[Game Review] Earthbound/Mother 2

Let's get this out of the way now because it is the first thing that comes to mind when talking about this game: Earthbound is weird.  Known as Mother 2 in Japan, Earthbound was a low-selling JRPG on the SNES that, in the age of emulation and ROMs, went cult-classic and eventually classic outright.  The first game in the series was never released in the west (hence the name change), and the third and last game in the series is a rather contentious point with gamers at large, as it also never released in the west, and Nintendo has seemed largely uninterested in the idea.  Earthbound itself, as a matter of fact, was completely impractical to get a legal copy of until the mid 2010s when it was finally released on the Wii U and 3DS shop (along with Mother 1 on the former, but not the latter).  Before then, if you wanted to play the game legally you had to shell out nearly or over a hundred dollars for an SNES cart, a price far exceeding the game's actual rareness (a byproduct of cult hype, since the game was known to have sold poorly, but there were some 140k carts sold in the US).  But digging into what made this game such a cult hit in the first place can be a difficult and aggravating process, since no one can be clear as to what about the game they love so much, outside of one, often repeated mantra: Earthbound is weird.

Before I delve into spoilers, I want to give my go as to what makes this game so amazing, and why you should definitely play it, the kind of summation I struggled to find for over a decade (without spoilers) before I finally decided to bite the bullet and play the damned thing.  Sure, Earthbound is weird, but it's what makes it weird that truly makes it shine.  In the age of high fantasy or sci-fi in JRPGs (and RPGs in general), Earthbound is decidedly quaint in setting.  You start out as Ness (or whatever you decide to name him), a little boy with a baseball cap for armor, and a baseball bat or slingshot as a weapon, leaving his small town home to venture round a 90s-cum-60s America.  Of course, the country you're from isn't called America.  Instead it's called Eagleland.  You decide to leave home when a meteorite lands on earth and a little bee named Buzz Buzz tells you that you and three others are the chosen ones to stop the evil alien Giygas, an inconceivable entity of evil that will destroy everything if you don't follow your destiny.  You are then tasked to find eight shrines, each one with a song you must record before you can face Giygas, and to find your three friends that will help you in the final battle.  The story is pretty trite, borrowing from 50s sci-fi b-movies and the basic archetypes of heros and cosmic evils (even having a title page ripped right from a campy space age movie), but it's the minutiae between these things that really bring out what is so interesting in this game.  The iconography throughout is very 50s and 60s, lampooning various Americanisms from the hippy movement to the KKK, from rockabilly to evil corporate entities.  For a game from the 90s, this may sound a little odd of a time frame to be satirizing, but it makes sense once you realize one of the core themes is nostalgia and childhood innocence.  I didn't grow up in the 50s or 60s, but I can feel a tinge of nostalgia for a time gone past in this game, of children running amok on adventures and combating (in real life, metaphorically) domineering adults.  The 50s and 60s stylings that crop up in pockets of the game only further this feeling of cascading backward, of a time reflected on, not experienced in the moment.  And, without spoiling too much of the end of the game, this theme comes to a head when Ness and party are forced to confront an existential horror that itself uses imagery too familiar, too adult, to be stricken away with.  Nostalgia is key, childhood innocence the vessel, and the lock is that confrontation adulthood brings with the existential unknown of existence.  If some of these pieces seem a bit of a pastiche, that's because (don't be scared of it) this game is incredibly post modern.  It knows it's a game, it knows it's playing with tropes, and it plays with what you know and what you expect in a playful way.  Everything hangs together loosely in a web of self awareness that utilizes the JRPG, utilizes the gameness of itself to tie it all together into something singular and expressive.

If all that sounds interesting, than I recommend you stop reading this and play it because SPOILERS FORM HERE ON OUT.

