When I started playing EarthBound for my retro review, I knew it might be too big for me to handle – howlongtobeat.com said it took 40 hours, after all. What I didn’t know, however, was that the game would become soon become “too big to handle” in a completely different way – because I loved its story too much to write only 750 words about it.
This isn’t to say that EarthBound’s gameplay is bad, or even that there isn’t much to say about it – I will certainly have to hold myself back a lot here as well. In truth, this title’s gameplay is amazing, and well ahead of its time, but just not as perfect as its other elements.
To start, Earthbound is a top-down, turn based JRPG in the style of the old Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest games. It stands apart from these titles (and almost every other JRPG at the time) by its modern setting, which also plays a role in its gameplay – EarthBound sees you, Paula, Jeff, and Poo beat down police officers and clowns alike with bats, pop guns, and, uh… bombs. And in terms of this, though the moment-to-moment action is nothing special, the game is engaging, helped in great part by its surreal animations. This, however, only really evolves when more party members are present, as the first 5 hours or so consist largely of spamming baseball bats. I think the game really hits its stride when Jeff is added as a party member, which allows you to get into a rhythm of using him to scan enemies, then having Paula hit their weakness, and letting Ness deal out damage between heals.
Less positive words can be used to describe the title’s puzzles. Most of them are kind of cute (like finding a way to pay the debts of a jazz band off) but any that require the usage of the inventory can be incredibly frusturating. After all, its item system for some reason is split by characters, oftentimes isn’t spacious enough, and is cumbersome to sift through – and these are all exacerbated when the path forward requires use of a certain item. An example that sticks out would be when a bubble-gum blowing monkey joins the party (who for some reason is represented as an “item”). At one point, to reach a rope that is off the floor, you need to “use” the monkey item so that it can blow a bubble, fly into the air, and pull down the rope. Such a solution has little context and is never used again.
But besides that, I don’t have much to complain about Earthbound’s gameplay. I mentioned before that I believe the title to be considerably ahead of its time, and nowhere is this more apparent than in its exploration segments. To start, the game (much like many modern RPGs), nixes frusturating random encounters for a system that sees you attempt to sneak behind enemies on the overworld. Even better, if you touch an enemy that is far below your level, it will instant-kill them while still giving you the XP, saving you from a redundant battle. This is something even modern RPGs fail to include!
In turn, we can look at Earthbound’s gameplay as a teacher of sorts, an emblem of what makes some old games frusturating (clunky inventories) and what makes some of them timeless (unique mechanics that go onto define genres). However, it took nearly a decade for its key aspects (surreal modern tone, non-random encounters) to hit the mainstream. Why is this? Well, I believe that, just how Earthbound can be emblematic of retro gaming’s pros and cons, it can also be emblematic of retro game culture, or more specifically, gaming culture of the 90s. Earthbound is strange today, but I would guess that it was really strange in the 90s – a time where the moniker of “game clone” was omnipresent, and companies and gamers alike were more afraid than ever of breaking free of their standard audience. As more people (and different kinds of people, at that!) picked up controllers years later, however, we began to see a little bit of Earthbound in popular titles (the unabashedly quirky tone of Katamari, for example, or the encounter styles/modern setting of Persona 3). Now, with Undertale being the worldwide sensation it is, I feel like the world is finally ready to give Earthbound the love it truly deserves.
Works Cited
EarthBound. Directed by Shigesato Itoi, 1994.
