(This is the 99th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
I'm constantly hearing great things about Earthbound or "Mother 2", a 1994 JRPG developed by Ape Inc. and HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo. Admittedly, when hearing of the game's Japanese and Western titles, I had a totally different type of JRPG in mind. One with a much more sad tone than I was met with.
It doesn't take long for Earthbound to show you what kind of game it is, and it won't take you long to figure out whether you like said tone or not. As a child, I would have absolutely adored it. As an adult? I absolutely adore it. The humor hits a lot but it misses quite often as well, at least for me. Depending on how that balances out for you, you might be more or less inclined to play on Earthbound once you start.
However, there are other reasons to continue or stop playing this game, which I want to go over in my review of this game.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 7/10
You're playing the character that you can give your own name, but is canonically called "Ness". It takes place after the events of the first Mother game, which I haven't played, but I didn't ever get the impression that you need to play that. (That one got first localized in 2015 under the name "Earthbound Beginnings")
The game is set in the fictional country "Eagleland", which is a parody of the USA. The word "parody" should already give you an idea about the tone of this game. This is not a medieval / fantasy JRPG. The game's setting is themed around a parody of Western culture, which is why you can enter burger and pizza joints, go to ATM machines to withdraw cash, rest in hotels, heal in hospitals, are able to go to police stations and much more. There is a humorous tone to nearly everything in Earthbound, and it's what drives the game's charm.
The story has you investigate a meteorite crash in your home town. You figure out that an evil creature has engulfed the world with his evil nature and turned lots of creatures hostile. A bee from the future tells Ness that he is prophecized to save the world and that he has to collect melodies in a Sound Stone to put a stop to the evil.
On your journey forward, you visit several other towns, forests, a desert, swamp and more. I spent 12 hours with this game, so I didn't see everything, but expect quirky characters, odd obstacles to overcome and eccentric bosses to fight.
Characters that have stuck with me are apple and orange kid (one who is deemed smart and capable, and who isn't, among which you can choose to help one), a man who interrupts your gameplay to take a photo of you (which I hope is then shown at the end of the game), a boss who wants to turn everything blue and created a cult over it and several more. Lots of NPCs have funny one-liners you can read through alongside the usual lore dump they are used for in RPGs.
I've read up on how the story ends, and it seems to take things into a very interesting direction. So if you see it through, I believe you will be satisfied with it. For me, the reason why I didn't stick with it can be read through just below.
GAMEPLAY | 11/20
Earthbound does a lot of cool things that are pretty unique for its time and have stuck with the genre until today. Most of these things are related to the game's setting and quirkiness, but I found some interesting things to highlight in its gameplay as well.
Just recently, it was announced that Like a Dragon 8 would introduce a feature that lets you win battles automatically, if enemies are a lot weaker than you are. I don't know if Earthbound was the first game to do it, but that feature is in here.
Additionally, the game does not use an overworld. You seamlessly move from town to town in this game world. For random encounters, you can see enemies placed on the map, which I've last seen in 1992's Romancing SaGa. When these enemies run towards you, additional enemies can run up to you before the encounter starts.
The game does cool things with its times as well. Buying salt packets or ketchup and eating food with these items in your inventory leads to boosts to the food items, like additional health recovery. Not all "enhancers" work well with all foods, which impacts the boost you get.
Finally, each time you win in battle, you don't just get money from it, but rather a money deposit from your father to your bank account. Since money on your person is halfed whenever you die, you can choose to keep money on your account until you want it to buy stuff. I can't say that I think this is a good unique feature, but it is certainly unique.
So Earthbound does a lot of interesting things and many of these are pretty neat ideas. In its basic form though, the game employs similar gameplay mechanics to other RPGs of its time. The game uses a turn-based battle system in which battle order is chosen randomly each turn. This means you can use a healing item, but die if the enemy is chosen to attack first. That part in particular was really frustrating to me during my playthrough. With the help of an emulator, you can easily rewind and get different outcomes, but I've noticed just how RNG dependent the gameplay is during tough fights.