 Earthbound's main draw is in how it uses Americanisms to play out the JRPG formula.  Bats and slingshots are weapons, baseball caps and ribbons are armor, and you spend most of the game going through quaint American towns and cities, boarding schools, and deserts with roadside drugstores.  Enemies in the game are often wildlife for the first third of the game, with crows and dogs the biggest threat to experience.  Eventually, angry adults under Giygas' influence start to attack the player, eventually having you confront a hippy-styled happiness cult dressed distinctly like blue Ku Klux Klanners.  The game uses this iconography to give a sense of familiar place for its fantastical story to take place, and for us to gain a sense of nostalgia as we play.  Ness can get a status ailment in the early levels called homesickness that he needs to call his mother in order to cure (it's notable that when he becomes a higher level, he is immune to this).  There is even an ailment where the characters get a cold or start to cry uncontrollably.  At one point, a boss is literally a pile of vomit.  A lot of the game uses these relatable pieces of childhood as a way of establishing a familiarity with nostalgia.  Eventually, the monsters become evil robots, mummies, and aliens, but it is a gradual progression as the game gets more and more outlandish.  Environments follow this trend too: Moonside is a hallucinatory version of the major city Fourside in the game, with its own Lynchian dream logic, and Lost Underworld is a dinosaur infested prehistoric land.  Even here, dreams and childhood creativity take a central place in what environments are shown.  The eight sanctuaries you're tasked with finding throughout the game always come with a memory Ness has of being a baby, his mother feeding him in his crib and talking to his father as to what to name him, and what kind of person he could be.  It's a powerful drawback, nostalgia experienced by a character meant to give us nostalgia, and a reminder that nostalgia is largely a timeless thing, so long as you have a memory of a time before.  When the eight sanctuaries are finally found, Ness gets an incredible stats boost, a literal strength he didn't have before.  That childlike sense of wonder, adventure, and fear only dissolves once you get to Giygas.

Giygas is something else.  He is a stark contrast to what you've encountered before, and is easily one of the most memorable final bosses in memory.  There is a relationship to birth and death, of pre-existence and post-existence, a concept of existentialism that looks into the void between our brief existence and taps into that inherent fear that we know all of this has to end.  For a game so largely about nostalgia, about looking back at innocence as you're forced to move forward and prove yourself as an independent person confronting the monsters in the world (even if those monsters themselves are childish in conception), it is striking that the end of the game would have you in a womb to fight the final boss.  Giygas is in an organic cave with tunnels like intestines, leading to a rib cage like structure with what looks like a cervix in the middle of it. When you approach it, Ness' head pops out, and you are forced to confront the horror you thought you were avoiding all this time.  We can be nostalgic and look back, but we can never look too far, because then we have to confront the truth that there was a time we didn't exist, in turn reminding us that one day we will cease to exist again.  In looking backwards, Earthbound brings us to the beginning.  As you fight Gigygas, his second form is revealed to be that of a ghostly, screaming face, repeating on screen as a tiled wallpaper, distorted and red.  As you enter his third phase, that face is revealed to be inside the skull of a fetus shape, a gasp of comprehension in a creature just beginning to be, and you realize that you are essentially aborting him (the Japanese title, Mother, starts to really jump out at you about now).  Before his life has properly started, you end him.  You remove the life, the anguish of existence, because you fear he will destroy the world.  It should be obvious by now that Giygas is existential dread incarnate, the evil within is the fear of death, and that you abort him by praying to your friends you met along the way and your families is no coincidence.  You use the community of others you've built along your adventures in order to beat the horror we all confront.  But it doesn't quite work.  Finally, on the ninth prayer, they call to you, the player, and ask you to pray for them.  The game tells you that you pray for them.  And finally, after you've done so, Giygas is vanquished, and everyone returns home, back to their parents, back to their homes, and finally sleep in their own beds, safe. 

It's exhausting, but also one of the most powerful moments a game has ever made me feel.  Earthbound plays with silly contradictions and adulthood anxieties, of debtors and debtees, of Ku Klux Klan iconography using the philosophy of love and happiness to manipulate people into a cult.  There are idols that corrupt people into doing awful deeds, and leave them whimpering and scared when they are gone.  The game downright toys with serious themes in a playful way, allowing you to acknowledge them, play with them, but never burden you with the weight of them.  It saves that for the last, and, to the game, most important theme.  You are the facilitator of Ness and co.'s destiny, a third person type indirect to the action onscreen, and in the final throes of that destiny, the game asks you to no longer be the vessel, but to actively participate as a character in the story. 

