I loved my time with this just like I thought I would. of course I did, it's earthbound. its great. everybody knows that, I don't need to be the millionth person to tell you that the mr saturns are funny, item organization is annoying, and that giygas is actually really messed up and scary. we both know.

however, I feel like I might've played a completely different copy of the game compared to everyone else where the emotional writing was spotty and I ended up not getting invested in a good chunk of the characters in the game. I guess you don't really need to though, as long as you care about your party, but the problem is that the game really wants you to care about a lot of stuff. I guess I just didn't see it that way which is a shame.

I really enjoyed earthbound's story more when it was a self-centered character story on growing and maturing with your friends and exploring the world. that's when it fucking hit. everything with giygas was still fine (pokey was actually great I hate him) but it felt like they didn't put as much stock into it as they should've, save for endgame. thats when it gets all the attention and they goddamn nail it

overall, mother 3 is more my jam but earthbound is still something everyone should try

its just a playable hollywood action movie with a bit of cheese and that's fine by me :) def plays and feels clunky though, idk if the ps4 remaster fixed a lot of that stuff but this deserves a complete overhaul

edit: idk if anyone else talks about this but compared to 2 and 3, you can kinda see a bit of naughty dog's prior work still shedding its skin here, mostly in the presentation and acting. it's a bit more game-y than its sequels, and some character animations and cutscenes really remind me of their ps2 work with how things are framed or scenes end (specifically when drake says "this is so not cool" when the plane gets hit in the intro) just something kinda neat i want to write down here

this is like having a chicken patty from summer camp as a kid. it was magical, and sometimes you wish you could go back in time to have another.

but eventually you piece together that a single small group of people who worked the kitchen probably didn't have the time to make every single one of those patties for every single kid at the camp. and they definitely didn't have any type of secret recipe.

so you head down to costco or some other wholesale place, pick up some of the chicken patties, go home, heat one up, and it ends up tasting... fine. its ok. you might tell yourself that since its been so long, they either changed the recipe or you simply picked up the wrong kind and try again. either way, you eventually realize that the patty wasn't good cause of the patty itself (though im gonna defend all kinds of chicken patties rn, its really really hard to mess them up), but instead because of your environment when you had them.

for me, i went to the same summer camp as a kid from when I was around 7ish to 14. the details are a little hazy but im pretty sure once every other week we had a chicken patty day and that shit was transcendent. I got to hang out with my friends, have pink lemonade iced tea, two chicken patties, and played gaga afterwards. it seemed silly, but after I left camp, I felt like I would never have a better chicken patty in my life ever again. turns out i would have ones that tasted just as good, but they never felt quite as good.

for a while, Skyrim was the only non-turn based rpg of its type that I felt I needed to play (pokemon was still a big part of my life). it was the first game I played when my dad got the family an xbox 360 slim bundle with Forza and Skyrim, so as a kid, I chalked a lot of the bugs and parts that probably just didn't work up to being part of this crazy fantastical world. never picked up on them until I got older and it was easier to critically analyze stuff I enjoyed. I specifically remember something glitching with the dwemers and thinking that their technology must've been so crazy strong that it wouldn't let me progress and that I have to get stronger. tapply that same school of thought to the chicken patties and its just me being 23 having a chicken patty at home instead of being 10 at summer camp, with justifications like "its probably the wrong brand" or "they changed the formula" before realizing that this is how its always been.

is this basically the same thing as nostalgia glasses? maybe, probably. but since I can essentially do a 1:1 comparison between this game, the special food I had at summer camp, and how i tried to recapture the magic of both, im calling this my chicken patty game

this game is fucking insane. contra has always been difficult like a lot of early konami games, but while a lot of castlevania's difficulty comes from not understanding your limits and abilities and playing unsafely (though there are def cheap exceptions), contra seemingly doesn't give a shit and has limited continues while throwing as much as it can at you, which is now even more with the power of the snes. when its not suffocating you with bullets though its actually pretty fun and rewarding to overcome, but most of the game feels like you're just getting run over

really wish we got more jojo beat em ups like this going forward after phantom blood. all star battle and eyes of heaven are totally fine for fanservice, but playing through an entire part will always be cool. the ps1 port of hftf pulls it off pretty decently with some special fights and segments, but 3d beat em ups with completely unique levels and sections just make more sense for the series going past part 3 that have more diverse stands/settings that aren't simple enough to translate into a 2d fighter setting.

just imagining the fact that we could've had ps3 stone ocean and (maybe ps4) steel ball run games with even more polish is bumming me out. (a part 4 game would also be dope as shit but im just going based off the fact that this was developed after part 5's completion and the phantom blood game was just because it was the series anniversary) if you think about it we would probably be getting a jojolion game now if we kept the pattern going

I really want to like this more than I do, but the frequent encounters in town (and ESPECIALLY with how much you get mobbed after the antique store till endgame) really discourage exploration for how much the game seemingly wants you to do that. I can rarely try and enter a building since most of the time, I was running away from like two or three enemies.

obviously there needed to be some enemies around, that's a given. the claustrophobic hallways of the school and hospital along with their otherworld segments especially benefit from crowds of enemies, and maybe saving a mass of them out in the open for one specific segment where you really need to haul ass (probably rushing to the lighthouse) would've made that part more memorable, but we didn't need this much. in fact, I'd even go so far as to say that a lack of monsters could've made this even more scary while letting the environment do the talking which, when it happens, they absolutely fucking nail it so we know they're more than capable of producing horror that way. it's a delicate balancing act that goes from unsettling to annoying pretty quickly and is unfortunately a pretty big sour spot on an otherwise great game that really pushed the ps1 to its limits.

totally gonna replay this though, its fucking insane and i love it and i want to try to really improve on a technical level since im aware I didn't really reach the skill ceiling