This is it, this is my favorite game. There might be better games made than this one, but there is not a single game that exists that is more special to me than Earthbound.

I used to think that a silent protagonist in a game was a liability for storytelling, that nothing mattered to the character you were playing as since they don't react to anything that happens, reduced to merely an avatar for you rather than character. This was the game that set me straight. Earthbound has such a fully-realized and fun world that for the first time in my gamesplaying history I was able to imagine and then build my own story to it while playing, precisely because there was a silent protagonist to react to it.

First of all, it needs to be understood how incredible the world of Earthbound is, so much that it is a pleasure in itself to be in it. Think about it, how often do you play an RPG where you are forced to "talk to everyone," and how often is it actually worthwhile to do so? Easily the worst part of any other RPG, Final Fantasies, Dragon Quests, Phantasy Stars, Secrets of Mana, you name them, is when you are compelled to scour an entire cookie-cutter medieval village, trespass into people's homes, and get time-wasting nuggets of dialogue like "ugh, the dark lord's hordes sure are making it hard for us here," or "oh hello, I was just sweeping my floor," before finally finding the one person you're supposed to find who says "you want to go to the castle dungeon? You'll need this gate key then, here you go." "Talk to everyone" is the least fun part of any other RPG, but absolutely the most fun part of playing Earthbound. In an industry that assumed only children were playing games, and thus took English localization as seriously as you could expect someone was in rendering whatever was in japanese to "all your base, etc.," it is a small miracle how in a mid-nineties video game easily 95% of its NPC dialogue is, at worst, worth a look, and at best, genuinely hilarious, quirky, and even at times moving. Check it out:

"I have moooore respect for Mr. Carpainter then others. Even if I become someone's steak dinner, I'll still respect him." - The Former Blue Cow

"Kidnapping is wrong! I'll be careful not to kidnap anyone." - Mr. T guy in Twoson

"Here is the map. All the info is there, except for the info that isn't there." -Onett Librarian

"The Runaway Five are so sexy! My husband definitely is...in need of some help in that area!" - Woman at Chaos Theater

"Do you know whose bones are on display here? The answer is...your bones. My bones. Bone's bones. Bone bone bone." - Research guy in Museum in Moonside

"I've heard some bad rumors about Mr. Monotoli. I heard he made a deal with pure evil in exchange for power...you know...stuff like that." -Woman in Fourside

"Didactically speaking, seminal evidence seems to explicate the fact that your repudiation of entropy supports my theory of space-time synthesis. Of this, I am irrefutably confident." - guy at the Stoic Club

"You guys can't envision the final collapse of capitalism? Incredible!" -girl at the Stoic Club

"Hi! Nice to meetchya! I'd really love to sit down and chat with you someday. I'll talk about my adventure, and you can tell me about all of your mistakes." -Shyless kid in Library

For as long as I live, I will never forget the five mole monsters in the tunnel you have to fight, who all argue that they are the third strongest among them. When you finally face the last one, he menacingly tells you "alright. You've faced the strongest, the second strongest, the fourth strongest, and the fifth strongest of us. Now, you shall face the TRUE third strongest mole of them all!" Reader, when I encountered this moment for the first time, I laughed out loud in the subway car. I laughed, at a mid-nineties video game, in public.