For example, say you are on low health. You can choose to heal, but if the enemy does an attack, you will lose all or most of that health again anyway. Or you can use a powerful PSI attack, but if the enemy activates a PSI shield right before that, you just waste a turn and PP points (yes, PP points). If you attack and the enemy attacks, you may die, if you haven't healed. Healing items and PP points are limited, so you can easily run out before killing a tough enemy. Or, alternatively, the enemy uses buffs or PSI shields while you are attacking, which lets you kill them before they get a chance to get enough hits in.
I got the impression that RNG dependency is too high on the one hand and/or grinding requirements are on a level that I'm not interested in engaging with.
Inventory management is also not the best and much more tedious than it needs to be. You can carry few items until you get additional party members, at which point you can carry twice as much and the issue is not nearly as bad. But for the first 10 hours or so, with all the key items you have, I found myself hard-pressed to be able to carry more than one food item, which made battles unnecessarily harder.
I've seen some people say that the game gets much easier as you go, so sticking with it may be rewarding in that sense. To me, the games 30+ hour runtime meant that I wasn't really too motivated to grind through the gameplay for that much longer.
Outside of combat, progression is also achieved by doing some light puzzles here and there or finding proper items to progress, such as figuring out a way to get past pencils that block your way forward. How could that be done?
Overall, your tolerance for the combat will decide how far you will take it with this game, and as is evident by this game's cult following to this day, the journey has been worth it to many.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
When I played a few hours, I couldn't believe how recognizable and nostalgic the music sounds in this game. I have never played the game before, and only after a couple hours did I realize that I actually have heard one track in this game in particular many, many times over the years without knowing that it's from Earthbound. "Sanctuary Guardian" or the What Meme is what I'm referring to, and if you give it a listen, I can guarantee that anyone spending more time online than the average person will have heard of it (listen to at least 20-25 seconds in).
This track's weird, quirky, confusing and oddball vibes are exactly what the whole game sounds like though, and not only does it make the game's sound immediately recognizable no matter how many years later you think back on it, but I also found it to add to the wackiness of the game's moment to moment gameplay, and in a positive way for sure.
Sound design overall is very good in this game, with unique sounds at a time where a lot of games use very similar sounds for most actions, so overall, I had a pleasant time listening to the game.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 10/10
The grounded, albeit parodied, real life setting is always very pleasant to me. Yes, there are humans and animals in control of evil who come after you like zombies, but seeing the setting and the design of the various towns be grounded like this is getting more and more rare these days where fantasy and sci-fi is included in nearly every single AAA game, so I appreciate the visual treat Earthbound ended up being in that regard.
In general, the look of the game is very distinct. You control kids who look like kids, in a world filled with your average modern-day adults (with quirky personalities), and run around from burger joint to flea market on your quest to save humanity. It's a pretty funny combination and works really well. So the art design I find to really be fantastic in this. Lots of stuff feels like it was drawn or written by children and then added into the game, so they really embraced this vibe and went for it.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
Few games have the same vibe as Earthbound. I've read that Undertale is one inspired by Earthbound. Even there, I can't say I ever got the same vibe from it, and I don't think that was intended either. The closest modern games to me that have this vibe are the South Park RPGs, and according to the South Park creators Earthbound apparently was a game they took inspriation from for those ones too. Considering the South Park RPGs, especially the first one, are some of my favorite games ever, you could see how I dug Earthbound so much, though I'd say there is one big difference between those two in terms of the vulgarity of course.
I've described it a few times in this review already, but quirky, whacky and weird will be common adjectives that will be used to describe the game. For example, early on, a bee of all things comes to you to tell you that you are to save this world and that it will follow you until you finish your journey. Minutes later, you get to your neighbor's house and the bee unceremoniously is swatted down and dies. Can't say I've played a big budget game during this time where things like that ever happened. It's unexpected, it's funny and even today, I was caught off guard by it.