Earthbound's mechanics (I feel I should touch on here, very quickly) are your basic JRPG stuff: turn based battles, with spells (here PSI powers), items, and inventory management.  This is definitely where the game has its most trouble.  Inventory management is clunky and a chore.  Each character has only so much stuff they can carry, and key items and equipped items all take up a space, essentially permanently limiting you throughout the game.  Turn based battles are somewhat plain, with static enemy sprites (your team gets no representation outside of four windows at the bottom with health and PSI power levels) in front of psychedelic backgrounds.  It sounds mean to say, but you do get used to it.  The battles have one ingenious mechanic that doesn't show its true colors until late in the game: the rolling health counter.  If an enemy attacks you with more damage than you can take, your health isn't immediately set to zero.  Instead, it begins to cascade down, allowing for a quick heal if you have the chops for it.  Early in the game, your health pool is so small it is virtually impossible to take advantage of.  Later on, when health pools begin to expand and it can be some fifteen seconds before your number hits zero, it becomes a frantic race to beat the clock that never ceased to be thrilling, especially in the later game boss battles.

In a lot of ways, Earthbound can be seen as a bit of a mess, all things considered.  Things don't fit flush together, and it can take some time into the game before it really begins to gel with the player, but it is well worth the investment.  This is one cult game that isn't all hype.  Rather, it delivers far more than I could have initially imagined.



10

[Game Review] West of Loathing

One of the most spectacular things an RPG can do is not only let you customize your character (or tell a riveting story with premade characters, as is often the case with JRPGs), but give you a world that reacts to your presence in it.  Or, at the very least, make each playthrough feel distinct by your choices.  One of the more notable RPGs in history is the classic PC release Fallout from Interplay, a post-apocalyptic yarn with colorful characters, goofy easter eggs, and a wacky personality that gave you the breadth to play straight laced or otherwise aloof.  It was a sandbox with stories outpouring from its folds of character choice, sense of place, and general philosophy of being entertaining above all else.

West of Loathing is most certainly the child of Fallout, if not legitimately, then in spirit, turning the location-based RPG map and random encounters while traveling that Fallout so expertly used as its groundwork into an absurdist comedian's stage.  As the title implies, you play a customized cowpoke who decides it's time to leave your mundane life behind and travel out west into the goofy world and find adventure.  You can choose one of three classes, the warrior type Cow Puncher, the mage like Bean Slinger, and the ranger/rogue type Snake Oiler.  Once set out, you'll learn that the world is in disarray since the cows came home, an event where cows (many of which are demonic) have overrun the desert and begun killing people and destroying their ranches.  You'll search for perks like in Fallout, such as goblintongue, which lets you have hilarious conversations with the goblins rather than fighting them, or minesplainer, aquired by trying to bullshit your way through explaining how various mining equipment works, allowing you to get more XP and loot from mining equipment you forage through.  While on your adventures, you'll come across all manner of oddities, from alien technology to necromancer cults, from ghosts to demonic clowns.  The game takes you to inventive and often hilarious places throughout your playthrough.

And that is the strength of this game: its humor.  The game is funny throughout, in just about every capacity.  The combat, however, is probably its weakest attribute, but never so much that it particularly gets in the way of the game.  The game is mercifully short, given how little depth combat provides, and ends just as it begins to feel it is wearing out its welcome (and if it hadn't by the end, as it did with me, a replay is incredibly rewarding for the different perks you can attain as you play).  Leveling up isn't actually done by, well, level, but rather by spending XP points on upgrading particular abilities or your base stats Muscle (strength), Moxie (something to do with shooting), and Mysticality (intelligence).  Other stats can be upgraded indirectly, such as speed or AP (being the currency for spells and buffs) by upgrading abilities.  Certain abilities, such as lockpicking or foraging, must be learned from books and can be upgraded the same way or by XP spending.  Unfortunately, many abilities don't scale well as you play, making them all but useless in later parts of the game, even when fully upgraded.  Playing in the later part of the game as a Cow Puncher, I found that if I ran into a large group of enemies, I would have to use a large portion of my items to get through them without dying, rather than attempt any of my spells.

