Why I Love Earthbound

EarthBound turned 20 a few days ago, June 5th. Twenty years. You can play games for decades, all of your old favourites hit their twentieth, their thritieth, and so on. But there are the few that have had a lasting personal impact on you. And while time is intangible, it makes you stop and think when there’s a more personal connection.

EarthBound, and by extension the MOTHER series, seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongues these days. It’s a game that’s been brought into the spotlight more than once by an impassioned community. It’s a game that everyone, their dog, and their septic tank says inspired their crowdfunding project. It’s become a grail for retro collectors. It’s become a lot of things to a lot of people. But why do I love EarthBound?

Honestly, I’ve been reluctant to talk about EarthBound because so much has already been said. So this is not going to be a review, there are enough of them and I encourage you to give it a try on your own.

As a kid I loved RPGs, I used to pour over Epic Center in Nintendo Power every month and rent as many as I could find. Number crunching, high adventure, even ridiculous melodrama. I ate it up. EarthBound was at once a satire and exultation of these tenants. It was an absurdist RPG. It was tongue-in-cheek, irreverent, and crass and when it needed to be – serious, compelling, and moving. It was very smart about it.

It captured my imagination in a way that few others managed to do so. EarthBound is full of bizarre events, characters, and dialogue. Sometimes dire, sometimes lighthearted, often deeper than face value. EarthBound is through the perspective of children. It’s parsed that way to us, the audience. But it never talked down to us. That’s important to a kid.

I recall renting this game at least three or four times before I owned it. I could never get in consecutive weekends, and my file was always replaced. But I started it up again every time and got farther and even enjoyed the repeats as much the second and third time through. There was so much flavour, so much to take in. It just drew you in, yeah?
You’re a kid playing sticks in the back woods. Paths and lots and cabins and noises take on special meaning in your personal mythology. The farther you get from home the wilder the adventure you’re acting out becomes. EarthBound is a kid playing sticks in the woods. Your hometown is relatively benign, and things just escalate as you spiral outwards. All from the perspective of four intrepid youngsters.

When I saw that this game was just going to get bigger and bigger, I resolved to wait until I could have it for my own before I kept going. And given that an SNES game in Canada was an expensive prospect, period, a big box like this was even moreso. Look – EarthBound can be a hard sell these days but the friends I lent it to were receptive. It was just prohibitively expensive at an age where getting a game – either by your own volition or as a gift – was an event.

EarthBound is one of the games (the other being EVO) that is responsible for my love of the unique, the obscure, the bizzare when it comes to games. It was so familiar yet so different, a take on the traditional jRPGs I loved that changed things up and could laugh at itself. Over these twenty years I’ve certainly played through it enough, yet I still find it a fresh play. Because it’s unique and bizzare and makes me grin.

Twenty years. As previously established, I’ve seen so many old favourites hit these milestones. But there are a few that just feel different, EarthBound included.

I think I love EarthBound because every time I play through it I feel like it’s freshly laid out for me. I know enough about it that I can play it differently every time. I’m excited about the prospect of maybe reading a line I’ve never read before. Perhaps I will even see an enemy spawn where I’ve never seen it spawn before?

Maybe the the reason I feel old thinking about EarthBound’s twenty years is because playing EarthBound makes me feel like a kid again. Because even though I’m deeply familiar with the game it still feels fresh and the possibilities are still there. It still captures my imagination in ways very few others can. It still brings a smile to my face, it still stirs something inside.

When I flip the power switch today it’s like I’m flipping it twenty years ago.

EarthBound is responsible for a lot of memories, more than I can ramble about here. But it’s been a personal journey. And let me make something clear – it doesn’t matter if your journey with the MOTHER series started on the SNES EarthBound, or on the Famicom with MOTHER, or GBA with Mother 3, or with EarthBound’s virtual console release. It doesn’t matter if you got interested because of Smash Brothers, or because you just wanted to know who that kid from the Amiibos was. EarthBound, and MOTHER, your attachment to the series isn’t measured in years but by what it means to you – personally.

For a game that stinks and is smack dab in the middle of the 90’s “gross out” era – it’s timeless. It’s timeless because it’s a sweeping adventure that – while silly at times – presents a living world full of strange and wonderful things for you to interact with and discover the meaning of. It takes you seriously, even if it sometimes doesn’t take itself seriously.

And it brings the funk.