CONTENT | 8/10
The game takes roughly 30 hours to beat if you mainly focus on the main path. There is plenty of distractions on top of that, and lots of those hours are spent talking to people and finding your way forward that way. There are lots of items to find, buy and get to use on key things, lots of unique characters to meet and many different enemy types to fight. It being an RPG however, it also means that many of those hours will be spent in combat, which, as described above, has not aged very well.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
The unique world map (no overworld) is a nice change from other RPGs for its time. Seeing enemies and being able to dodge random encounters at times is a good approach to them in my opinion.
In terms of the mission design, for the most part, it's your typical RPG affair. You go from town to town, dungeon to dungeon and beat boss after boss as you get stronger and stronger. While the dungeons I've seen all looked pretty much the same, towns are where a lot of work has gone in. Sure, you get the same main areas in all of them, but in layout and non-key buildings (hospital, burger joint, hotel..), there is enough variety there to give towns a distinct feeling.
In terms of the dungeons, as mentioned, they have all looked the same in the first third of the game. You enter caves and either come out the other end in a mountaineous arae or something similar, or you find yourself in the bigger part of the cave and have to move upwards to find the boss. Gets the job done, but not much creativity here.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
The tone and setting of this game are both very unique components of it, and there are plenty of QoL improvements the game brings to the fold. Unfortunately, the combat system is too RNG-dependent for me to really say that all changes from your typical RPG work well here, and overall, Earthbound still is a 90s RPG in its core, and uses a similar formula for the most part.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
Early on, there is a choice to go with one of two kinds of kids to help them. Maybe there are more of those later on, but other than that, the game is not gonna offer you branching paths in key areas.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 79/100
Earthbound is among those dozen or so games from the 99 games I've played as part of this challenge so far that I can recommend everyone to at least check out. There is a reason it remains this popular, and it's one of the most unique games in terms of atmosphere that you will be able to play from the early 90s. The SNES is a console that keeps (kept) on giving and Earthbound is one of its many highlights, though the combat might be unendurable for some at this point in time.
I'm constantly hearing great things about Earthbound or "Mother 2", a 1994 JRPG developed by Ape Inc. and HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo. Admittedly, when hearing of the game's Japanese and Western titles, I had a totally different type of JRPG in mind. One with a much more sad tone than I was met with.
It doesn't take long for Earthbound to show you what kind of game it is, and it won't take you long to figure out whether you like said tone or not. As a child, I would have absolutely adored it. As an adult? I absolutely adore it. The humor hits a lot but it misses quite often as well, at least for me. Depending on how that balances out for you, you might be more or less inclined to play on Earthbound once you start.
However, there are other reasons to continue or stop playing this game, which I want to go over in my review of this game.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 7/10
You're playing the character that you can give your own name, but is canonically called "Ness". It takes place after the events of the first Mother game, which I haven't played, but I didn't ever get the impression that you need to play that. (That one got first localized in 2015 under the name "Earthbound Beginnings")
The game is set in the fictional country "Eagleland", which is a parody of the USA. The word "parody" should already give you an idea about the tone of this game. This is not a medieval / fantasy JRPG. The game's setting is themed around a parody of Western culture, which is why you can enter burger and pizza joints, go to ATM machines to withdraw cash, rest in hotels, heal in hospitals, are able to go to police stations and much more. There is a humorous tone to nearly everything in Earthbound, and it's what drives the game's charm.
The story has you investigate a meteorite crash in your home town. You figure out that an evil creature has engulfed the world with his evil nature and turned lots of creatures hostile. A bee from the future tells Ness that he is prophecized to save the world and that he has to collect melodies in a Sound Stone to put a stop to the evil.
On your journey forward, you visit several other towns, forests, a desert, swamp and more. I spent 12 hours with this game, so I didn't see everything, but expect quirky characters, odd obstacles to overcome and eccentric bosses to fight.
