Earthbound is a pretty cool game. I guess that goes without saying, now. It’s a different spin on a JRPG that really show how games don’t just have to be about getting your numbers bigger to win against the next boss. Games are art, and Earthbound is a good example why.
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| A place long ago and far away. |
I never played Earthbound as a kid partly because it came a big box and for SNES games I figured that meant it had / needed a multi-tap and I’d need friends to play it. It also had the “it stinks” marketing campaign which I reacted to quite badly at the time. Fortunately, in recent years, YouTube has come along in the form of
Chuggaconroy and
Stephen Goerg (and friends) to show me just how great this game is.
I started playing Earthbound (on the WiiU Virtual Console) in early 2017 and played until mid-late 2018. So it’s been a while since I finished, and a really long time since I started. Still this game is so full of fun and interesting things that I wanted to talk about, that I thought I’d write a post.
As always, beware of spoilers for Earthbound. I totally recommend playing it yourself or watching a good
Let’s Play.
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| Kay-o. You Thank. |
Things I Liked
There’s practically nothing I didn’t like about Earthbound. It is, at its core an incredibly charming game in story and style, that has a really interesting combat system. As with a lot of SNES RPGs of the era, the store is somewhat simple, but filled with interesting and well-rounded characters. As you journey around the world every place you go is unique, memorable and interesting, and every character you meet is also unique, memorable and interesting.
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| Bones bones bones |
Playing Earthbound I left, feeling as though I had been to another world and met ,learned about and loved people along the way. This particularly included the characters in the main party, I can’t think of a lot of other games from this era (or honestly ever) where the party was this deeply characterized with understandable motivation and struggles in the world.
I also liked the art style in. It’s simple, but very visually appealing, and everything was clear and easy to see. The battle system in particularly is fascinating with large and interesting art along with Earthbound’s notorious psychedelic backgrounds. I think there’s almost no chance that anyone who’s seen Earthbound would ever confuse a screenshot with any other game (except maybe its
sequel).
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| Very rewarding. |
The music is also quite iconic, helping to illuminate the style and feeling of the world. It’s a mix of cheerful and creepy. It’s style is very varied from, SNES meets rock-and-roll in the early urban areas or synthetic weirdness when you’re fighting the UFOs and Robots in the creepy underground bases.
More specifically I love the scrolling health mechanism. The combat is turn based, but when you take damage, rather than the damage being taken from your HP right away, your HP ticks down over a (relatively) short period of time. In the case of big or fatal damage, this gives you enough time to use a healing item or cast a healing spell, which will start healing you from wherever your HP has ticked down to, cause your health to tick up (much faster than it ticks down).
I think this is a fantastic mechanism for a number of reasons. First off, it keeps you interesting in and focused on the combat, because you always need to be ready to abandon your planned command in the menu and get to healing as quickly as possible. This felt to me like a really good method as opposed to some of the Active Time Battle present in other games like the Mario RPG family.
I also like it aesthetically. The HP counter is styled as an [odometer] rolling number, and so the ticking is styled as the number rolling down. Something about that really just appeals to me (although I’d love to see it styled as a train-station flip clock). Finally, it has provoked a thought about how you could structure HP and damage differently in a game, which I will talk about more later.
The final thing I wanted to talk about in the things I love is the way they handle mismatches between your level and the enemy level. Lots of SNES RPGS which came before (and after actually) forced you to keep fighting low level enemies in low level areas long after you were levelled up. In Earthbound, thanks to their visible enemy system, where enemy sprites are visible on the real world and you touch them to initiate combat, enemies will actually run from you if they think they can’t defeat you. This means that if you want the XP you can go after them, but if you don’t want to they’ll stay out of your way.
This is also combined with the other nice effect of the visible enemy system. If you surprise the enemy you get an extra round of attack (and if they surprise you they do). When they’re running you automatically get that extra round, and if the game calculates that you’d win in that round it doesn’t make you even enter the fight. It just gives you the XP and your other rewards for the fight. This is a wonderful touch in the game and honestly a thing that a lot of games still don’t implement that nicely.
Things I Didn’t Like
There’s not much I don’t like about Earthbound and a lot of them are easily forgiven seeing as this game had a very difficult development cycle and has some incredible things built into it.
