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
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