Characters that have stuck with me are apple and orange kid (one who is deemed smart and capable, and who isn't, among which you can choose to help one), a man who interrupts your gameplay to take a photo of you (which I hope is then shown at the end of the game), a boss who wants to turn everything blue and created a cult over it and several more. Lots of NPCs have funny one-liners you can read through alongside the usual lore dump they are used for in RPGs.
I've read up on how the story ends, and it seems to take things into a very interesting direction. So if you see it through, I believe you will be satisfied with it. For me, the reason why I didn't stick with it can be read through just below.
GAMEPLAY | 11/20
Earthbound does a lot of cool things that are pretty unique for its time and have stuck with the genre until today. Most of these things are related to the game's setting and quirkiness, but I found some interesting things to highlight in its gameplay as well.
Just recently, it was announced that Like a Dragon 8 would introduce a feature that lets you win battles automatically, if enemies are a lot weaker than you are. I don't know if Earthbound was the first game to do it, but that feature is in here.
Additionally, the game does not use an overworld. You seamlessly move from town to town in this game world. For random encounters, you can see enemies placed on the map, which I've last seen in 1992's Romancing SaGa. When these enemies run towards you, additional enemies can run up to you before the encounter starts.
The game does cool things with its times as well. Buying salt packets or ketchup and eating food with these items in your inventory leads to boosts to the food items, like additional health recovery. Not all "enhancers" work well with all foods, which impacts the boost you get.
Finally, each time you win in battle, you don't just get money from it, but rather a money deposit from your father to your bank account. Since money on your person is halfed whenever you die, you can choose to keep money on your account until you want it to buy stuff. I can't say that I think this is a good unique feature, but it is certainly unique.
So Earthbound does a lot of interesting things and many of these are pretty neat ideas. In its basic form though, the game employs similar gameplay mechanics to other RPGs of its time. The game uses a turn-based battle system in which battle order is chosen randomly each turn. This means you can use a healing item, but die if the enemy is chosen to attack first. That part in particular was really frustrating to me during my playthrough. With the help of an emulator, you can easily rewind and get different outcomes, but I've noticed just how RNG dependent the gameplay is during tough fights.
For example, say you are on low health. You can choose to heal, but if the enemy does an attack, you will lose all or most of that health again anyway. Or you can use a powerful PSI attack, but if the enemy activates a PSI shield right before that, you just waste a turn and PP points (yes, PP points). If you attack and the enemy attacks, you may die, if you haven't healed. Healing items and PP points are limited, so you can easily run out before killing a tough enemy. Or, alternatively, the enemy uses buffs or PSI shields while you are attacking, which lets you kill them before they get a chance to get enough hits in.
I got the impression that RNG dependency is too high on the one hand and/or grinding requirements are on a level that I'm not interested in engaging with.
Inventory management is also not the best and much more tedious than it needs to be. You can carry few items until you get additional party members, at which point you can carry twice as much and the issue is not nearly as bad. But for the first 10 hours or so, with all the key items you have, I found myself hard-pressed to be able to carry more than one food item, which made battles unnecessarily harder.
I've seen some people say that the game gets much easier as you go, so sticking with it may be rewarding in that sense. To me, the games 30+ hour runtime meant that I wasn't really too motivated to grind through the gameplay for that much longer.
Outside of combat, progression is also achieved by doing some light puzzles here and there or finding proper items to progress, such as figuring out a way to get past pencils that block your way forward. How could that be done?
Overall, your tolerance for the combat will decide how far you will take it with this game, and as is evident by this game's cult following to this day, the journey has been worth it to many.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
When I played a few hours, I couldn't believe how recognizable and nostalgic the music sounds in this game. I have never played the game before, and only after a couple hours did I realize that I actually have heard one track in this game in particular many, many times over the years without knowing that it's from Earthbound. "Sanctuary Guardian" or the What Meme is what I'm referring to, and if you give it a listen, I can guarantee that anyone spending more time online than the average person will have heard of it (listen to at least 20-25 seconds in).
