The thing that surprised me the most about Earthbound was that, even nearly 30 years and like 4 generations of games inspired by it later, it still feels fresh and original. I've tried to play Earthbound before, but much like FF6 I bounced off of it hard like a decade ago and just now came back to it. In that decade I've played a lot of games that were clearly inspired by Earthbound, and even some that clearly inspired Earthbound, but none of them exactly hit on exactly what makes this game so special.

It's hard for me to nail down exactly what that is. Is it the irreverent tone? The endless torrent of dad jokes? The 20th century Americana setting? The cartoony art direction? The psychedelic imagery? The themes? I honestly don't know. It's probably some combination of all those things and something completely irreplicable. However, the feelings this evoked in me were distinctly different from basically anything I've ever played that followed in its footsteps, and any other JRPG for that matter.

It's hard for me to say I wholeheartedly loved Earthbound. There's a lot of gameplay annoyances throughout, even if they're intentional or a parody of Dragon Quest I still oftentimes found myself rolling my eyes like the HP counter rolls when you get hit with an attack that does mortal damage to your whole party. That being said I'm very glad that I went back and gave this another shot, because it is something still worth experiencing even after years of pretenders to the throne.