Game Review #3: EarthBound

Gather 'round kids. It's story time with The LKIF. Once upon a time, there was a little 8-year-old child who just got a Wii. So what game does he get? Smash Bros. of course! And which character does he question the existence of first? Ness! Why? Because he has no idea who the hell Ness is! Anyway, his brother tell him he's from something called EarthBound and since he's 8, he doesn't bother looking it up and just moves on with his life continuing to play as PKMN Trainer and failing to figure out how to switch to Charizard. Who was this beautiful, little child? Why, it was a young me, of course. So yeah, I didn't know about Ness until I was eight, and I didn't know much of anything about EarthBound until early last year. Curious about this character that somehow has been in every Smash game, I took it upon myself to learn everything about the game without actually playing it. That failed epically. So, through means that I don't find it necessary to disclose to the public, I played the game (and if you're gonna say that I couldn't have pirated it since the game crashes before the final boss and deletes your save file if you pirate the game, I already knew that, so good for you; you just ruled out one possible way I could've played the game.) Anyway, EarthBound is an old RPG on the SNES. The first thing you'll notice is that instead of being an angsty teenage knight in a world being attacked by a dragon that you have to slay with your sword, Exsabermastery Soul, you're a thirteen-year-old boy in a suburban house and at the moment, your biggest problem is that a meteorite landed, like, less than a mile from your house and the only monsters you have to deal with are angry dogs that you hit with a baseball bat. You could call that animal abuse, but no! They've been made evil by the influence of the game's main villain Giygas so it's perfectly acceptable to hit them with bats. But you won't be fighting dogs forever, though. By the time this game's done, you'll have fought sentient stop signs, religious painters, and a couple palette swaps of vomit. So, anyway, you have psychic powers (that are never explained in this game) and you have to beat an omnipotent alien alongside 3 other kids that you never really speak to and you just assume are friendly with you if the silent protagonist switch were turned off. One of the things I liked about this game was a serious case of role reversal. The main character, Ness, has mostly abilities that make it easy to consider him as mainly a healer/support character, whereas Paula, the only female in your party, is the main special, or PSI, damage dealer having access to all three of the elemental PSI attacks. That's quite different from the usual structure placing the main character ass the offensive badass and the hot girlfriend as a healer. Also, the game has a much more relatable than most JRPGs, and RPGs in general I guess. Since it's set in a modern world, you're much more likely to understand how everything works in the world. Instead of riding around on horses or some old Royal Caravan, you take buses to get between towns. NPCs drop their Old English speak for modern, often comical dialogue. People tell you not to stare at their hips. People play EarthBound in EarthBound. People pass out drunk. Oh, sorry translation team. People pass out from 'too much coffee' #totallyathing. The game is almost like a Mario RPG dialogue-wise with all the comedic charm of games like Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. As for the battle system, it's nothing special to tell you the truth. It replaces most RPG's 'magic' or 'special' option with 'PSI' which are your psychic powers, but that's about as much innovation as the battle system has. There is this thing about it where instead of taking all the damage at once, you take it one at a time, so if you can end the battle before it finishes going all the way down, you end up taking half the damage or even skipping out on dying every now and then, but most of the time, it's not actually gonna matter no matter how over-sold the idea is. Aside from that, it's just regular turn-based combat. As for the graphical quality, it's the SNES. That's about all that one can say about it. Aside from the LSD trip in the background of all the battles, it's just kinda flat, kinda pixelated graphics that you can expect from late SNES games. I think the game's defining feature, though, is its ability to transition between bright and cheerful to dark and depressing without even thinking about it. Most games that try to do this crash and burn. I couldn't even find that many examples that did it to the extremes that EarthBound reached. Most games pick one or the other and stick with it. There's no cartoon religious cults in Wind Waker, and there's no gloomily lit clowns in Twilight Princess. I think. To be honest there might be and just no one cares enough about it to check. But EarthBound easily makes the switch back and forth between these two extremes. In fact, this is reflected in the game's ending. To get to the final area of the game, you have to go through Saturn Valley, home of the Mr. Saturns, who have been stated to represent innocence in the game. Also, the area itself has bright, full colors and happy music. But after talking to Dr. Andonuts in order to get to the final area, you'll be informed that the only way to do it is to go back in time, which can only be achieved if you and your party transfer your consciousness into robot bodies and you may never be able to return to your real body or even back to your time, which, for those of you with broken brains, is pretty damn creepy in and of itself. But the game's final area adds to this with its creepy, blank white and gray tiles making up almost the whole area, broken up by nothing but metallic grey Starman enemies and metallic, sphere-shaped warp points, all leading up to the final boss's room which is just a series of pipes over a black background. And then there's all the final boss's creepy forms. I won't go into anymore detail but anyway, belated spoiler alert. So for all its short-comings, that are solely a result of being 16-bit, EarthBound is well worth the HOLY SHIT THIS THING TOOK ME 16 HOURS?!