The "puzzle solving", as it were (although a more accurate description might be "involved questing"), often had me finding strange things in the world only to find a use for them later.  For example, I found a fort populated with nerd-type NPCs playing a table top RPG (meta jokes galore), and after winning every scenario they could throw at me, they rewarded me with tiny, miniature guns (for tabletop models, of course).  What the hell am I going to do with this?  I thought of selling them, but as luck would have it I forgot they were in my inventory for the better part of 4 hours of gameplay.  Eventually I stumble across this fort of drug taking campers absolutely high out of their mind (there are actually two such camps in the game, one more of a commune, the other literally just one big psychedelic party - I'm at the latter here).  One person here stands in front of a table covered in shoes.  I ask to buy shoes from him, but he tells me they aren't his.  I ask whose are they, and he replies that he used to make shoes all the time, but now he'll be just standing there and shoes will appear in his hands.  His theory was that elves were making them for him, and he wasn't comfortable selling them.  So I tell him: why not sell them and let the people see what these elves can do?  I happen to know of a vacant lot in the main town of the game, Dirtwater, where he can set up shop.  He tells me he guesses that sounds like a pretty good idea, but what about the elves?  What if they get into trouble following him out there?  Without missing a beat, my character hands over the miniature guns so the elves can "protect themselves", and the tripping man is on his way to open a boot shop I can buy from for the rest of the game.  The tiniest things in this game can find themselves interlocking in ridiculous ways, to the point I'm convinced one playthrough is far from enough to experience them all.  And, because the game is light on actual RPG tactics and combat, the game can be goofier at giving you buffs, locations, or even new stores to buy from, because you aren't here for the challenge of the game: you're here for the experience of this weird and trippy world.

West of Loathing has one real issue, and that is that it has no ending because it isn't going anywhere.  There is an ending, naturally, but getting there is inconsequential to just about anything else in the game.  Though it feels aimless, that is also part of its charm.  The snaking stories underneath the surface and the interlocking characters, items, and goofy repercussions to seemingly inconsequential actions are addictive and hilarious, and there isn't much more you could be asking for just $11.  It's about digging in and seeing what you find, and it is always surprising, absurd, and irreverent.



8.5   

[Game Review] Final Fantasy VII

There are a select few games in the medium's upper echelon that have transcended the medium that birthed them and entered the cultural stream proper.  Games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time have timeless characters and songs that just about anyone even tangentially aware of popular culture could recognize.  There are a few games, however, that have entered this upper echelon without taking with it almost any of the components that made it up.  For Final Fantasy VII, only two or three things really ever entered the cultural zeitgeist: the image of Cloud Strife, and his massive, unwieldy sword (one could argue villain Sephiroth has as well, but I'd put that in the iffy camp, and one particular spoiler that has come to define this game to the initiated).  To anyone interested in game culture at all, this may seem like a severe under representation of the impact this game had, but ask anyone on the street about any and all things they know about this game, and you may be likely to get even less than I listed.  The reason I bring this up at all is because despite Final Fantasy VII's cultural status, it was an extremely unlikely hit.

Final Fantasy games are, by design, a little less inclusive than the Zeldas and Marios that usually take up the mantel of video game ambassadors to culture at large.  They are dense, novel styled stories with sprawling worlds, an ensemble cast of main or important characters, complex battle systems, and (particularly the PS1 generation and beyond) a substantial time sink.  Final Fantasy VII had a couple of things going for it that made it stand out so singularly in 1997.  For one, the graphics were cutting edge at the time, blending polygons with prerendered backgrounds and with full motion video, with loading screens masked by CGI cutscenes that included the live rendered polygonal figures you played with or outright replacing them with full-bodied, movie-like (for the time) avatars.  This aspect of the game has dated poorly, to be sure, but placing it side-by-side with its contemporaries is rather impressive.  The setting to the game, a cyber punk type dystopia where an eco-terrorist group is trying to fight the government (which is run by an energy corporation), was incredibly unique to gaming and also matched a relatively popular style at the time (The Matrix would be released two years later).  None of this is to say that Final Fantasy VII is bad - it is actually very good - but that it's image as one of THE games in that exclusive club that defines the medium is largely coincidental, and to discuss Final Fantasy VII's legacy at all is to digress away from what actually makes it so good in the first place.  

