EarthBound, originally released in Japan as is a 1994 role-playing video game developed by Ape Inc. (now Creatures Inc.) and HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The second entry in the Mother series, it follows a young boy named Ness and his party of Paula, Jeff and Poo, as they travel the world to collect melodies from eight Sanctuaries to defeat the universal cosmic destroyer Giygas.
EarthBound had a lengthy development period that spanned five years. Its returning staff from EarthBound Beginnings (1989) included writer/director Shigesato Itoi and lead programmer Satoru Iwata, as well as composers Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka, who incorporated a diverse range of styles into the soundtrack, including salsa, reggae, and dub. Most of the other staff members had not worked on the original EarthBound Beginnings, and the game came under repeated threats of cancellation until Iwata joined the team. Originally scheduled for release in January1993, the game was completed around May1994 and first released in Japan in August1994, and in North America in June1995. A port for the Game Boy Advance developed by Pax Softnica, bundled with Mother, as , was released only in Japan in 2003.
Like its predecessor, EarthBound is themed around an idiosyncratic portrayal of Americana and Western culture, subverting popular role-playing game traditions by featuring a modern setting while parodying numerous staples of the genre. Itoi wanted the game to reach non-gamers with its intentionally goofy tone; for example, the player uses items such as the Pencil Eraser to remove pencil statues (octopus statues in the Japanese version), experiences in-game hallucinations, and battles piles of vomit, taxi cabs, and walking nooses. For its American release, the game was marketed with a $2million promotional campaign that sardonically proclaimed: "This game stinks." The game's puns and humor were reworked by localizer Marcus Lindblom. Since the original Mother had not yet been released outside Japan on the Nintendo Entertainment System before 2015, Mother2 was called EarthBound to avoid confusion about what it was a sequel to.
Although it was positively received by Japanese audiences, EarthBound sold quite poorly in the United States. Journalists attributed the game's poor sales in the West to a combination of its simple graphics, satirical marketing campaign, and a lack of market interest in the genre. In the ensuing years, a dedicated fan community spawned that advocated for the series' recognition, particularly after Ness appeared as a playable character in the Super Smash Bros.series. By the 2000s, multiple reader polls and critics had named it one of the greatest video games of all time, and it became regarded as a "sacred cow among gaming's cognoscenti". It was followed by the Japan-only sequel Mother 3 for the Game Boy Advance in 2006. EarthBound was later made available worldwide on the Wii U Virtual Console in 2013, 3DS Virtual Console in 2016, the SNES Classic in 2017, and the Nintendo Classics service in February2022.
Gameplay
EarthBound features many traditional role-playing game elements: the player controls a party of 4 characters who travel through the game's two-dimensional world composed of villages, cities, caves, and dungeons. Along the way, the player fights battles against enemies and the party receives experience points for victories. If enough experience points are acquired, a character's level will increase. This pseudo-randomly increases the character's attributes, such as offense, defense, and the maximum hit points (HP) and psychic points (PP) of each character. Rather than using an overworld map screen like most console RPGs of its era, the world is entirely seamless, with no differentiation between towns and the outside world. Another non-traditional element is the perspective used for the world. The game uses oblique projection, while most 2D RPGs use a "top-down" view on a grid or an isometric perspective.
Unlike its predecessor, EarthBound Beginnings, EarthBound does not use random encounters. In EarthBound, enemies are presented similarly to other non-player characters scattered around the game's overworld. While the player can see enemy parties on-screen, the composition of the parties is randomly generated. If the party contacts an enemy from behind (indicated by a translucent green swirl that fills the screen), the player is given a first-strike priority when battle mode begins. If an enemy sneaks up on the party from behind, the swirl is red, and the enemy is given first-strike priority, though the player has a brief window to dodge. Battles with weaker enemies are won automatically, forgoing the battle sequence, and weaker monsters will flee from Ness and his friends rather than chase them.
In combat, once an enemy or character's HP reaches zero, that enemy or character is rendered unconscious. There is a chance that the party will receive an item after the battle. Battle commands include attacking, spying (reveals enemy weakness), mirroring (emulates an enemy), and running away. Characters can also use PSI actions that require PP. Once each character is assigned a command, the characters and enemies perform their actions in an order determined by character speed and a random number generator. Whenever a character receives damage, the HP box gradually "rolls" down, similar to a mechanical counter. This allows players an opportunity to heal the character or win the battle before the counter hits zero, saving the character from being rendered unconscious. When hit with mortal damage, there is a small chance the character will survive it, being left with 1 HP, even without intervention of other characters. This mechanic does not apply to enemies, for whom unconsciousness is instantaneous and can be reversed only with healing PSI. If all characters are rendered unconscious, the game transitions to an endgame screen, asking if the player wants to continue. An affirmative response brings Ness, conscious, back to the last save point, with half the money on his person at the time of his defeat, and with other party members still unconscious.
