This is one of those classic Nintendo games that you hear great things about, and everybody knows about Ness due to Smash Bros. At some point, many Nintendo fans get around to it because it looks like everything you'd expect from a Nintendo game. This is because it's unique, and that's quite frankly the best quality the game has going for it. Instead of a fantasy based adventure with swords and magic, you're playing a RPG as a bunch of kids with baseball bats and hamburgers. When considering its charm and quirkiness, it makes sense as to why its such a cult classic.
As much I as did enjoy the more positive aspects of this game, it falls well short of Nintendo's other great franchises. Part of what helps this game live up to legendary status is undoubtedly its time of release. The flaws it has in an age of game reviewing would not go unnoticed today, and I want to be a bit more critical than most people are and talk about some of them.
The thing that becomes very clear early on and will stop many players from even enjoying the game to begin with, is how inconsistent the difficulty of the game is. Players will get destroyed by the enemies around Onett in the beginning of the game, and the game will not open up until you defeat Frank, the area boss. Frank is not a fight that players are going to roll up to and immediately be able to handle. For me and many other players I've talked to, sometimes you have to grind upward of an hour or so at the very beginning of the game just to become strong enough to get out of the first town. And then when you do, the game is just suddenly not difficult all the way to the very end. There were a few exceptions that came with their own annoyances. After recruiting Paula, your 2nd party member, she is extremely underleveled. Fights are not hard to win with her since Ness can usually take care of enemies, but she dies so often that it's hard to grind XP with her, and this is a game where fallen party members do not leave the fight with 1 HP. You have to take them to a hospital in a town, which is inconvenient and costly. The other fight I remember having some difficulty with was "NN", but immediately upon completing it you pretty much become set up to never lose again. Veteran players will understand why, but that's as much as I'll say on that.
The game likes to pretend that things are open by letting you walk through very large towns, but the game rarely ever offers you real choices. You just eventually figure out where you're supposed to go. This still rings true with encounters. It's not that they're random encounters, but the game tries to deceive you into thinking you pick and choose what you fight. In reality, any enemy that spots you is going to outspeed you on the overworld map heavily, and if the game wants you to fight something, you're going to fight it. The encounter system itself makes this even more true than it should be. You're introduced to a mechanic that allows you to gain an advantage when entering a battle if you sneak up on an enemy, but that also comes with bad starts if they get you first. In practice, this does not ever work out for you. This is because enemies will always spot you. What this means is you often can't try to even attempt to outrun them or they will attack you from behind and take an early advantage if you do. The only time you truly get to take advantage of the favorable start is against enemies that avoid you, but at that point they are no longer worth fighting because they are a lower level than you.
Battles come with a relatively simple combat system, and I came away from this expecting better. This is one of those games that have very annoying status effects, especially the mushroom status that messes with your controls after fights. Frequently the only way to fix these statuses is to visit a hospital, so getting them can be quite annoying. The biggest missed opportunity however, was in the execution of the rolling HP meter. A lot of people like to credit Earthbound for the rolling HP meter, because it is a great idea. However, Earthbound did not effectively use it as a way to enhance battles. The only practical use it had was allowing for exploding trees to do 200 damage early game, which meant you had to defeat them last. This comes as a cheap shot the first time of course. In the late game, you can sometimes take advantage of the rolling HP meter after being damaged, but the sheer speed of it in this game makes saving your party members a little bit rough. This mechanic is actually fully realized in Mother 3, and is an excellent addition there. In that game, they can up the difficulty in fights, and very frequently that game is designed around bosses frequently dealing mortal damage, yet dealing with these blows is manageable and makes for some very engaging and intense boss fights that you can't really experience elsewhere. This mechanic is truly a unique one that can serve as justification to try out Mother 3 over other RPGs, but the same can't really be said for Earthbound.
Item management and menuing in this game is a bit annoying. I don't want to go into an essay on menuing, but this definitely stuck out to me as a more negative thing.