Not just the people you talk to (or monkeys, or aliens, or barnyard animals, or rocks, for that matter), but the world itself and the things you need to do in it provide you with one wildly inventive scenario after another. The Campbellian call to adventure comes from an intergalactic bug, who can incinerate frightening aliens with a mere thought, but sadly gets crushed to death by your awful friend's awful mom. You start out fighting the gang that has overrun your home city, but then it progresses to cops who decide to beat you up as a funny bit, then cultists who worship the color blue, then a town overrun with zombies and ghosties, then a gigantic pile of barf, then a surreal inversion of an already-scary big city, a neon nightmare world where yes is no, down is up, and the only way to escape is to face down a boogeyman from your nightmares. And this is all before you even leave your home continent. Similarly, fetch quests, a stale staple of RPGs even in the nineties, become fun simply on the strength of their own unpredictability. Also to its credit, the game does not expect you to already know or figure out these solutions, so much as it just gently treats you like a dumdum for not knowing what should be obvious in this world. Need to get up to a penthouse floor? Bribe the elevator operator with her favorite food, trout flavored yogurt, duh. Where’s the submarine you need? Why, didn’t you notice it while you were walking around inside the man who turned himself into a huge dungeon? What do we do about this huge pencil blocking the way? Oh, you're gonna need a "pencil eraser" for that. Just make sure you don't accidentally bring that into a pencil shop! The game turns the crazy all the way up at the very beginning, and only changes the color and dressing of the crazy as you move on.

And in the middle of all this craziness is an utterly normal little boy. What complete fun it is to actually imagine what Ness is thinking, how he's responding, how terrified he must be when he sees otherwise normal people and everyday object suddenly turn feral and attack, how confused he must be when the police in his hometown threaten to beat him up before laughing and saying just kidding, we'll go ahead and open up the way to the next town now, how annoyed he must be when more than once he has to bail out this complete dad-rock band with thousands of dollars so that they can get him to the next city. This normal kid, who doesn't even know he has psionic powers yet, suddenly gets thrust into the least normal world possible, one he had no idea even existed outside his house. The fact that enemies prowl around the world map in real time, and you can run away and hide until they go away, or muster up your courage and face them head on, is a brilliant underline to the overarching theme of Ness at first being afraid of his journey, but slowly getting stronger and more confident until he has faced his greatest fear and become a psionic powerhouse ready to face off against the destroyer of worlds.

And of course, you're not alone! You're going to need wisdom, courage, and above all else friendship in this quest, and so you have a fantastic group of friends to help you out. Again, because your friends are just as silent as Ness, it was a lot of fun to inject them with personalities of my own: I imagined Paula, already a strong wielder of psionic powers, as almost a mentor and cheerleader for Ness throughout his journey, someone who was so powerful she was misunderstood in her hometown and locked away for their own safety, hard on Ness when she needs to be but kind and gentle when the situation calls for it, and knows how grave the threat of Giygas is long before anyone else does. I imagined Jeff as an annoying but loveable nerd, someone who has to escape the strict rules of his Wes-Anderson-esque boarding school before joining the others, who even in the face of grave danger is still thinking about how he can get his latest invention to work, the kind of know-it-all where even when nothing around him makes sense, he still tries to figure things out logically and on the world's strange terms. Zombies in your neighborhood? Jeff's the kind of kid who figures out that you have to put down zombie paper, you know, paper that sticks to zombies. And Poo, a skilled martial artist, crown prince of a distant land, and a master of mind over matter (a memorable moment has Poo meditating in a common Zen Buddhist trope where he has to remain perfectly still even when illusions of his attachments to life are calling him away, and even when they threaten to rip off his arms, legs, eyes, ears, and finally his whole mind). Arguably more powerful than any of the other kids, at least when they first meet him, nonetheless his rigorous training never allowed him to just be a kid, and his time with the others allows him to learn how to "empty the cup" of all he thinks he knows and have fun with his new friends, and draw strength from them as they face intergalactic terrors together.

And the villains here? Damn, what a set of villains. Giygas is one of my all-time favorite villains and I can't even tell you what he is. Is he an alien, or a force? Just what the hell is his form in the end anyway (and no, I'm not talking about THAT here. If you've read this far you probably know what I mean anyway, and if not, go on youtube and throw a rock, it will hit a thinkpiece on Giygas somewhere. I've heard about it a million times and I'm sick of it)? It's great that even though you never see him throughout your journey, you feel him everywhere. Any time an inanimate object or a innocent pet attacks you, you remember it's Giygas causing all of it. Any time you encounter a Starman, you remember that Giygas is still out there. As much as you are afraid of this nebulous evil alien force at the start, you get stronger and stronger and Giygas grows more and more afraid of you, until in the end he is babbling nonsense at you ("I feel happy..." "let's be friends...") while he unknowingly wields world-ending destructive power at you.

