Was Earthbound ever real?

[Neet Tokusatsu]

It came out in the west the same year as chronno trigger and FFVI. It must have looked like a real piece of shit.

Chrono Trigger was one of the best-looking JRPGs on the SNES and had art made by Akira Toriyama, on the other hand FFVI is considered one of the best entries in the series and had a legacy behind by the time of its release.

While Earthbound barely looked any better than a NES game and had nothing really going for it other than it was set in a modern-day setting, no wonder it sold like shit back in the day. In the grand scheme of things, Earthbound was a slightly above average (if that) JRPG released alongside two of the best games the SNES had to offer, talk about bad timing.

 

[robobobo]

I rented Earthbound back in the day, it's a perfectly good JRPG and I recommend it without any reservation. It's not better than FF6/Chrono Trigger unless you have a real hardon for the uwu quirky theme, I'd put it about on par with the Super Mario RPG on the list of SNES RPGs: solid but not one of the legends. Of course the same trannies who jerk it to Undertale worship Earthbound, but don't let that scare you off from a solid game.

 

[Pissmaster]

I remember no advertisements, products in stores, or anyone ever talking about it.

JRPGs were very niche until Final Fantasy VII. Not a lot of stores stocked them, and they tended to be more expensive than everything else, probably due to the high megabit count and battery saving.

It was probably not until I played Smash Bros on the N64, but even then I hardly remember Ness in that game.

Ness was usually the final character anyone would unlock. You had to beat the 1P mode on Normal with three lives, no continues, which took a little bit of effort. The other three characters were trivial to unlock.

Ness was also a weird character. You had to get good at aiming his PK thunder ball into his back to launch him towards your opponent.

I don't remember anyone talking about the game until the 2000s, when it seemed to be a niche but well-liked game online in certain circles. However, it seems that nowadays everyone loves this game and played it as a kid. Did I miss something?

Ness was either unlocked by default or easy to unlock in every Smash Bros. going forward, and Starmen.net was very active and promoted the hell out of the game for a long time. Then Undertale came out, and brought Earthbound to the forefront for a whole new generation.

Earthbound aged a lot better than the other JRPGs I grew up liking. The setting is fun and the writing is lighthearted. It doesn't have the same kind of structure most other JRPGs have where you visit increasingly larger castles and towers until you wind up at the biggest one. The last stretch of the game has you go through a swamp, a prehistoric dinosaur land, an alien invasion, and finally a creepy abstract cave in the distant past, with your team's souls inserted into robots on a suicide mission.

But, yeah, I don't remember any advertisements. You can see old internet posts floating around saying that it was advertised as a gross-out game, but I think those were limited to Nintendo Power ads. It's not like the game got a TV commercial, while even Final Fantasy VI did.

everyone loves this game

It's amazing how just a handful of very active people who won't shut up about something online can make it seem like everyone shares their opinion. You know what I'm sure was played a lot more than Earthbound? NBA Live '95. But that game doesn't attract an audience that latched on to a game they played as kids and wound up considering it the apex of their lives.

 

[Sheriff Mike Chitwood]

when earthbound came out i was a little kid and i had accidentally rented some rpg's before that and didnt understand how they worked, i thought they were like gay math education games, gay numbers and shit, i get earthbound and aw shit its one of these gay games, i could get past frankie and his shark gang in the starting town, but the ants in the mountain are pushing my shit in, i think to myself this cant be where im supposed to be i have to look elsewhere, so im walking all over town for hours looking for somewhere else to go fighting crows and snakes and it dawns on me "this hunk of shit actually wants me to run around in circles on the world map" and it was like sentience had been uploaded to my mind

 

[Dammit Mandrake!]

Why would I buy that when Chrono Trigger's on the shelf next to it for only 2/3rds the price?

The two posters that Chrono Trigger came with are better than Earthbound.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Bought it on clearance at the local game store with iirc birthday money or something when I was like 14-15 because whoa jrpg for $25 new. I don't think I'd even seen it beforehand. Great game imo but it absolutely didn't age well (fucking EVERY indie badly trying to ape the humor and copying jokes outright, ugh) and is best experienced 20 years ago as a setup for Mother 3 when you're decades older.

