A spectacularly clever and creative metroid-like game. The powerups are all interesting and multi-faceted, and provide a variety of ways to work your way through the many puzzles and platforming challenges of the world.

The map is dense with secrets, fun to explore and experiment with, and even though many of the secrets are collectible macguffins, there are interesting rewards for collecting enough of them.

The experience is a little bit soured by some steep difficulty spikes that feel very out of place, and some annoyingly precise platforming that can turn a few key crossroads into obnoxious choke points.

Further, the tail end of the "100%" experience can become tedious, as it consists of extremely meticulous secret hunting that will (for most folks, myself included) eventually devolve into picking your way through a guide.

Overall, though, there's a ton of fun interactions and clever ideas that make the game a delight to work through, and the majority of the experience is refreshingly dense and concise. The long tail of the game lost me after a while, but the true secret-hunting sickos will have plenty to rummage around for.

I played EarthBound without any nostalgia for it and with relatively few expectations. My overall impression was that it was broadly enjoyable despite its moments of tedium; frequently clever and fun, but never really taking its oddball setting much farther than vague pseudo-satire. It's storytelling meanders between a delightfully absurd jumble of earnest heroism, creeping horror, offbeat comedy, and wild psychedelia, all of which help to keep the experience varied and unexpected.

The game has a number of small mechanical twists that demonstrate its "not like other JRPGs" philosophy pretty nicely, as well as a number of aesthetic changes to the usual genre trappings that are fun to puzzle out (e.g. figuring out what the heck the "crying uncontrollably" status does).

Actual moment-to-moment gameplay can be rather tedious to at times, despite the twists; I recommend leaning on emulator save states (if available) to avoid retreading a dungeon if you whiff a boss fight. There is an in-built hint system that's also quite handy, so you'll pretty rarely need to look up anything even if you're playing casually.

A lot of folks have a deep connection to this game that comes from playing it at a formative time, and I can certainly appreciate how impactful that can be. For me, EarthBound didn't manage to pull on my heartstrings at all; its own irreverence and paper-thin characters got in the way of any real emotional investment.

That said, it was consistently fun to see what kind of nonsense the game had hidden around each subsequent corner, and that's a perfectly good reason to play. I liked it well enough!