Terry Plays

Bad Guys in the Hills

Only once Pokey recruits you to find Picky and the Onett police have left do savage beasts appear on the road to the meteorite. There are only three kinds to start, but they teach you so much of what to expect.

The Coil Snake is the single weakest enemy in the game, and gives you 1 experience point on defeat. But he can wrap himself around you, anulling your next action! A very devious tactic in the right battle, but for now it’s pretty harmless: when it’s coiling around you, it can’t hurt you.

The Runaway Dog grants the most experience points of the first enemies (4!!! enough to level you up for the first time), but is also the only enemy that can waste it’s turn by howling harmlessly into the air. Sometimes, bad guys just do what they want to do.

The Spiteful Crow is a motherfucker. It’s so fast that, basically no matter how high your level is, the Crow will always get the first move. Although sometimes it does waste a turn with a big grin on its face, it can also peck at your eyes, which does quite a bit of damage at this point in the game.

Not only that, it can STEAL from you. And you don’t get the item back when you defeat it – it’s just gone. Fortunately, it only seems to go after food items.

Spiteful Crows give you just 3 experience points, but upon defeat they always drop a cookie. These only recover 6 HP, but until you learn Lifeup Alpha, cookies are the only way to heal yourself in the field.

What I love about these enemies is how different they all are. Even though your only attack option in battle at this point is to hit things with your bat – Pokey just wastes his turn cowering and your dog just does minimal damage – the bad guys already provide so much variety that you can never really be sure what the dialog box at the top of the battle screen will say next. And we’re just gettin’ started!

Ness’ Family

A lot of good RPGs throw you right into the thick of things, in media res. Final Fantasy VI, VII, Super Mario RPG, and Vagrant Story all begin almost immediately with the player in the midst of combat. These games want to immediately familiarize you with the things that you’ll be doing for the next 30~60 hours.

Earthbound, on the other hand, actually delays your adventure so you can get to know one aspect of the game which you actually don’t have to interact with that often, but hopefully never forget: your family.

Ness is first awakened by the meteorite that lands on the tallest hill in Onett – which almost looks like it was designed to have a meteorite land on it. You can go out into the night and explore the hillside, talking with Onett’s overzealous and overtired police force, as well as townsfolk who can’t get home because of the road blocks. Your “friend” and neighbor, Pokey, who is suspiciously focused on finding out everything he can about the meteorite, tells you to go back home and that he’ll update you in the morning.

So despite the fact that the meteorite is set up as your ultimate goal, Pokey turns you back to where you came from. I think this can be seen as a microcosm of your relationship with Pokey through the rest of the game.

However! The household is awakened once again when Pokey bangs on the door – clearly actual recorded knocking, nice going, sound design! – to get your help to find his lost brother, Picky.

If you refuse me, I’ll say something that’ll cut you like a knife.
-if you say No to Pokey’s request

Which bring us back to the family! Your Mom heals you by feeding you your favorite food – which you identified at the start of the game – tells you that you’re her “natural born fighter”, and reminds you to put on clothes before you leave the house.

She also tells you to get the Cracked bat, your first weapon, from your sister Tracy‘s room. Tracy also offers to hold onto your spare stuff, which might be the first time you realize that your inventory is limited.

Before you can leave home, the phone starts ringing, and your Dad is on the other end! Dad’s place in the game is the most suspicious, mainly because of his physical absence. What does he do? Where is he now? Anyway, he records you game. He also tells you the amount of experience points you would need to get to the next level; which is an unusually useless feature considering you can do the same thing from the status screen.

Remember to “Go for it!”
-Mom

“Work to exhaustion when you’re young…” Have you ever heard of a weird saying like this?
-Dad

I think it’s very funny that both parents give Ness platitudes that sound tired, but seem to come from a place of legitimate caring anyway.

You meet your family, especially your Mom, several times during the first 10 minutes of the game. But as time goes on, you’ll see them less and less, talking to them on the phone only, just as with your dad.

(If I knew this was going to be such a scary place, I wouldn’t have come along… I’m outta here!) -the dog

I nearly forgot your dog. I named mine Bro, after my dog in real life. The dog is the first time the game defies an expectation it sets up for you. Even though you named him, just like any other member of the party, he only joins you very briefly on the quest to find Pickey, after which he runs back home to continue being a lazybones.

But, then, he’s your dog, so why wouldn’t you name him?

Your Name, Please

I think what’s really exciting about the naming process at the beginning of Earthbound is the music. They don’t just carry over the same tune from the file select screen.

Not only does the change in music signify a new relationship, a collaboration between the game and you, but it’s also the first really good song you hear in the game.

Not only is it a great song, it introduces you to the kind of sound you can look forward to for the rest of the game. It starts with sampling (pretty advanced for the Super Nintendo), accompanied by a sweet bass line, chirping and percussive parts that almost seem like sound effects, and a legendary hook (01:00).

The song teaches you that, although the graphics seem to be low-fi, the sound design is actually pretty advanced and varied. It lets you know that the aesthetics are not a result of technological limitation, but a specific choice.

Naming your characters at the beginning of the game is unlike what most other popular (Squaresoft) RPGs of the time did. Usually you would not name a player-character until they appeared in the story. Instead, Earthbound does what it will turn out to be extremely good at doing: setting up expectations.

You know right from the beginning that you will meet a girl who likes music and hops straight into the air when she’s surprised, a four-eyed preppy who doesn’t always know what to do with himself, and a dignified and stoic warrior from a classical version of “the Orient”. In meeting your party at the beginning of the game, you are given the means to measure your progress.

Many of those who worked on Earthbound would join Creatures, Inc. and create Pokemon, another game in which you name yourself and another character (your rival) at the start of the game, intertwining your fates indefinitely.

Andres left for L.A.

He left some video games with us for safekeeping.

Including Earthbound.

I’ve played this game a lot. That’s because I really like it. I think it’s one of the best games ever, and it means a lot to me personally.

That’s the main thing about Earthbound, and all reviews and essays written about Earthbound inevitably tap into the memories the writer has of playing the game.

It’s been suggested before that it’s impossible to write about Earthbound without talking specifically about the feelings it invokes in a person. Which is part of the magic of Earthbound.

What I want to do is a close reading – or a close playing – of Earthbound, to see how, mechanically, Earthbound sparks these feelings, and how Earthbound as a game is actually just really good.

Here we go.