Currency is indirectly received from battles. Each time the party wins a battle, Ness's father, who can also save the game's progress, deposits money into an account that can be withdrawn at ATMs. In towns, players can buy weapons, armor, and items from stores. Weapons and armor can be equipped to increase character strength and defense, respectively. Items can be used for several purposes, such as healing. Towns also contain useful facilities such as hospitals where players can be healed for a fee.
Plot In an unknown year of the 1990s, a meteorite crashes in Eagleland. In the nearby neighborhood of the crash, Ness and Pokey investigate the meteorite, where they encounter a small creature called Buzz-Buzz who came from the future. Buzz-Buzz reveals that in ten years the world will be engulfed in hatred by an alien force named Giygas, transforming humans, animals, and objects into malicious creatures. Buzz-Buzz enlists Ness to save the world by using a "Sound Stone" to collect eight melodies kept in sanctuaries scattered around the world. However, Buzz-Buzz is accidentally killed, forcing Ness to begin alone.
Travelling through Eagleland and other places to collect the melodies, Ness comes across many events and characters. In the Happy Happy Village, Ness rescues a young girl named Paula from cultists who abuse her psychic abilities after being influenced by a Mani Mani statue created by Giygas. After falling into a trap in Threed, Paula summons child scientist Jeff, who travels from Winters with his father's flying saucer. Reaching the seaside resort Summers, Ness gains a vision of Poo, the prince of Dalaam, who joins the party after completing his "Mu Training". With his three companions, Ness successfully fills the Sound Stone.
Ness then visits Magicant, where Ness fights his personal dark side. Returning to Eagleland, the party uses the Phase Distorter to travel back in time to fight Giygas; to avoid destroying their bodies through time travel, the party transfers their souls into robots. In the ensuing confrontation with Giygas, Pokey reveals himself as his ally by using alien technology. Upon being defeated, Pokey releases Giygas, now transformed into the embodiment of evil due to his infinite power. Paula uses her psychic powers to get aid from the world through prayers, which allows the party to defeat Giygas with his fatal weaknesses: human emotions and love, while Pokey flees through time and space. Ness returns home to resume his normal life, where he receives a mocking letter from a taunting Pokey that his brother Picky found.
Development
EarthBound Beginnings was released for the Famicom in 1989 in Japan. Its sequel, EarthBound, was developed over five years by Ape and HAL, and published through Nintendo. The game was written and designed by Japanese author, musician, and advertiser Shigesato Itoi, and produced by Satoru Iwata, who became Nintendo's president and CEO. Mother 2 was made with a development team different from that of the original game, and most of its members were unmarried and willing to work all night on the project. Mother 2 development took much longer than planned and came under repeated threats of cancellation. Itoi has said that the project's dire straits were resolved when Iwata joined the team. Ape's programming team had more members than HAL on the project. The HAL team (led by lead programmer Iwata) worked on the game programming, while the Ape team (led by lead programmer Kouji Malta) worked on specific data, such as the text and maps. They spent biweekly retreats together at the HAL office in view of Mount Fuji.
The game continues EarthBound Beginnings story in that Giygas reappears as the antagonist (and thus did not die at the end of EarthBound Beginnings) and the player has the option of choosing whether to continue the protagonist's story by choosing whether to name their player-character the same as the original. He considered interstellar and interplanetary space travel instead of the confines of a single planet in the new game. After four months, Itoi scrapped the idea as cliché. Itoi sought to make a game that would appeal to populations that were playing games less, such as girls.
The Mother series titles are built on what Itoi considered "reckless wildness", where he would offer ideas that encouraged his staff to contribute new ways of portraying scenes in the video game medium. He saw the titles foremost as games and not "big scenario scripts". Itoi has said that he wanted the player to feel emotions such as "distraught" when playing the game. The game's writing was intentionally "quirky and goofy" in character, and written in the Japanese kana script to give dialogue a conversational feel. Itoi thought of the default player-character names when he did not like his team's suggestions. Many of the characters were based on real-life personalities. For instance, the desert miners were modeled on specific executives from a Japanese construction company. The final battle dialogue with Giygas was based on Itoi's recollections of a traumatic scene from the Shintoho film The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty that he had accidentally seen in his childhood. Itoi referred to the battle background animations as a "video drug". The same specialist made nearly 200 of these animations, working solely on backgrounds for two years.