And I thought Metroid would have been impossible without a guide!
Earthbound Beginnings is immensely charming, but I wouldn't quite call it "fun". What's most interesting about it is how similar the content and story are to Earthbound. More than anything, this feels like a practice attempt at making the game Itoi had always intended, but wasn't able to until the Super Famicom/Nintendo became available.
The songs, locations, playable characters, macguffins, even the end boss are all effectively the same as Earthbound, but with minor name changes. It's an impressively large adventure for the NES, and seems like Itoi got everything he could out of a cartridge with a capacity measured in kilobytes. This is worth playing if you enjoyed Earthbound and are curious about its background, but I wouldn't recommend it by itself to anyone besides die-hard fans of 80s JRPGs.
Earthbound Beginnings is immensely charming, but I wouldn't quite call it "fun". What's most interesting about it is how similar the content and story are to Earthbound. More than anything, this feels like a practice attempt at making the game Itoi had always intended, but wasn't able to until the Super Famicom/Nintendo became available.
The songs, locations, playable characters, macguffins, even the end boss are all effectively the same as Earthbound, but with minor name changes. It's an impressively large adventure for the NES, and seems like Itoi got everything he could out of a cartridge with a capacity measured in kilobytes. This is worth playing if you enjoyed Earthbound and are curious about its background, but I wouldn't recommend it by itself to anyone besides die-hard fans of 80s JRPGs.