I'm sure everyone has some stories of absolutely ridiculous shit they believed as a kid, or things that went over their head. One of mine is that we owned the NES version of Narc as a kid and I didn't know what heroin was so I just figured those guys in the second level were throwing little missiles that made you flash different colors for some reason. That makes no sense, but neither does anything in Mario, so why not?
I thought about this a lot while playing Earthbound for the first time in like 20 years. I'd always known it was kind of a goofy game with a lot of jokes. I even remembered some good ones. Most of them flew right over my head as a kid, though, because everything is so deadpan. Ness' dad talks about how his mom works too hard while literally never being at home. The rolling HP bar ties character incapacitation to the UI element of the HP number, rather than the actual attack. There's a guy who forces a free bike on you no matter what you say, but then you can essentially never ride it. Kids today don't get that one either, I've seen them complaining that the bike is useless online.
There was no reason to question the internal logic of a game back then, and I had not yet realized the value of not taking adults at their word. I did ask questions at times, but I mostly would accept the arbitrary rules imposed on me by the adults who ruled my life. I didn't know what value I could have outside of, say, good grades in school. Even so, the idea of a cool adventure where you save the world from an evil alien dude was a fun fantasy even for me.
So playing this as an adult, it's way funnier and I have a better tactical brain to understand how to win fights. It's breezier and more enjoyable overall, but my perspective is entirely different. I wouldn't say it's some big takedown of it's own concept. It enjoys RPGs plenty, and somebody has to save the world from the evil alien guy. The kids are out of their depth, though. It's hard to see at times because each of them gets around three sentences of dialogue, but it's there. The one time Ness himself gets any kind of attributed dialogue is in Lumina Hall, close to the end of the game, when his thoughts are written on the wall. "What's going to happen to us?" he wonders.
You unlock the secret powers of the mind. You give up your human flesh bodies with the knowledge that you might never get them back. You fight a literally incomprehensible monster: an alien who couldn't handle the gap between his childhood raised by humans and his origins as a space invader, so he essentially lobotimized himself instead of deal with it.
And then it ends. The ending seemed so cool and grand when I first played the game, but now I see how incredibly abrupt it is. It's done! You beat the boss! Poo goes right back home, Jeff stays with the father he has an incredibly strained relationship with after the most comically awkward goodbye ever written, and then you walk home. You're allowed to linger and talk to everyone again, but at some point you quit and wake up the next morning and go back to school. To the world where the adults rule you.
When I played Mother 3, it was the game in this series that I liked most because it dealt with tragedy head-on. It showed the characters being directly affected by death and loss, and there were even adult main characters! Now I've gone back around to these kids. When I was young, I envied them. As an adult I feel bad for them. Their quest let them touch the very edges of the strange, rough world of adults, and now it's over and nobody is ever going to help them reckon with it. There will at least be a lot of whatever you put in for your favorite food. Oh you wrote in ass? Well,
I thought about this a lot while playing Earthbound for the first time in like 20 years. I'd always known it was kind of a goofy game with a lot of jokes. I even remembered some good ones. Most of them flew right over my head as a kid, though, because everything is so deadpan. Ness' dad talks about how his mom works too hard while literally never being at home. The rolling HP bar ties character incapacitation to the UI element of the HP number, rather than the actual attack. There's a guy who forces a free bike on you no matter what you say, but then you can essentially never ride it. Kids today don't get that one either, I've seen them complaining that the bike is useless online.
There was no reason to question the internal logic of a game back then, and I had not yet realized the value of not taking adults at their word. I did ask questions at times, but I mostly would accept the arbitrary rules imposed on me by the adults who ruled my life. I didn't know what value I could have outside of, say, good grades in school. Even so, the idea of a cool adventure where you save the world from an evil alien dude was a fun fantasy even for me.
So playing this as an adult, it's way funnier and I have a better tactical brain to understand how to win fights. It's breezier and more enjoyable overall, but my perspective is entirely different. I wouldn't say it's some big takedown of it's own concept. It enjoys RPGs plenty, and somebody has to save the world from the evil alien guy. The kids are out of their depth, though. It's hard to see at times because each of them gets around three sentences of dialogue, but it's there. The one time Ness himself gets any kind of attributed dialogue is in Lumina Hall, close to the end of the game, when his thoughts are written on the wall. "What's going to happen to us?" he wonders.
You unlock the secret powers of the mind. You give up your human flesh bodies with the knowledge that you might never get them back. You fight a literally incomprehensible monster: an alien who couldn't handle the gap between his childhood raised by humans and his origins as a space invader, so he essentially lobotimized himself instead of deal with it.
And then it ends. The ending seemed so cool and grand when I first played the game, but now I see how incredibly abrupt it is. It's done! You beat the boss! Poo goes right back home, Jeff stays with the father he has an incredibly strained relationship with after the most comically awkward goodbye ever written, and then you walk home. You're allowed to linger and talk to everyone again, but at some point you quit and wake up the next morning and go back to school. To the world where the adults rule you.
When I played Mother 3, it was the game in this series that I liked most because it dealt with tragedy head-on. It showed the characters being directly affected by death and loss, and there were even adult main characters! Now I've gone back around to these kids. When I was young, I envied them. As an adult I feel bad for them. Their quest let them touch the very edges of the strange, rough world of adults, and now it's over and nobody is ever going to help them reckon with it. There will at least be a lot of whatever you put in for your favorite food. Oh you wrote in ass? Well,