Well.
Didn’t see that one coming.
Sure, it’s not the highest-profile game out there, but it’s certainly got a strange
story to it: rumored to be one of the latest NES releases, scrapped at the 11th hour despite
the translation and localization being complete, sitting on a shelf for a couple decades, a
surreptitious leak online of a prototype cart leading to one of the holy grails of the early
rom scene: the game they called Earthbound Zero.
Or Mother, since that’s legit as well.
But apparently Nintendo prefer the term “Earthbound Beginnings,” so when you go on the Virtual
Console, that’s what you’re looking for.
Was a heck of a way to kick off E3, releasing to an unsuspecting Western world the Mother
game they weren’t exactly looking forward to.
Got everyone’s hopes up about the potential for a Mother 3 release.
And then we got Muppets and Star Fox.
Two very cool things, but not precisely what we were expecting.
So let’s take a look at the game that would have been EarthBound, had it happened when
it should’ve.
And don’t step in the barf.
Except, there isn’t really any barf.
Or references to pants-wetting, or excess flatulence, or any of the things we associate
with EarthBound.
We haven’t gotten there yet.
And thus, we hit the first jarring difference between the two games: this NES relic looks,
sounds, and kinda plays like its successor, almost identically in places, but the feel
is very different.
Call it limitations on what they could do with the system.
Call it the Treehouse not yet having hit their stride localization-wise.
Call it the difference between 1989 RPG design and 1994 RPG design.
And when you think about it, that five years saw the genre advance by leaps and bounds.
Just think: the Final Fantasy series went from faceless protagonists with interchangable
jobs to suplexing trains and beating up clowns.
The Breath of Fire series started, as did the Fire Emblem series, the Shining series,
the Mana series, the Lunar series… and trust me, as you’re slogging through this thing,
you’ll be wishing you were playing ANY of those titles.
And you will realize this the first time an ally swings into the air where an enemy used
to be.
Yep, JRPGs in 1989 weren’t the refined beasts they were in the 16-bit era with intricate
storylines and detailed sprite art.
JRPGs were basic tile sets and spartan environments.
JRPGs were obscenely high encounter rates, EXP grinding, and interrogating every townsperson
in the hopes of getting a clue.
JRPGs were massive maps with little direction - which, when coupled with the aforementioned
encounter rate, almost had me shivering in a mass on the floor, dreaming of the good
times I had with Final Fantasy XIII.
Wrap your head around THAT one.
This is some brutal, weep-into-your-Ecto-Cooler shit, as was standard back then.
After settling a poltergeist attack and disturbances at your local zoo and graveyard, psychic kid
Ninten (sound familiar?) takes an extended trip through the psilocybin-laced dreamscape
of Magicant (sound familiar?), befriends some Flying Men, fights some floating eyes, gets
into an existential argument with no one, or rather someone claiming to be no one, simply
because he’s standing between you and where the game demands you be.
And when you get down to it, that’s at the heart of the EarthBound we know and love:
A contrivance standing in your way, acknowledging with a straight face that it is a contrivance.
Then it’s just a task of getting around it.
Whether it’s a Nowhere Man or an Eraser that needs erased, the standard toolbox of
tropes is left in plain view, in a world designed to mirror our own as closely as possible except
where it doesn’t.
You don’t have high fantasy and codpiece-clad heroes traipsing about, you have a bunch of
kids buying ridiculously expensive slingshots and spending hundreds of dollars on medication.
If that’s not a reflection of reality, I don’t know what is.
Well, it gets a little fuzzy around the whole “Psychic powers” and “alternate magical
dimension” and “cats swimming on land” nonsense.
Anyway.
As we continue on, you see the same concepts you know, just with eight fewer bits: You
befriend a nerdy kid with a fascination for bottle rockets, you invade a large factory
area or two, you meet a girl with psychic powers and an eerie premonition, you come
across a tough guy who prefers edged weapons to baseball bats and frying pans, and you
thwart an evil plot that apparently sees you beating the hell out of hippies and rogue
automobiles.
You’re going around, trying to find eight pieces of a melody, and… yeah.
I realize that they recycled pretty much all of this for EarthBound.
There are little bits of difference, but not many.
The primary distinction is that the 16-bit offering has a lot more polish that just wasn’t
possible - or yet imagined - in the first go-round.
EarthBound Beginnings is going to feel like Kryptonite to anyone who grew up playing the
RPGs of the 32 or even 16-bit eras.
It’s so customer-unfriendly that Comcast’s hired a dozen copies to work in tech support
for them.
But at the same time, I couldn’t really stop playing.
Perhaps it appeals to the same part of my brain that can’t get enough information
on dummied-out or debug content in games.
The part of my brain that loves seeing concept art and how it all morphs together into a
cohesive whole.
After all, the graphics - up to and including the weird clay models that formed the basis
for most of the character design - are just like its successor.
The soundtrack - besides being a masterwork in its own right - informed the equally accomplished
score of the later work.
Ultimately, playing this game will make you think you’re playing some awkward beta of
EarthBound, granted one a console generation older, where you get to see what it was like
before the inclusion of such poetic masterpieces as “Spit spit spit / saliva spit spit / want
some gum?
/ Get your own, twit.”