Finally, I want to say that while the story works, it feels like it barely works. The premise is fine and even solid, but again, in practice this story is really held together by a thread. Often times, the game feels like it doesn't know what it wants to do next, so it makes something up that does not particularly make a lot of sense. The Runaway Five are frequently used as a distraction and reason to do certain things, and whenever the game has reached a point where seemingly there is nothing you realistically can do to progress the story, Apple Kid bails you out with some ridiculous invention to put the story back on the rails. What is ironic about Apple Kid is that he seems almost telepathic. It's not just that he is a super genius, it's that he somehow always anticipates every possible problem you are going to encounter ahead of time, so when you run into the problem, he just appears with the solution. As funny as it can be due to its sheer absurdity, it is not good storytelling at all. The game was clearly designed for you to go through a bunch of areas and levels that the developers made, and then at the last second it seems they had to find some sort of justification as to why you do the things you do. Both Apple Kid & the Runaway Five don't have a huge reason to be part of the story, other than being very useful diversions.
Pokey, the annoying neighborhood kid, as everyone knows, becomes one of the main antagonists. How he actually gets to that point makes almost zero sense. It's clear in the beginning of the game that something is off with him, but his future appearances escalate so quickly that it's almost jarring. The silence of Ness as a protagonist may have something to do with this as well. Ness is such a neutral character that it is genuinely hard to believe that he could've done anything to make Pokey behave so irrationally as the game progresses. There are reasons as to why Pokey could've been brainwashed, but when those reasons disappear, Pokey remains the way he is. It's honestly weird. The rest of the party, while unique in battle, are pretty lifeless as well. They are characters you control, and there is not much else you learn about them. It works in the end, but I can't say I can walk away from this game with a favorite character because really no candidate stands out for that title.
This was a fine enough game. It works. It's not something I really have any desire to replay, and it was fun enough. At some point though, I feel people need to be more realistic about it. "Quirkiness" is a fun touch to add to your RPG. It is not a free pass to give a game a 5/5 rating and not take questions about how it could've been improved. So I think Earthbound was just okay in the end. Luckily, its sequel takes so many of its problems and just fixes them completely. I can at least thank this game for keeping me interested enough in trying out Mother 3, which is what I believe this game was striving to be to begin with.
As much I as did enjoy the more positive aspects of this game, it falls well short of Nintendo's other great franchises. Part of what helps this game live up to legendary status is undoubtedly its time of release. The flaws it has in an age of game reviewing would not go unnoticed today, and I want to be a bit more critical than most people are and talk about some of them.
The thing that becomes very clear early on and will stop many players from even enjoying the game to begin with, is how inconsistent the difficulty of the game is. Players will get destroyed by the enemies around Onett in the beginning of the game, and the game will not open up until you defeat Frank, the area boss. Frank is not a fight that players are going to roll up to and immediately be able to handle. For me and many other players I've talked to, sometimes you have to grind upward of an hour or so at the very beginning of the game just to become strong enough to get out of the first town. And then when you do, the game is just suddenly not difficult all the way to the very end. There were a few exceptions that came with their own annoyances. After recruiting Paula, your 2nd party member, she is extremely underleveled. Fights are not hard to win with her since Ness can usually take care of enemies, but she dies so often that it's hard to grind XP with her, and this is a game where fallen party members do not leave the fight with 1 HP. You have to take them to a hospital in a town, which is inconvenient and costly. The other fight I remember having some difficulty with was "NN", but immediately upon completing it you pretty much become set up to never lose again. Veteran players will understand why, but that's as much as I'll say on that.
The game likes to pretend that things are open by letting you walk through very large towns, but the game rarely ever offers you real choices. You just eventually figure out where you're supposed to go. This still rings true with encounters. It's not that they're random encounters, but the game tries to deceive you into thinking you pick and choose what you fight. In reality, any enemy that spots you is going to outspeed you on the overworld map heavily, and if the game wants you to fight something, you're going to fight it. The encounter system itself makes this even more true than it should be. You're introduced to a mechanic that allows you to gain an advantage when entering a battle if you sneak up on an enemy, but that also comes with bad starts if they get you first. In practice, this does not ever work out for you. This is because enemies will always spot you. What this means is you often can't try to even attempt to outrun them or they will attack you from behind and take an early advantage if you do. The only time you truly get to take advantage of the favorable start is against enemies that avoid you, but at that point they are no longer worth fighting because they are a lower level than you.
