EarthBound

There were a few older games I understood and appreciated more as I got older, but by and large the games of today are much more rife for reinterpretation and revisiting because they are trying to say something or give you more to work with. I mean, the original Mario for NES is still a lot of fun, but unless you're going to get really pretentious and read things into it that the designers never intended, your understanding of it now is still "hey, jumping on stuff is fun!!"

EarthBound, then, is an older game that I understand much better today, now that I've moved beyond "is this entertaining or not??" as my sole determining factor for something being successful or not. As a game, EarthBound is very entertaining and a cult classic: a quirky RPG set in modern day with an odd sense of humor and an absurd, surrealist take on the world. At it's core, though, it's a competent Dragon Quest clone. EarthBound wasn't a huge success in the U.S. when it was release, but now it has a fanatical following that Dragon Quest has never achieved here. How to account for this, when the game is, as I said, a veritable clone of an unpopular-in-the-U.S. RPG series?? Sure, it's unique, but that's not always enough.A lot of the reason the game has been so cherished for so long has to do with all the things you don't think about while playing it. It's only after you're done with the game that you begin to think about what it's trying to do, what it achieves, and what it's about. Other than its sheer uniqueness, the allure of EarthBound is the same as that of the Dragon Quest series: the characters and scenario writing. I absolutely loved Dragon Quest VIII for the PS2 even though it's pretty much built on the same gameplay style from the series' 8 bit days. Like EarthBound, I loved it for the places you go, people you meet, and things you do. To be sure, EarthBound has incredibly interesting locales, from the trippy Moonside to the zombie infested Threed to the mysterious and aptly named Deep Darkness.
At the same time, EarthBound features a memorable set of characters that still inspire love today, most notably the (in)famous Mr. Saturn creatures, who've gone on to be weapons in Nintendo's Smash Brothers series. But let's get back to my three thinking points--to start, what is EarthBound trying to do?? Well, on the surface it's attempting to be a weird RPG that overturns many genre conventions. But beyond that, in actual practice, it's a pretty decent parody of the genre though it's not always explicit about it. In a early area of the game, the player's party has to defeat a group of moles who've hindered a mining operation in a desert. Funnily enough, every mole threatens you pre-battle and promises that it's the third strongest of the group. More brilliantly, the game breaks the fourth wall by requiring you to call your Dad to save the game; Dad is a character you never actually see, but who sometimes calls to remind you it's a good idea to take a break (implicitly, in real life, to take a break from the game) and save your game. The game's excellent translation helps these parodies succeed, thanks not just to faithful-in-spirit-but-not-literal-word-for-word-translating but also to neat tricks like the odd speech pattern and borderline-unreadable-font that the Mr. Saturn talk in.
In the game's most overt commentary on the RPG genre, you meet a character named Brickroad who designs dungeons for a living. His first appearance is right after a simple, rudimentary dungeon, the kind you may have seen in 8 bit RPGs, with only a few paths and dead ends and no possibility of losing your way or dying. Later when you encounter him again, he has become Dungeon Man, a literal living dungeon in a the form of a giant stone humanoid. After entering him, you climb to his top 'floor' in order to interact with him. On the way there are plenty of signs that comment on the dungeon and dungeon design in general, such as what a good dungeon should have. It's all very...meta and post-modern, when you think about it. What EarthBound achieves is to both critique and transcend its own genre. There is an undefinable quality in regards to what the game is about that I'll get to in closing, but its success as 'parody' and 'paragon' deserves further mention. Though it is, at heart, based heavily on the Dragon Warrior gameplay style, it's a bit more advanced in a few ways thanks to its unique-ness. For starters, the modern setting lets the game play fast and loose with convention. In typical Dragon Warrior-style RPGs, you stay in old timey Inns to rest, and you save at seemingly arbitrary locations, like with the Innkeeper or at glowing crystalline savepoints. You also get money from a bank or your characters simply hold unto all the money at all times. In EarthBound, you stay at hotels to rest, which also cleverly have bellhops reading you snippets from local newspapers as an ongoing commentary on the plot. There phones you can call your Dad on in order to save (or to order pizza deliveries, talk to your Mom to cure homesickness, and to access the game's storage system). Finally, there are ATMs in the world that allow you to depost or withdraw money.
EarthBound's gameplay and its battle system specifically are better than the usual Dragon Warrior clones. Instead of instantly being killed by a fatal blow, your characters have slot machine-style rolling meters for their life, perhaps indicating your character, when mortally wounded, is bleeding to death and trying to get off quick, desperate attacks rather than instantly succumbing. Instead of swords, armor, and magic spells, you are armed with baseball bats, frying pans, hats, bottle rockets, and psychic powers. Instead of static backgrounds of the current terrain, you get psychedelic colors and patterns. And finally, instead of the usual grand and dramatic ending, in EarthBound you get to revisit all the areas of the game to hear new dialogue from the characters before simply...going home and going to bed.
This last bit is important, because what EarthBound is about is growing up while still desiring to stay young and a child. Some have noted this interpretation of the game, and the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Sure, the first set of towns you go to are called Onett, Twoson, Threed, and Fourside as clever wordplay and a simple way to remember which towns you went to in what order, but moreso it makes me think about how, just as games get more difficult as you go, in real life, growing up and getting older means that life becomes more complicated and difficult, too. The desire to stay young is something I read into the game, because there's an underlying feeling of nostalgia and childlike melancholy running through the whole thing that I can't quite explain. Since I replay the game every few years and simultaneously experience this feeling from the game itself as much as I do thinking back to other times I played the game and what age I was, this whole thing becomes a self-fueling loop of nostalgia. The game seems to feel the same way, because during the ending, on top of being able to revisit every place you had been to during the game, you also get to look back via a photo album of snapshots taken by a mysterious photographer during the course of the game. Could this photographer be interpreted as the player's memory of specific moments from a game, which you naturally revisit when you're doing playing?? Perhaps.

That I'm able to get so much from EarthBound this many years later...well, I think it really says a lot about the quality and depth of the game, its world, and its story. What you bring to it is equally as important as the game itself, and the fact that a much younger version of me enjoyed it as much as I do now--with all my interpretations and pretensions--is pretty incredible.