A famous bit of pop-history is that one in twelve men in Asia are direct descendants of Genghis Khan. Similarly, one in three indie games are direct descendants of Earthbound.
Ten minutes of playing Earthbound will give you more insight into the state of internet humor over the past two decades than you could ever hope to learn in a hundred hours of going down rabbit holes on your own. At first I was shocked at how "online" a lot of the game felt, but I realized that I was looking at it backwards; Earthbound isn't online, online is Earthbound. It's become a meme to mock a lot of games in the indie space for being "the quirky RPG influenced by Earthbound", but these roots run far deeper than that. Earthbound isn't just relevant to games like Undertale, or LISA, or OMORI, but rather to everything and everyone that's come out of Starmen.net since 1999. You can follow this thread of logic to some dark places, such as the statement that Homestuck was inspired by Earthbound. Rage against this if you wish, but know that you can never truly hope to deny it.
Since the game is nearly thirty years old at this point, a lot of the people who haven't grown up with games like Earthbound have only ever been exposed to what's come in its wake. Undertale is an especially obvious example — I'd call it an absolute shameless ripoff if it didn't explicitly improve on everything I didn't like in Earthbound — and that's what a lot of younger people have latched onto. All of this to say that Earthbound's progeny are already out there being fruitful and multiplying, spreading their influence further and further across the reaches of generations of fresh blood in gaming. Undertale has been around and been important for long enough that aspiring developers are now taking influence from it, and not Earthbound. This is not an inherently good or bad thing, but it's interesting to think about how many layers deep we've gotten, and how easily you can trace all of these new games back to their singular forefather. Or foreMOTHER, I suppose.
Ultimately, though, Earthbound is still a game that has to be played to be completed, and a lot of the gameplay mechanics here are the weakest part of the experience. All of the influential writing and excellent tracks tend to temporarily vanish into thin air as soon as you're put into a bland, boring dungeon bereft of NPCs, which the game likes to do a lot. Each of these little underground spaces has a rotation of about three palette-swapped enemies tops, loop through one of scant few possible dungeon songs, and are huge mazes for what feels like no reason other than to pad runtime when you run into a dead end. The several hours of playtime from when you walk into the desert to when you enter Summers for the first time are a massive, massive slog of slow backtracking and fetch quests, and there's not enough meat on the writing bone to make it go down any easier. Thankfully, nothing else ever feels like as much of a grind as that, but it's a ridiculously long sequence that dragged my whole experience down.
There's still more than enough here to love. A lot of set pieces are written incredibly well, whether they're funny, moving, or fucked up, and it's an experience that a lot of modern titles inspired by it have yet to fully replicate. There's a lot of fat that I wish could have been trimmed off, but this game was the first to do a lot of what's done here. Some growing pains are understandable, and could even be excused.
Earthbound is a unique game, and maybe that's all anything needs to be.
Ten minutes of playing Earthbound will give you more insight into the state of internet humor over the past two decades than you could ever hope to learn in a hundred hours of going down rabbit holes on your own. At first I was shocked at how "online" a lot of the game felt, but I realized that I was looking at it backwards; Earthbound isn't online, online is Earthbound. It's become a meme to mock a lot of games in the indie space for being "the quirky RPG influenced by Earthbound", but these roots run far deeper than that. Earthbound isn't just relevant to games like Undertale, or LISA, or OMORI, but rather to everything and everyone that's come out of Starmen.net since 1999. You can follow this thread of logic to some dark places, such as the statement that Homestuck was inspired by Earthbound. Rage against this if you wish, but know that you can never truly hope to deny it.
Since the game is nearly thirty years old at this point, a lot of the people who haven't grown up with games like Earthbound have only ever been exposed to what's come in its wake. Undertale is an especially obvious example — I'd call it an absolute shameless ripoff if it didn't explicitly improve on everything I didn't like in Earthbound — and that's what a lot of younger people have latched onto. All of this to say that Earthbound's progeny are already out there being fruitful and multiplying, spreading their influence further and further across the reaches of generations of fresh blood in gaming. Undertale has been around and been important for long enough that aspiring developers are now taking influence from it, and not Earthbound. This is not an inherently good or bad thing, but it's interesting to think about how many layers deep we've gotten, and how easily you can trace all of these new games back to their singular forefather. Or foreMOTHER, I suppose.
Ultimately, though, Earthbound is still a game that has to be played to be completed, and a lot of the gameplay mechanics here are the weakest part of the experience. All of the influential writing and excellent tracks tend to temporarily vanish into thin air as soon as you're put into a bland, boring dungeon bereft of NPCs, which the game likes to do a lot. Each of these little underground spaces has a rotation of about three palette-swapped enemies tops, loop through one of scant few possible dungeon songs, and are huge mazes for what feels like no reason other than to pad runtime when you run into a dead end. The several hours of playtime from when you walk into the desert to when you enter Summers for the first time are a massive, massive slog of slow backtracking and fetch quests, and there's not enough meat on the writing bone to make it go down any easier. Thankfully, nothing else ever feels like as much of a grind as that, but it's a ridiculously long sequence that dragged my whole experience down.
There's still more than enough here to love. A lot of set pieces are written incredibly well, whether they're funny, moving, or fucked up, and it's an experience that a lot of modern titles inspired by it have yet to fully replicate. There's a lot of fat that I wish could have been trimmed off, but this game was the first to do a lot of what's done here. Some growing pains are understandable, and could even be excused.
Earthbound is a unique game, and maybe that's all anything needs to be.