Is Earthbound/Mother worth playing?

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I haven't played it in almost 20 years I'm pretty sure, but I don't see any reason NOT to play it if you're interested. I wouldn't push through it if you don't end up enjoying it but it was a nice little JRPG when I played it.
 
Yeah, Earthbound is a very unique "classic" jrpg that is better than the sum of its parts. Don't let hipsters and bugmen ruin it for you. Its a quirky, atmospheric game made before shit like that was cashed in upon by developers.

Anyone remember the scratch n' sniff EB stickers in gamepro lol?
 
Earthbound is a good play, even if just once. I'm not usually a JRPG guy, but Earthbound did a good job at keeping my attention with the unique setting in comparison to other games of that time period. There will definitely be some times where it's a little confusing, but they're pretty far apart from one another.
 
Duncan Hills Coffee said:
I think it's a worthwhile experience, especially if you're a classic JRPG fan. I think what a lot of people miss about EarthBound, or at least don't focus on, is that it's a massive parody of classic Dragon Quest (honestly it makes me happy people are bringing it up in this thread). It's basically taking the base mechanics of DQ and inserting them into a contemporary setting. Instead of enemies dropping gold, your dad puts money into your bank account. Instead of swords and shields, you wield bats and frying pans. Instead of a hero from a mythic bloodline, you're just some kid wrapped up in a bizarre scenario (a kid with psychic powers, but still just a kid). In a lot of ways, it's a clever subversion of the classic JRPG. Hell, the battle screen from the first Mother is startlingly similar to the battle screen from the NES DQ sequels.

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This is Mother 1

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And this is Dragon Quest III.

A lot of people these days (mostly the retarded fanbase) focus solely on the series' silliness, which to me is only part of what makes the games so special. The games do carve out their own identity as time goes on (like EarthBound adding the psychedelic backgrounds and rolling HP counts), but I personally think they're all worth playing. You should start with EarthBound, since that is the most accessible and most well-known of the series.

Also, I personally really like Mother 1, but I am also very weird. I like the minimalist feel of the game and I don't mind the endless grind. For some reason I always found it more captivating than NES Final Fantasy. I also like how you can see some of the seeds that would later spring into EarthBound, but that's just me. I'd only recommend it if you liked EarthBound and you don't mind playing archaic 8-bit RPGs (and if you have a guide handy; the game is very hard to figure out on your own).
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How the fuck did Dragon Quest III end up looking WORSE than Dragon Quest I?
 
El Conserje said:
As for Dragon Quest III, thats actually the first one I try of the DQ series
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I actually highly recommend checking out DQ1 first of all.
It's short and sweet, so you can blaze through it in like a day, and it's where console JRPGs started--it's really nice to see the context of what all these other games from that era were so excited to build off. Suddenly all these little references and jokes will make sense (not just games; 50% of all Japanese culture is a Dragon Quest reference) and it's neat to have an appreciation for what all the little innovations that came after evolved from and why.

I'd also check out Mother 1 first (one of the versions with a run/turbo button anyway) after that before Earthbound for a similar reason, but that's more optional. You can honestly skip it, personally I just dig seeing the history of how genres differentiated, but I will say that when I played Earthbound first I was pretty curious for over a decade about the (whole five minutes of, as it turns out) Geigue backstory and was bound to go back to Mother eventually so you might as well: it's also fairly short.
 
Foxxo said:
How the fuck did Dragon Quest III end up looking WORSE than Dragon Quest I?
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I remember reading that when the sequels added multiple enemies and party members to battles, it took such a toll on the game's programming that they had to add transitions to entirely different screens just to get it working. The result was putting the enemy sprites in a black void. Considering the sequels were pushing the limits of what the Famicom and NES could do (DQ II only had 10 bytes of free space on a system with 1 Mbit of ROM), it's kind of a miracle they got it working at all.
 
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Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
alright I'm a spastic, how do you patch these games?
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They have pre-patched ROMs on the site, but IIRC I used Lunar IPS patcher before. There is a patcher tool packaged in the download zip.
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