 

[whatever I feel like]

Favorite game, can't wait to play it.

 

[🔪Cold Steel Brand Rep🔪]

so you could just walk down the street like a video game but you could also take the shortcut through the woods and around the back fence of the baseball field like you're a kid and I thought about how that was deliberately designed and it gave me a nice little twee feeling

 

[Newcomer 42]

i'll always look back at the Mother series fondly, but it's all just that: memories.
it really hasn't aged gracefully, and being co-opted by trannies and the general mentally ill has really pushed me away from it in recent years.

I liked Mother 2 and the 3rd game was awesomesauce. Seeing how these games were taken over by the tranny crowd and permanently tainted by association is sad.

Earthbound shoulda been on PC years ago, which would've proven that Undertale is trash or something when you can actually play what inspired it. People who can play Earthbound via emulation ignore it cuz they can play better RPGs. Like Xenosaga.

Also a random jab against Look Outside for reasons for a particular choice the game makes you do, meant for multiple playthroughs.

 

[Caligura]

Disillusion ST better.

 

[big pauper]

i just wish it/they would have rereleased no later than undertale, something like a basic 1920x1080 set that didn't crash for pc, so 1. autists could have had their fill and helped avoid 500 ""successors"" 2. just how much they were shittily ripped- i mean homaged could be seen by normies, and if someone had an urge to play earthbound or mother, they could just easily play it instead of having to play "edgy moral rpg 6". the mother games were the most like actual games, or like the undertale vibe but with the game working more like a old final fantasy instead of "will you sacrifice your arm for Bill? will you sacrifice your other arm and make your main character fucking garbage the rest of the game/entire postgame or kill the child?" or "will you stay at a boring ass level 1 with no sense of progression or cool gear or fun the entire game?"

the normal to fucked vibe, cool music, wacky combat, all of that is straight ripped off and on a sliding scale of inferior by many, many titles. normies aren't going to get a console based on 75% baby games just to play it so instead most people just play alternatives, and mother just gets a mythical status instead of being a very good rpg.

main problem with mother series is if you are willing to go through the necessary effort to play it, you're able to play nearly the entire united console library of rpgs, which includes many, many, many, many other obscure rpgs that expanded on ideas and gameplay further, made back when shit was still good. xenosaga for one is much more like a fever dream

i'd say at the time it easily competes with ff6 and chrono trigger, which are also both good but rose tinted to the point of reverence, but the ps2 library-on less so

Once you've played a game like Metal Gear Solid it's just a completely quaint and antiquated way of storytelling. The most memorable examples in the last 30 years are mostly joke games like "barkley shut up and jam gaiden" just because the medium itself is just so awkward once you've experienced more developed storytelling techniques.

jrpgs came to provenance in the weird transitional period between 8 bit personal computers and 16 bit video game consoles when computers weren't really capable of doing anything visually complex, and had its golden years in the snes/ps1 era when consoles were becoming visually engrossing but still had severe limits on what they could accomplish with the technology. It's not a coincidence that the "greatest rpgs of all time" were a bunch of super nintendo games because they were what was pushing the limits of the hardware and of the medium itself at the time. But the medium moved on to action packed 3d gaming for a reason, turn based rpgs are basically interactive books man they're not simple things to crank out.

like many genres that became obsolete as technology moved on, people still make games to try and move the boundary forward, but unlike platformers or fighting games the whole motivation for making a turn based rpg is "the story." That's not something you can just throw money or time at, you need actual talent, and the games we're talking about had all-star production teams from million dollar companies. Earthbound was extremely well written and had a tight concept from the start. the last jrpg i put any significant time into was xenoblade, it was visually beautiful and conceptually pretty engrossing but the story itself really wasn't developed enough to get the player involved in the characters. it was mostly just tropes - and it's supposed to be one of the best that's ever been made? no it's not lol

 

[George Lucas]

I rented Earthbound back in the day, it's a perfectly good JRPG and I recommend it without any reservation. It's not better than FF6/Chrono Trigger unless you have a real hardon for the uwu quirky theme, I'd put it about on par with the Super Mario RPG on the list of SNES RPGs: solid but not one of the legends. Of course the same trannies who jerk it to Undertale worship Earthbound, but don't let that scare you off from a solid game.

