Okay, yes, this game is cringey. No one is questioning that, lmao. It’s a gamer themed dating game based around real living people. You really don’t need to go much further than that to understand why everyone makes fun of it. But don’t worry, I’ll keep talking about it and make it all your problem too 🖤🖤🖤


First of all, I just want to say I realize that they clearly went into this game thinking this would be a funny joke of “hey, let’s make a game about ourselves.” “Yeah, hahaha you know what would be funny? If it were a dating game, you know how cheesy those can get.” “Oh, that’s perfect! We can totally poke fun at each other and the game genre at the same time!” And yes, there’s nothing wrong with that in theory. But then you actually sit down and play the game and realize you’re playing a high school dating simulator where you play as a high school girl who is interested in the other high school boys. Except they’re based on 30-year old men, still acting and looking like the 30-year old men they’re based off of, and the cherry on top is one eventually getting into a scandal about whether or not he was sexting with high school aged girls. So yeah, I’m going to find this game incredibly creepy. It’s like watching Grease, where all the high schoolers are so clearly adult men and women, but you have to sit and pretend they’re all 17. Except in addition to that, they’re all epic gamers, a few of which you can argue have some pretty questionable morals. (Though I won’t act like any of the actors in Grease didn’t either lol)

The game still has the qualities that dating visual novels have, and there’s a clear talent put into the UI and art. I don’t want the idea of the game being “cringe” to be anything involving the art or music department or anything like that, it's just when you decide to make a dating game about real people, even if it’s supposed to be a joke, it’s going to be freaking weird. It’s especially going to be weird when the game ends up focusing on specifically Normal Boots people. So bluntly put, that’s what I think about the game. It’s a weird and uncomfortable premise for a game, so as a result I think that the game is weird and uncomfortable.

The game ended amazingly for me though, with it crashing hours in: perfectly encapsulating the spirit of the whole experience.

A famous bit of pop-history is that one in twelve men in Asia are direct descendants of Genghis Khan. Similarly, one in three indie games are direct descendants of Earthbound.

Ten minutes of playing Earthbound will give you more insight into the state of internet humor over the past two decades than you could ever hope to learn in a hundred hours of going down rabbit holes on your own. At first I was shocked at how "online" a lot of the game felt, but I realized that I was looking at it backwards; Earthbound isn't online, online is Earthbound. It's become a meme to mock a lot of games in the indie space for being "the quirky RPG influenced by Earthbound", but these roots run far deeper than that. Earthbound isn't just relevant to games like Undertale, or LISA, or OMORI, but rather to everything and everyone that's come out of Starmen.net since 1999. You can follow this thread of logic to some dark places, such as the statement that Homestuck was inspired by Earthbound. Rage against this if you wish, but know that you can never truly hope to deny it.

Since the game is nearly thirty years old at this point, a lot of the people who haven't grown up with games like Earthbound have only ever been exposed to what's come in its wake. Undertale is an especially obvious example — I'd call it an absolute shameless ripoff if it didn't explicitly improve on everything I didn't like in Earthbound — and that's what a lot of younger people have latched onto. All of this to say that Earthbound's progeny are already out there being fruitful and multiplying, spreading their influence further and further across the reaches of generations of fresh blood in gaming. Undertale has been around and been important for long enough that aspiring developers are now taking influence from it, and not Earthbound. This is not an inherently good or bad thing, but it's interesting to think about how many layers deep we've gotten, and how easily you can trace all of these new games back to their singular forefather. Or foreMOTHER, I suppose.

Ultimately, though, Earthbound is still a game that has to be played to be completed, and a lot of the gameplay mechanics here are the weakest part of the experience. All of the influential writing and excellent tracks tend to temporarily vanish into thin air as soon as you're put into a bland, boring dungeon bereft of NPCs, which the game likes to do a lot. Each of these little underground spaces has a rotation of about three palette-swapped enemies tops, loop through one of scant few possible dungeon songs, and are huge mazes for what feels like no reason other than to pad runtime when you run into a dead end. The several hours of playtime from when you walk into the desert to when you enter Summers for the first time are a massive, massive slog of slow backtracking and fetch quests, and there's not enough meat on the writing bone to make it go down any easier. Thankfully, nothing else ever feels like as much of a grind as that, but it's a ridiculously long sequence that dragged my whole experience down.

There's still more than enough here to love. A lot of set pieces are written incredibly well, whether they're funny, moving, or fucked up, and it's an experience that a lot of modern titles inspired by it have yet to fully replicate. There's a lot of fat that I wish could have been trimmed off, but this game was the first to do a lot of what's done here. Some growing pains are understandable, and could even be excused.

Earthbound is a unique game, and maybe that's all anything needs to be.