit more to them than I remember there being, and there's a pretty clear reason why. Much of the necessary "fleshing out" is relegated to optional, easily overlooked scenes that I probably didn't even see the first time. Gameplay is extremely flexible and replayable, which is V's saving grace. It's a fun, whimsical romp that probably won't leave much of a lasting impression on anyone who's touring their way through the franchise. It's meant to be replayed multiple times and in numerous ways, and that's a virtue lost on those who are just visiting on their way to FFVI.