The one thing that constantly frustrated me playing Earthbound was the inventory. It’s small and there are a lot of things that need to go into it and it’s often not very clear what a lot of items do and when you need them. Now that being said compared to a lot of other games it’s a much more effective system and it has things like a callable storage company that will take things to storage for you and bring it back, all you have to do is find a phone, call and wait in a place they feel safe to get to.
Still, “cleaning the fridge” is a regular activity, probably every hour or so. The mechanics for doing so are clunky and the whole thing just grinds the game to a halt. So a little more flexibility in design and a little more explanation would have been nice.
Another element they introduced which seemed like a good idea at the time is condiments. These alter the effects of your healing items. Ketchup on your hamburger improves the amount of HP you get back and sugar improves a cup of coffee (which I think gives you magic points). On the other hand ketchup in your coffee is supposed to make it worse, as is sugar on your hamburger.
Unfortunately, if you want to use it you have to keep it in your inventory and the game decides automatically which condiment to apply (and not always the best one). This means that you lose a inventory spot, for a chance to improve one healing item, not quite as much as having two of the same healing item. So the whole system becomes useless and cumbersome. Not that the developers could be expected to make one, but a rudimentary crafting system would have made this work really well. It might also have tied in nicely with the PC who builds and fixes things.
The game is also a bit slow. That’s probably somewhat intentional, but the maps are large and intricate and sometimes it takes a very long time to go anywhere, even if the enemies are running from you. There is a fast travel system (and a very nicely diegetic one at that), but it has a limited number of places you can be dropped off, so you still get to walk.
The final thing I didn’t like about Earthbound was it’s ad campaign. I’m not sure that, being the kid I was in the 90s I’d have liked Earthbound. I had strong opinions that if you didn’t have swords and magic, it wasn’t an RPG. I *might* have come around on Earthbound, but the whole
It Stinks ad campaign they ran with back when the game was new turned me right off. I hated scratch-and-sniff and the whole it’s gross so boys will love it thing in the 90s just turned me off.
It's not the game’s fault, but I think a different campaign might have brought me in (also a smaller box, since I assumed that all of the big snes boxes were for multi-taps and I didn’t really have much in the way of video-game playing friends as a kid.
Things I Noticed
It would have been nice to have a little more gender parity in the party, the world and the story in general. Paula, the only female playable character is portrayed as very strong, but is also quite stereotypically girly. On its own I think that’s great, but having a different type of female character would have been a nice balance to the game. She is also kidnapped significantly more often than her male counterparts. Given that this is a game developed in Japan in the 1990s, it's not outrageous for its time, but it does feel limited in light of a lot of modern games and media.
As I mentioned I did not play this game as a kid for a variety of reasons. That being said I’m not sure that this is ever a game I’d have liked as a kid. It feels as though it is intended for a much more mature audience, with more uncomfortable ideas, more disturbing situations and more complex problems to be solved. Given some of the discussion I’ve seen about this games development that’s intentional and I think it’s good to have a game that does a good job of maturity and complexity of story.
Things I’d Include In a Game
The first thing I’d include in a game is the active health system for a menu based RPG. I think there’s a lot of neat ways to play with it including to alter the spin speed as status based attack or to somehow mess with the numbers. I’ve also been considering a version which is some kind of liquid system where you pour health in and the enemies try to pour health out and you’re trying to manage keeping more going in than they’re getting out.
I also think I’d like to look at more audiences for games. I recognize this is not a unique thing at this point, but I like the idea that two games with similar mechanics could be aimed at very different audiences depending on how their story is constructed.
The final thing I think everyone should include in their games is the attention to detail. I love the attention to paid to the detail in both the story and the programming and while I know there’s a ton of people who worked on this game, I feel like
Shigesato Itoi and
Satoru Iwata really poured a lot of themselves in to the game.
Final Things
I’m really glad I played Earthbound. I’m also really glad I played it as an adult, because that gave me a lot of perspective on the story and the characters.
I’m also really glad I got to play Earthbound. A few years before it was released for the WiiU I remember walking around the local comic convention and seeing Earthbound boxes for $1000 a pop. It’s not that easy to find physically and it’s really nice that it got a digital release for the WiiU. I’m hoping that Nintendo remembers how important that kind of access is and makes sure that everyone will always be able to have access to important games like this one.
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| Somehow still a question 24 years later. |