And then there's Porky. First of all, Porky not Pokey, not the least because his appearance in Mother 3 makes no sense without the pun on his name. Anyway, the name Porky comes with an abundance of meanings, whereas Pokey just sounds like a bad localization. No one's going to call anyone Pokey for any reason, either assigned at birth or as a nickname. But Porky? Now we're talking. What, you mean to tell me you never had an annoying kid in your circle of friends, one you wish would go away but put up with anyway because he's inexplicably one of the guys? A Cartman, if you will? And maybe, since you weren't the most open-minded you could have been when you were nine to thirteen years old, you had a disparaging nickname for him that you whispered in private among your real friends, one that zeroed in on his most distinguishable and shameful feature? Like his size, maybe? That's what Porky is to Ness at the start of the game. His real name is unknown, maybe Billy or Steve or whatever, but to Ness he is only Porky. With this baggage already on him at the start, Porky transforms into a frighteningly logical adversary, one whose involvement as an obstacle is directly proportionate to the rising stakes of the story. When the meteor falls, he is simply an annoyance, one who tags along and puffs himself up without contributing any real thing whatsoever. On the start of your journey, he throws in with the powerful Happy-Happy cult, but does little more than fake you out with elementary school playground-level taunts and tricks. Later he allies himself with the powerful mayor of Fourside, providing him an artifact that will give him power while knowing full well its evil origins and potential for harm. He also knows about Giygas now, and chooses to serve him and stop you simply because YOU are trying to stop Giygas. By the end, when the stakes are fully realized, when you know you have to beat Giygas for good for the sake of the world, it is Porky who once again opposes you, far more powerful than Giygas himself, far more bitter and hateful than even this fearful alien force ever was, and in a grotesque physical state of decay, a side-effect of the time travel technology he rushed himself into to complete his single-minded mad goal. Giygas is all-powerful and terrifying at the start, while Porky is just a bratty child. But in the end, Porky rises up to become the true villain while reducing Giygas to a child and a mere tool of his own designs.

What else is there... uh... the music! The music is fantastic! I actually bothered to save the mp3s to the Earthbound soundtrack in my music collection! What's the other thing that sucks about an RPG? That's right, the battle theme. There's always one battle theme, and you hear it over and over again, and you also associate it with the other major annoyance in an RPG, the random encounters. Say what you will about Final Fantasy games, but even the best battle theme they can muster (that would be 7, by the way) ends up sucking in the end like all the others. But this game fixes all that, first of all by giving you far more control over the random encounters as I mentioned before, then by featuring an unprecedented-for-its-time five different battle themes, and finally, by making them all really really good.

You see? Look at all that. Most of that isn't canon at all, I made it up! And none of that could have happened if Earthbound wasn't designed exactly the way it was, in exactly the time and place it was. Like a perfect storm, it needed every single part it has to make all that possible. The world, the enemies, the music, the sound effects, the silent main characters, the great writing and localization efforts for the NPCs, all of it, and it had to be done in the mid-nineties. Anything before that would have been underdeveloped (Mother 1?), and any RPG past that would have relied on poorly-written scripts and overblown voice acting and complicated 3D-rendered graphics and anime nonsense melodrama like all the others. You see? I've played many games, I've replayed many games, I've enjoyed some, deeply admired some, thought a great deal about some, shrugged at some, derided and cursed some others. However, I have never, ever, ever, ever CARED as much about a game in my entire life as I do for this one. It's true, just look at my other reviews on this site, they're all sarcastic and try-hard and shit-posty. I always hide behind a veneer of sarcasm and humor because I'm afraid of being vulnerable and revealing my genuine feelings about something for fear of being mocked or proved wrong, so when I bother to be this sincere? Well, they must be on to something.