Earthbound (SNES)
Published by Nintendo
Developed by Ape Studios
By Graham Tsui
Back in 1995, when RPGs were just starting to emerge as a major genre in console gaming, Nintendo released a quirky, offbeat game called Earthbound for the SNES. Throwing a significant amount of promotion behind it, Nintendo hoped that it would take off with U.S. gamers starved for more RPGs. It ended up falling short of expectations, but ultimately developed a loyal cult following that has thrived to this day.
Better known in Japan as Mother 2, Earthbound is actually the second game in the quirky Mother series, although the first was never released in North America. At first glance, the game appears to be laughably crude. The graphics are aggressively and deliberately rendered in a sub-par manner more befitting an 8-bit system rather than a 16-bit system. Outlines of buildings and characters look as if they were rendered with an MS Paint pen tool. If you think that’s strange, that’s not even the most unusual aspect of the game. Earthbound is one of the few RPGs that take place in a quasi-20th-century setting. Your main party is made up of kids who could have walked out of a Leave it to Beaver episode. There are no elves or goblins or other monsters often associated with medieval or fantasy settings. Instead, you get to fight street punks, corrupt policemen, hippies, and my favourite enemy, the “Annoying Old Party Man.” (I’m not kidding, that’s what it actually says on the battle screens.)
The battles are actually the only conventional things in the game. They handle exactly like early Dragon Quest games — turn-based, menu-driven affairs where stat “boxes” represent your characters as you fight in first-person perspective. Much like Chrono Trigger, you can see random enemies onscreen before you encounter them, but it takes a certain amount of skill to avoid most of them.
The main draw of the game, though, is its offbeat tone. Many characters speak in non-sequiturs. Ridiculous events happen for no logical reason at all. Though the main plot has something to do with stopping aliens from conquering the world, subplots involve a travelling jazz band, a crazy cult bent on painting the world blue, and a bunch of weird creatures too shy to talk without a self-help book.
It’s that tone that makes Earthbound such a unique RPG, and what has attracted the loyal following it has gathered over the years. While it may not be for everyone, it’s definitely a must-play for RPG fanatics looking for something different. So go into your closet, dust off that old SNES, and raid your buddy’s collection of SNES games to see if you can find a copy in his collection to borrow. If you don’t have any moral issues with downloading and playing ROMs, that’s also an option, at least until Earthbound is finally re-released for the Wii as part of their Virtual Console library of games. After all, it is your moral imperative to protect the world from annoying old party men. Because if you won’t do it, who will?