There is a lot of depth to the combat that people don’t give it credit for. The first two games are harder than stuff like FF6/Chrono Trigger which are pretty much centered around finding the best equipment, telegraphing attacks, and exploiting weaknesses. The combat in Mother 1/2 is more strategic. You have a lot of options for buffs/debuffs and resource management. And the scaling punishes people who just grind. If you put effort into making plans for different enemy groups based on their stats the game becomes very enjoyable and you don’t have to grind. Mother 1 is more like an old school RPG where you wander around a giant map and have no idea wtf you should do while Mother 2 is more story-driven and streamlines the combat further.

Mother 3 is a lot different. It feels more like later RPGs that focus on bosses. I don’t like the combat nearly as much.

 

[Rapesputin]

It was but it stopped being so in the early 2010s

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

I still haven't played it but I know its genuinely regarded as being insane. The game with Lucas is considered probably one of if not the most controversial game that Nintendo has ever put out, to the point it will never be officially released in English unless they censor stuff.

 

[George Lucas]

I still haven't played it but I know its genuinely regarded as being insane. The game with Lucas is considered probably one of if not the most controversial game that Nintendo has ever put out, to the point it will never be officially released in English unless they censor stuff.

It has a race of crossdressers and that’s about it. There’s nothing controversial about it really, not sure where you got that from.

IMO the series is secretly based, which makes the troon/furry fanbase even funnier. It totally goes over their heads. All three games are about how important it is to have an actual MOM (not two dads, not a ‘mom’). All three games have references all over to ‘the modern world is fake and gay, return to nature’. You literally beat up hippies. It’s a chud game through and through.

 

[Hermiöne Granger]

It must have been shit since someone gave a mint CIB version to MetalJesusRocks when he begged for it on youtube.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

It has a race of crossdressers and that’s about it. There’s nothing controversial about it really, not sure where you got that from.

IMO the series is secretly based, which makes the troon/furry fanbase even funnier. It totally goes over their heads. All three games are about how important it is to have an actual MOM (not two dads, not a ‘mom’). All three games have references all over to ‘the modern world is fake and gay, return to nature’. You literally beat up hippies. It’s a chud game through and through.

You're right. I wasn't aware Itoi supported the fan translation. I assumed because of the animal cruelty, dream island sequence, and overall dark themes they wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. But then you remember Bayonetta 2 and 3 are a thing.

The only thing I could ascertain is that they don't find it to be financially viable as a product.

 

[Need for Sped]

It was a decent game, I can say that much. In the SNES era, 95% of the JRPG lineup were going for the fantastic-medieval setting, so Earthbound already stood out just by virtue of being different (Similar deal than Live a Live, which was kind of mediocre in the gameplay front, but was set in different eras and was kind of experimental for its time).

I played it on a emulator back in the day, I enjoyed it, and most of the "quirks" there are can be explained away as the game being a product of its time. And just like with New Vegas, it's a game that you can play, think nothing of it, and then be flabbergasted that the trannies and other assorted degenerates have put it on a pedestal.

If we're talking degenerates and SNES games, you have an infinitely more obvious contender in Bahamut Lagoon, which is a barely disguised NTR fantasy.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Earthbound popularity is mainly fake and gay, the game is more well known for its quirkiness than actual gameplay and plot. When it was released it was too novel to have an effect, and nowadays it is too overused to have an impact.

If we're talking degenerates and SNES games, you have an infinitely more obvious contender in Bahamut Lagoon, which is a barely disguised NTR fantasy.

Got to thank you for that massive rabbithole. The golden age of RPGs had a lot of experimentation but some ideas should stay dead.

 

[Not A Cat Person]

It has a race of crossdressers and that’s about it. There’s nothing controversial about it really, not sure where you got that from.

Plus all the monkey abuse.