EarthBound

So, EarthBound is the 1994 sequel to a 1989 JRPG called Mother - a game released only in Japan that still hasn't seen an American or European port after more than 25 years. A third game, Mother 3, came out on the GameBoy Advance in Japan in 2006 only after a hotly anticipated Nintendo 64 version stalled somewhere in the development process and died on the vine. The Mother trilogy is a huge hit in Japan, and as such, American gamers have clamored for English translations for years on end. But Nintendo is Nintendo, and since EarthBound didn't sell as well in America as it should have, all the way back in 1995, to this day Nintendo doesn't think either its prequel or its sequel would do well here. In fact, they stopped manufacturing the EarthBound SNES cartridges after a run of some 400,000 and never bothered to port the game onto newer consoles for the longest time. This resulted in the ironic situation where, right up until 2013, American gamers were shelling out hundreds of dollars for copies of the fairly rare game - a game only made rare in the first place because Nintendo pulled the plug so quickly after lackluster sales. Wow! Anyway, in the summer of 2013, with no announcement or fanfare made whatsoever, the game appeared in the eShop, available to purchase and play on the Wii U Virtual Console. Forget the lack of marketing - that's just such a Nintendo move, releasing the game on the Wii U - three million of which had sold in the U.S. at the time - as opposed to the standard Wii, which had something like 47 million units in America by 2013.

Anyway, my point is, right up until 2013, EarthBound was sort of like this holy grail of JRPGs. Everyone who had played it had loved it, it seemed, but very few people had ever played it over here. When EarthBound was available to me through Club Nintendo last year, I pounced on the opportunity to acquire and play such a fabled classic.

It was good, and I enjoyed my time with it a great deal. But it wasn't amazing, I guess.

In many ways, it was a pretty standard JRPG. It took me close to 30 hours to finish, and that was with a walkthrough. It was fairly difficult, especially early on. Battles were turn-based and took place from first-person viewpoints using fairly simple menus. Its world was imaginative and memorable, but none of its boss fights really were - save for the final boss, which deserves its own whole review - for a number of reasons. (Maybe some other time.) Maybe I'm hardened or jaded or cynical, but I just didn't feel like I was playing something substantially important, nor like the lack of Mother or Mother 3 in America seem like real gaming tragedies.

All the same, this was a damn good game. Here are some personal highlights and odd shortcomings worth singling out:

• Good: There are no random encounters, and battles are initiated when you run into enemies within the environment. A lot of JRPGs have this feature, but what made EarthBound really shine was that if your party was significantly more powerful than the enemy, you wouldn't even enter the battle screen; you'd just get an instant win and all the requisite experience points - which, granted, weren't many, since you're so damn OP compared to the enemy in the first place. Still, this made grinding and one particular item-drop hunting segment a lot more palatable.
• Bad: Frankly, the game looks way older and shittier than it should. For a comparison point, Square released three all time classic JRPGs on the SNES in the early-to-mid-'90s - Final Fantasy IV (1991), Final Fantasy VI (1994), and Chrono Trigger (1995). All of these games look better than EarthBound (1994) and its two contemporary releases simply blow it out of the water. Graphics aren't everything, particularly when it comes to differentiating between games that look 20 years old and games that look 25 years old, but this is still worth mentioning.
• Good: Whenever you take damage, rather than getting nicked for one lump sum, your HP gauge would sort of slowly roll its way down. This added an interesting time-sensitive component to a turn-based battle system; an enemy could give a lethal amount of damage to all four of my characters, but as long as I got a "life up" move in before someone's HP hit zero, I was fine. Same thing would apply if the battles ended before someone died. Alternatively, if Ness has 500 HP, and the enemy keeps using a move that whacks him for 500 HP, I can probably get three or four turns in with Ness attacking before I need to worry about healing Ness.
• Bad: Like so many older RPGs, EarthBound has a really limited inventory. Each character can carry, in addition to four pieces of currently-in-use equipment, a maximum of ten items. One character doesn't use any PSI (magic, basically) and therefore needs his inventory space allocated primarily for battle items and other tools. That leaves you with thirty spots to store every relevant item you need along with any and all restorative items. By the time you get to four party members, it's not so bad, but any time you're stuck using one or even two party members for any amount of time, yeesh. I suppose a limited inventory is a realistic issue - no backpack is bottomless - but these types of limitations always end up forcing me to throw away  items I'd spent money on or gone out of my way to find in chests, only to end up wanting them later. Worse still, there's no shared inventory where everyone can dump their things. If Ness has a hamburger, and Jeff needs to eat it, but Ness should be using an attack, then guess what, Jeff, you're shit out luck. Should have stocked up on your own hamburgers! Also, whenever you find a treasure chest, the item inside goes straight tot he first character with an opening for it, which is how Ness always ends up with all kinds of crap in his inventory even though he's the one character you'll use solo a decent amount. Gah!
• Good: When you die in EarthBound, you don't revert to the last save point. I mean, you do, but all your experience and all of your new items are retained. I think your money is cut in half or something, which, fine. Beats throwing an hour of your life away on a failed attempt to make it through a dungeon. I always appreciate when games do this. "Yeah, you died, but that doesn't mean everything you did since your last save has gone to waste." Classy move, game! Granted, I was using save states on my Wii U Virtual Console for most of the game anyway.