Especially by today's standards EarthBound doesn't have the deepest story or gameplay, but what does make this game special is that there's a really unique charm with the game. Even though this game has inspired a lot of other games, there's really nothing quite like EarthBound. There could be a million quirky silly little rpgs made and none of them could be EarthBound, and even after playing the game twice I still don't completely know why. I think part of it is that EarthBound has a really unique sense of humor. It's hard to explain, but with a lot of jokes in this game you can sort of tell it was written by a bunch of middle aged men thinking "haha what if this happened that would be kinda funny lmao" and I really like it. The game's charm comes through in more ways than that though, with its constant wackiness, the music, the writing, and more. At the end of the day there's no game that does it like EarthBound does, and there'll probably never be one.