The basic plot is this:  you play primarily as Cloud Strife, an ex-super soldier (part of a branch simply called SOLDIER) gone AWOL and joined an eco-terrorist group called Avalanche.  Cloud is the platonic form of the cold, broody anime protagonist (and has largely been said to have made it popular - unfair, given his character has far more depth than that), and thus doesn't care about the idealism of Avalanche, only lending a hand for money and at the request of his childhood friend, Tifa, who has joined the group.  The game opens with Avalanche bombing one of the Shinra corporation's eight mako reactors.  Dissecting that last sentence: Shinra is an energy corporation that now owns the planetary government, and mako is an energy source made up of the planet's energy.  Avalanche greatly oppose the company's killing the planet for energy and magic powers called materia (which is made up of condensed mako), and their bombing results in mixed reception among the populace.  Some like that they are fighting against their dystopian oppression, while others wonder if the large loss of innocent lives was worth it.  Avalanche's charismatic leader, Barret, distrusts you for having worked for Shinra previously in SOLDIER, but realizes he needs you and offers you more money for another bombing.  During the bombing attempt, you are caught by the Shinra president and his forces, and separated from the group as you flee, falling into the slums.  There, you find Aerith, a young woman who Shinra is trying to kidnap.  You make your way with Aerith back to the sector Avalanche's headquarters are, only to find Shinra destroying it, faking a terrorist attack by Avalanche.  Barret, Tifa, and Barret's adopted daughter survive, but Aerith is captured by Shinra.  Your group goes to rescue her only to find that the Shinra president has been killed, and it is thought to be by the strongest SOLDIER operative, a man named Sephiroth, who has been presumed dead for five years.  Cloud, in particular, has reason to be concerned, as he saw Sephiroth die and had worked with him, and what happened that fateful day lead to his going AWOL.  You rescue Aerith and your rag tag team decide to leave the city and follow the rumors of Sephiroth's sightings in hopes of finding and stopping him from doing whatever he is doing, while Shinra sends their own team to do the same.

This largely makes up the setup for the game's plot, and for the first half of the game you hop from town to town, meeting colorful characters and learning little bits of plot, following Sephiroth's trail.  One of the disappointing aspects to the plot is how it is given to you through most of the game.  The game starts explosively, giving you a lot to take in while at the same time jumping you right into the action, but as you begin to follow Sephiroth, the game takes an episodic structure.  Each of the towns and characters are fun, and the little bits you learn along the way about the town you grew up in and the various interactions with Shinra are all entertaining, but the story can feel a bit like it isn't moving.  Add to this copious amounts of misdirection, and it would be surprising if you weren't at least a little confused by the end of it all as to what happened, and who was who.  When the threads are untangled and the dust is cleared, however, you have a rather good story about ecological damage, corporate destruction, identity, loss and its affect on the people who cared about them.  While Sephiroth never becomes more than the villainous icon, his relationship with cloud and himself is an interesting attempt at something different, but the real standout here is Cloud himself.  Literally the mold to most brooding anime characters that "work alone", Cloud surprised me as he became far more than just a scowl.  Learning his true backstory and who he used to be, and how that now feeds into his current self was one of the best character surprises in the whole game, and gave me far more reason to cheer him on than just as this badass icon he was sold as in the beginning. 