Battles come with a relatively simple combat system, and I came away from this expecting better. This is one of those games that have very annoying status effects, especially the mushroom status that messes with your controls after fights. Frequently the only way to fix these statuses is to visit a hospital, so getting them can be quite annoying. The biggest missed opportunity however, was in the execution of the rolling HP meter. A lot of people like to credit Earthbound for the rolling HP meter, because it is a great idea. However, Earthbound did not effectively use it as a way to enhance battles. The only practical use it had was allowing for exploding trees to do 200 damage early game, which meant you had to defeat them last. This comes as a cheap shot the first time of course. In the late game, you can sometimes take advantage of the rolling HP meter after being damaged, but the sheer speed of it in this game makes saving your party members a little bit rough. This mechanic is actually fully realized in Mother 3, and is an excellent addition there. In that game, they can up the difficulty in fights, and very frequently that game is designed around bosses frequently dealing mortal damage, yet dealing with these blows is manageable and makes for some very engaging and intense boss fights that you can't really experience elsewhere. This mechanic is truly a unique one that can serve as justification to try out Mother 3 over other RPGs, but the same can't really be said for Earthbound.
Item management and menuing in this game is a bit annoying. I don't want to go into an essay on menuing, but this definitely stuck out to me as a more negative thing.
Finally, I want to say that while the story works, it feels like it barely works. The premise is fine and even solid, but again, in practice this story is really held together by a thread. Often times, the game feels like it doesn't know what it wants to do next, so it makes something up that does not particularly make a lot of sense. The Runaway Five are frequently used as a distraction and reason to do certain things, and whenever the game has reached a point where seemingly there is nothing you realistically can do to progress the story, Apple Kid bails you out with some ridiculous invention to put the story back on the rails. What is ironic about Apple Kid is that he seems almost telepathic. It's not just that he is a super genius, it's that he somehow always anticipates every possible problem you are going to encounter ahead of time, so when you run into the problem, he just appears with the solution. As funny as it can be due to its sheer absurdity, it is not good storytelling at all. The game was clearly designed for you to go through a bunch of areas and levels that the developers made, and then at the last second it seems they had to find some sort of justification as to why you do the things you do. Both Apple Kid & the Runaway Five don't have a huge reason to be part of the story, other than being very useful diversions.
Pokey, the annoying neighborhood kid, as everyone knows, becomes one of the main antagonists. How he actually gets to that point makes almost zero sense. It's clear in the beginning of the game that something is off with him, but his future appearances escalate so quickly that it's almost jarring. The silence of Ness as a protagonist may have something to do with this as well. Ness is such a neutral character that it is genuinely hard to believe that he could've done anything to make Pokey behave so irrationally as the game progresses. There are reasons as to why Pokey could've been brainwashed, but when those reasons disappear, Pokey remains the way he is. It's honestly weird. The rest of the party, while unique in battle, are pretty lifeless as well. They are characters you control, and there is not much else you learn about them. It works in the end, but I can't say I can walk away from this game with a favorite character because really no candidate stands out for that title.
This was a fine enough game. It works. It's not something I really have any desire to replay, and it was fun enough. At some point though, I feel people need to be more realistic about it. "Quirkiness" is a fun touch to add to your RPG. It is not a free pass to give a game a 5/5 rating and not take questions about how it could've been improved. So I think Earthbound was just okay in the end. Luckily, its sequel takes so many of its problems and just fixes them completely. I can at least thank this game for keeping me interested enough in trying out Mother 3, which is what I believe this game was striving to be to begin with.