Earthbound – Super Mateo’s Gaming Reviews

So if this is Earthbound, what planet was departed from and who?

Information:

Writeup Date: June 22, 2021
Game’s Date of Birth: June 5, 1995
Console: SNES
Publisher: Nintendo
Creator: Ape
Genre: RPG

Anecdotes: Looking at Twitter, it appears there is a demand there for Earthbound to hit the Switch. Nintendo posted an update with the new games that were added to the library, but Earthbound wasn’t on there. It’s clear to me that this game has its fans. It’s odd and it’s quirky, but I think that’s exactly what people like about it. I’m going to see what it’s all about. I’m playing the game blind. It’s new to me. May I bask in the glory.

It’s also gotten to the point where I realize that I won’t be able to play these RPGs in full. There are just too many RPGs out there and I am unable to drop tons of time into these game. These writeups will only grade the parts of the game that I got to see and play.

Description: Just 5 minutes into the game, I can already see how bizarre it is. On the naming screen alone, the game automatically assigns names to characters through a “Don’t Care” options, like a Quick Pick in the lottery. It seriously named one of my party members “Poo.”

Yeah, now shut up and let me eat my pasta.

Anyway, I think the story is about a boy (I hit “Don’t Care” and the game named him Ness) who goes out in the middle of the night to take a look at a meteorite or UFO or something in town. At some point, it switches to daytime, and I seriously couldn’t describe what the plot of the game is after that.

In keeping up with the odd nature of this game, I had an issue with one of my letter keys on my keyboard, so I am going to use a 25 letter alphabet for this writing. Try to guess which letter doesn’t appear in the article.

The Good:

There is an Auto-Fight command, which is really nice. This allows players to skip entering commands each round, but it also takes away any chance of healing during the battle.
I’m only in the town of Onett and this game has already cracked me up a few times. The dialogue is rather witty, so credit to the writers or translators on what they were able to accomplish.

The Bad:

This must be where Ocarina of Time got their ideas for annoying dialogue boxes. A character will ramble through some long, boring story that always ends in a binary choice, one of which will end the talking, but the other will cause the story to be repeated. It won’t take long before players are annoyed with it. (Edit: One of the characters actually talked about this in the game. They didn’t talk about the option at the end, but a character did say how players just try to scroll through the words and miss important information because of it.)

The Photos: