Feels to me like Itoi’s vision of what he wanted for the Mother series didn’t quite materialize here, likely because it wasn’t achievable with the technology available at the time. It lacks the comedic whimsicality and self deprecating tone of Earthbound or the world building, multidimensional characters and soul-crushing narrative of Mother 3. Although to be fair, he stated that you should play through it “completely blind and take your time, it is supposed to be a slow game of discovery”. I definitely did not do that.

Respect it for what it is
- a unique open-ended and fun JRPG that was groundbreaking for its era - but if you skip it and go right into Earthbound before Mother 3 you’re missing basically nothing and nobody’s gonna judge you for it.

If you do choose to play it, I highly recommend playing the Mother 25th Anniversary Restoration Hack found here:
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/5193/
It removes the stuff that was censored in Earthbound Beginnings and rebalances the game quite a bit to remove the unnecessary grinding slog that plagues most turn based games of the time.