This track's weird, quirky, confusing and oddball vibes are exactly what the whole game sounds like though, and not only does it make the game's sound immediately recognizable no matter how many years later you think back on it, but I also found it to add to the wackiness of the game's moment to moment gameplay, and in a positive way for sure.
Sound design overall is very good in this game, with unique sounds at a time where a lot of games use very similar sounds for most actions, so overall, I had a pleasant time listening to the game.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 10/10
The grounded, albeit parodied, real life setting is always very pleasant to me. Yes, there are humans and animals in control of evil who come after you like zombies, but seeing the setting and the design of the various towns be grounded like this is getting more and more rare these days where fantasy and sci-fi is included in nearly every single AAA game, so I appreciate the visual treat Earthbound ended up being in that regard.
In general, the look of the game is very distinct. You control kids who look like kids, in a world filled with your average modern-day adults (with quirky personalities), and run around from burger joint to flea market on your quest to save humanity. It's a pretty funny combination and works really well. So the art design I find to really be fantastic in this. Lots of stuff feels like it was drawn or written by children and then added into the game, so they really embraced this vibe and went for it.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
Few games have the same vibe as Earthbound. I've read that Undertale is one inspired by Earthbound. Even there, I can't say I ever got the same vibe from it, and I don't think that was intended either. The closest modern games to me that have this vibe are the South Park RPGs, and according to the South Park creators Earthbound apparently was a game they took inspriation from for those ones too. Considering the South Park RPGs, especially the first one, are some of my favorite games ever, you could see how I dug Earthbound so much, though I'd say there is one big difference between those two in terms of the vulgarity of course.
I've described it a few times in this review already, but quirky, whacky and weird will be common adjectives that will be used to describe the game. For example, early on, a bee of all things comes to you to tell you that you are to save this world and that it will follow you until you finish your journey. Minutes later, you get to your neighbor's house and the bee unceremoniously is swatted down and dies. Can't say I've played a big budget game during this time where things like that ever happened. It's unexpected, it's funny and even today, I was caught off guard by it.
CONTENT | 8/10
The game takes roughly 30 hours to beat if you mainly focus on the main path. There is plenty of distractions on top of that, and lots of those hours are spent talking to people and finding your way forward that way. There are lots of items to find, buy and get to use on key things, lots of unique characters to meet and many different enemy types to fight. It being an RPG however, it also means that many of those hours will be spent in combat, which, as described above, has not aged very well.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
The unique world map (no overworld) is a nice change from other RPGs for its time. Seeing enemies and being able to dodge random encounters at times is a good approach to them in my opinion.
In terms of the mission design, for the most part, it's your typical RPG affair. You go from town to town, dungeon to dungeon and beat boss after boss as you get stronger and stronger. While the dungeons I've seen all looked pretty much the same, towns are where a lot of work has gone in. Sure, you get the same main areas in all of them, but in layout and non-key buildings (hospital, burger joint, hotel..), there is enough variety there to give towns a distinct feeling.
In terms of the dungeons, as mentioned, they have all looked the same in the first third of the game. You enter caves and either come out the other end in a mountaineous arae or something similar, or you find yourself in the bigger part of the cave and have to move upwards to find the boss. Gets the job done, but not much creativity here.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
The tone and setting of this game are both very unique components of it, and there are plenty of QoL improvements the game brings to the fold. Unfortunately, the combat system is too RNG-dependent for me to really say that all changes from your typical RPG work well here, and overall, Earthbound still is a 90s RPG in its core, and uses a similar formula for the most part.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
Early on, there is a choice to go with one of two kinds of kids to help them. Maybe there are more of those later on, but other than that, the game is not gonna offer you branching paths in key areas.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 79/100
Earthbound is among those dozen or so games from the 99 games I've played as part of this challenge so far that I can recommend everyone to at least check out. There is a reason it remains this popular, and it's one of the most unique games in terms of atmosphere that you will be able to play from the early 90s. The SNES is a console that keeps (kept) on giving and Earthbound is one of its many highlights, though the combat might be unendurable for some at this point in time.