Earthbound

As I mentioned in my review of Mother, I had a tough time getting into Earthbound. I certainly tried, but I'd always get filtered early on, the farthest I've ever played being up to the Giant Step area. However, since I did play and come to really enjoy the first Mother game, I did want to give Earthbound another chance to see if I was too harsh on it. And yeah, I was definitely too harsh on it, this is a great RPG... but it's still not my favorite game in the series.

In a lot of ways, Earthbound feels like a slightly more refined version of its predecessor. It tells a similar story of a group of four kids coming together and setting out into the world to find eight melodies and defeat an alien threat. It boasts similar gameplay and writing, several music tracks are reused and repurposed, and they even share some similar locations like a factory dungeon or the monkey cave. I'm kind of in the weird, somewhat unique position of having fully played Mother before Earthbound. If I had played Earthbound first, Mother would probably have felt like just a worse Earthbound. But instead, I find myself fascinating by the many little changes Earthbound makes from the previous game as not all of them are dramatic improvements.

Take the story, for example. Both games have fairly thin plots with the same basic premise, but both Mother and Earthbound take different approaches. Earthbound is more about the episodic vignettes that Ness and his friends get wrapped up in rather than the overarching narrative tying them together. The most exciting moments of the game are the wild one-off events like stopping a blue man's cult, stumbling upon an trippy inverse world with Salvador Dali-inspired enemies, or running away from giant dinosaurs. These more episodic moments are really what makes Earthbound so charming, it's always willing to push the bar for what you can expect from an RPG setting. Mother, on the other hand, has a bit more connective tissue to it. There's a much stronger focus on unraveling the mystery of the alien invasion and discovering how it's affected the world around. Neither of these approaches are inherently better than the other, and I did love seeing what crazy scenarios Earthbound was going to toss at me next, but I will say that I do prefer Mother's more mystery-centric aspects as well as its more explorative, open world.

Speaking of which, the way both games handle their darker elements is also quite different. Mother keeps a fairly consistently downcast atmosphere throughout its runtime, from the melancholic romance backstory, to the Easter plotline, to the muted colors and music. Earthbound, on the other hand, leans more heavily into just straight-up horror. It has cults, police brutality, zombie invasions, an antagonist made of vomit, one of the main characters losing all his body parts and senses as a form of training, and pretty much the entire final act which has the party transfer their spirits into robots, complete with wince-inducing drilling noises, to go fight an eldtrich monster. Those last two bits in particular creeped the shit of me, geez. the Giygas in particular is a highlight for being one of the most accurate eldtrich final bosses I've seen in a video game. He has no comprehensible form, constantly shifting wildly throughout the fight, and even his own attacks feel indecipherable. I will say I preferred the fight against Mother's Giygas, it felt more challenging, tense, desperate, and personal, but Earthbound's Giygas was a more fully-realized cosmic horror threat. I get the impression that Itoi was inspired by horror films of all kinds when making Earthbound, and it ended up leading to what I think can easily rank as one of Nintendo's scariest games.

I praised Mother for feeling really ahead of its time for an NES game in terms of its pacing and UI, but five years later, Earthbound keeping most of the same mechanics doesn't feel quite as novel. It's not as big of a next-gen jump as games like Final Fantasy IV or Lunar: The Silver Star was, that's for sure. You still have the same limited inventory, it uses a pretty archaic trigger context-sensitivity button, new party members still join the party at Level 1, and there isn't a run button at all. To be fair, Mother 1's run button was only in the prototyped English version but it still feels like a noticeable regression. And most of these issues really shine in the first two hours, when you're stuck as Ness, with a tiny inventory, mandatory items constantly being forced onto you, and a minimal amount of PSI spells to pick from. I used to have trouble with that cave area, but little did I know that Peaceful Rest Valley would be waaaaayyy worse! I don't blame anyone for bouncing off Earthbound when I did, it really can feel archaic through modern lens, especially in that opening segment.

However, once you get accustomed to Earthbound's quirks and get your first party member, I think Earthbound is genuinely an improvement on Mother in terms of the combat. Mother was really broken in a way that I found quite fun, the sheer amount of PSI spells you got made it very easy to snap the game in half, but Earthbound feels a lot better balanced. The level of challenge feels more fair and less like it wildly swings from absurdly hard to hilariously easy, you have less PSI spells but they feel more valuable, and most importantly, Jeff's invention-focused kit feels far more developed than Loid's in the first game. I spent my review of Mother ragging on Loid for his perceived uselessness due to his low attack, inability to use PSI, and moveset built around inventory items in a game with a limited inventory. Jeff, on the other hand, actually feels worth using properly despite having a similar kit. He has a cool mechanic about repairing broken items which can often unlock some really powerful weapons, and his one-use items feel a lot more powerful, dude could one-shot certain bosses if you know what you're doing.

On top of that, Earthbound has a decent amount of little nuances that make the combat even more engaging. You can now approach enemies from the sides and back to get a first hit on them, and vice versa. If you vastly outlevel an enemy, you can automatically take them out without needing to get in a battle, and you'll even get a bit of XP for it. And probably my favorite addition, your health ticks down slowly and you can act while your health is still draining. So let's say you get hit with a mortal blow meaning the attack should theoretically kill you, if you're fast enough you can scramble to clutch a heal and keep yourself alive. It lends this fun level of tension to battles where you can reverse a bit of bad luck, but only if you're fast enough, striking a good balance between giving the player generosity while being skill-based enough that sloppy play can cause the player to waste that generosity.

Presentation-wise, Earthbound is pretty much on par with its predecessor. It mostly looks like a more refined version of the distinct and charming Peanuts-inspired artstyle of the original, with a more garish color palette, some neat comic book-inspired embellishments like speech bubbles, and some really cool and trippy background effects for the battle screen. I do somewhat prefer the more muted color palette of Mother but that's really just me nitpicking here. The soundtrack is similarly about on the same level. Earthbound obviously has the larger soundtrack and boasts a lot of the most iconic Nintendo tracks pretty much ever, like Onett, Apple Kid's Theme, Buy Something Will Ya, and Sanctuary Guardian. The battle themes in particular are probably the biggest improvement, there's a lot more of them and they're all great. However, I still think I prefer the heavy rock/blues influence that game's soundtrack has over the trippy ambient synths of Earthbound's OST, and frankly most of Earthbound's best tracks are frontloaded into the first half of the game.

I know I was a bit harsh on Earthbound, but keep in mind that this is mostly in comparison with Mother. That game really resonated with me in ways I didn't expect and Earthbound didn't quite manage to have that same impact on me. That being said, despite its many quirks, Earthbound was still a really fun time. It's weird, it's charming, it looks and sounds great, it constantly tosses memorable setpieces at you, and its battle system is way more fun than I could've expected. Without the thick atmosphere of its predecessor or the emotional story of its successor, it's still probably my least favorite Mother game, but that's not saying much, I can now definitively say that I think they're all great.

4/5 Stars