As with any Final Fantasy game, the battle system has been tweaked, and this time it's easy to pick up, relatively tough to master.  Here, we have the materia system, which uses slots in weapons or armor as a way of adding abilities, from spells to summons to buffs and autocasts.  Some of these can be combined together in chained slots, where two slots are paired and allow for interplay.  You can use a Restore materia, which allows for healing spells like Cure, with a paired All materia, which allows casting spells or attacks on groups rather than a single target, and you can heal your entire party at once.  Sometimes materia only works in pairs, such as materia that allows elemental materia to be infused with weapons or armor for elemental physical attacks or defense.  The materia itself is leveled up on its own, allowing you to switch materia between party members at will without worrying about starting over learning spells.  The system is fun to play with and grind AP (the experience points for materia) into, but there isn't a whole lot of depth past the basic level.  Learning how various materia interact doesn't take long after attaining it, and you'll have greater difficulty attaining it than you will building loadouts (sidebar: I really wish I could have saved materia loadouts).  The game tries to toy with your choices in materia vs armor/weapons by giving you far more slots in exchange for worse stat buffs, but it never feels worth it.  Likewise, it never feels worth having massive stat boosts if your materia slots are tiny.  Compare this to Final Fantasy IX's system of learning abilities from armor and weapons, where I was more than willing to grind a character with sub-par equipment so I could learn abilities I wanted, because I knew it was a temporary sacrifice that would benefit me in the long run, and it was a lot of fun.  With materia, there is just no reason not to go balanced materia unless you are going for extremely high physical attacks and defense only, with only buffing materia and no spells.  You could use high materia equipment to try and level up materia quicker (many of these had double or triple AP gain), but I found my materia leveling up at a pretty solid rate.

The battle system also adds the new limit breaks, which allow for powerful attacks after taking enough damage for the limit bar to have been filled.  These can be unlocked by leveling up or, as with the final limit breaks, can be found by doing obscure RPG stuff.  If a limit break is attained in battle, you can choose to use it in place of a physical attack, or otherwise save it by casting magic, allowing for far more tactical usage than some of the other games' trance-type systems.  Attacks were done through the ATB system, one found in many of the modern Final Fantasy games.  There is an ATB bar that fills up depending on the speed of the character, and when it fills up the character is able to attack.  Taking too long to choose an attack can lead to enemies catching up on their ATB meter and even able to attack twice if you were so careless.  You're limited to three party members, rather than four like in some Final Fantasy games (I'm partial to four for more versatile party composition), and Cloud is locked in for most of the game.  Final Fantasy VII has several interesting characters you can put in your party, and while the materia system allows you to pick and choose who you want to be where (although certain characters, like Aerith, have limit breaks that feel very class specific), you are more than likely going to stick with the same two for most of the game.  This is a real shame, since it would require either going out of your way to rotate characters (and respec their materia, which is a chore) to spend time with them all, making it more of an incentive on subsequent playthroughs.  Compare this to Final Fantasy IX which uses the story to separate your party and force you to spend time with everyone for considerable amounts of time (full disclosure: Final Fantasy IX is probably my favorite of the series).  The biggest sin, however, may be the summons, which can take upwards of an unskippable minute to play out, lengthening your time (unless you place one of the rereleases with a fast forward button, which I highly recommend you do) to insane numbers.  To sidebar this just a bit, this is true of many parts of the game, with odd sections of the game where you are required to run along short looking prerendered paths, but taking twice as long as you'd think.  The game seems rather content wasting little pieces of your time, and these little pieces add up.

The pieces of Final Fantasy VII are hit and miss when looked at through a microscope, and while I won't say the game totally makes up for the sum of its parts, Final Fantasy VII is certainly more significant than that.  The world is very well realized, and making your party partially made up of terrorists with a large body count adds a flavor of moral ambiguity that many other games lack.  Materia, likewise, isn't just a tool useful to you, but has a real world place, and that place is as a weapon created by the evil corporation you are fighting, and made through a process you are trying to stop.  And it will be hard to mention without spoilers, but that one part about 2/3rds through the game is seriously impactful, and the fact you still have so much of the game left to deal with the consequences and to see how the party deal with it is a stroke of genius for a game of this generation.  In a lot of ways, Final Fantasy VII is a flawed masterpiece, one I can't in my right mind give a masterpiece's rating, but in a lot of ways lives up to the title nonetheless.  It's an emotional journey, one that rewards most of its side quests with actually significant plot points and world building, some of which will change the way you think of characters, or clear up some of the those confusing threads toward the end of the game.  I beat Final Fantasy VII in a rather short amount of time, having played it back-to-back with IX, but already I'm considering things I want to do again, or old saves I might replay to find some of that side content.   There is a wealth of world to explore, and the game has dated horribly, but if you can get past that you won't regret visiting a classic that casts one of the longest shadows in gaming.



9.0