1995 was a great year for RPG's. With Final Fantasy 3 still fresh in the mind's of Square-heads (blockheads?) all over, two big summer prospects emerged; Chrono Trigger which was as close to USFF4 we would see, and Earthbound. Both games were fantastic but for widely different reasons.

Earthbound is famous for being the "kids RPG", and the kiddiness is actually what would keep me from this game for about two more years. When I finally did get my claws on it, I was glad I had made the by-then $20 investment.

Depending on where you buy this game, you may get a different assortment of stuff. In its original packaging, Earthbound contains the game, the strategy guide (which is very helpful) and some scratch-n-sniff cards with certain characters or items from the game. Another reason I didn't want to buy this game at first is that I thought the cards would be essential to completing the game. Fortunately, they are not, they're just a novelty. And I'm betting because of careless people like myself, that they are pretty rare nowadays.

The story is this: You are a prepubescent teenage boy living in the quiet town of Onett. One night, a meteorite hits in your town. You get up and check it out. You meet Buzz Buzz, a bee from the future who tells you that aliens are taking over the minds of humans and animals, making them hostile. And according to a prophecy, you and three others are destined to do away with them. Since Will Smith is nowhere to be seen, you have to rely on your baseball bat.

That is one of the more great things about Earthbound; it is a very down-to-Earth game. Your money comes in US dollars, and you withdraw it from an ATM machine. You can make phone calls to your Mom when you are homesick (you'll start losing motivation, ergo battle turns, if you go too long without), or your Dad when you decide to save your progress. Healing items range from bread rolls to pizza to hamburgers to boiled eggs. You can even get condiments such as salt or ketchup to go with the items and increase the effect of healing. You can grab a bicycle to get around quicker. Your weapons consist of baseball bats, frying pans, slingshots, and guns. Or if you want, you can carry around a teddy bear, and it will stand in as a character in battle to absorb damage.

The battle concept in Earthbound is kind of clever. Your foes move around in the overworld, and you can either engage or avoid them. Usually they will chase you down anyway, so you don't want them to approach you from behind or they get the first strike! At the same time, if you get them from behind, you get the first strike yourself. The cool thing is that once you defeat a boss character, all the monsters in its area or dungeon will run away from you, making for easy first strikes which in turn result in a higher occurrence of automatic wins. Automatic wins ROCK; they make experience building a piece of cake. If your level is so ridiculously high that there is no point in even bringing up a battle, it will just flash and say "You Win" without even making you fight. Then you get the experience for free. Only problem with this is that if you do it for too long, and you're not actually engaging in battle, then you don't get to actually see your progress, e.g. how much more damage you're doing with each hit and so on.

As far as the battling itself, it's pretty much standard issue. You can fight, you can cast a spell, or you can run away. Your characters are represented by boxes at the bottom of the screen that show your current HP and PP. When you give or take damage, you will see it in the scrolling text up at the top, e.g. Ness attacks! 147 HP of damage to the New Age Hippie! So there really isn't a lot of action to see in battle, but the sound effects are real nice; some of them may even cause that "snapping" sound you get in your speakers when something really loud "pops out". The fanfare when you win a battle is also at least a little rewarding. The music itself often sounds like something that aliens would listen to.

When you actually gain a level, you will be rewarded with increases in your max HP, PP (psychic points, which are used for magic), offense, defense, speed, vitality, or IQ. As far as I can tell, the increases are random. My friend Joe says if you refrain from building your levels too early, you will get better increases. I say if you don't build your levels early, you get your ^ss kicked. So, whatever.

(By the way, if you want the REAL scoop on how to enhance your increases, check this out. I gained 90 HP on one level this morning with it.)

http://www.angelfire.com/oh/dannosworld/buzz.html

Basically, this is what I like and what I don't like about Earthbound...

What I Like

One of the things I like the most about Earthbound is that it ranks as one of the funniest RPG's I've ever played. There are monsters that burp, characters that introduce themselves in bizarre ways (I haven't showered in a few days, so I may be kind of stinky.), weird monster names like the Worthless Protoplasm, the Mad Taxi or one of my personal favorites, the Mighty Bear Seven (WTF?). You might catch a cold in battle and start receiving damage from sneezing, or you'll just start getting confused and walking in different directions than what you push because you have a mushroom on your head. The cops in Onett will reprimand you in the time of danger and say "Times such as this, children like you should be at home playing video games." That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Graphically speaking, Earthbound is not the most impressive thing around; it wasn't even all that impressive by the standards we had six years ago, with the exception of some psychedelic, swirling and drunk backgrounds during battle. But I think the innocent colorful look goes better with a game like this. It has that old timeless ability to "suck you in" like a cartoon a la Super Mario Bros. 3.

Shopping for new armor and weapons is especially easy on Earthbound. While you are browsing, your windows will light up when you point the cursor over an item that increases your stats. Once you buy the weapon or armor it will ask if you would like to equip it right away. When you do, it will tell you the difference (Joe's offense changed 83 to 88), and the store clerk will offer to buy your old armor. It's really quite convenient.

The final battle sequence in this game is completely astounding. It's a little bit on the easy side, but the idea behind how you win is one of the greatest ever. You really have to see it for yourself, it's unexpectedly touching.

What I Didn't Like

I've never seen so many misses in battle before! Holy cow! Most other RPG's that I've played, you'll usually hit an enemy 90-95% of the time unless you are hindered by blindness or you're fighting a flying or invisible foe. None of the Earthbound foes have any of this ('cept for UFO's I guess), but your chance of actually connecting with a blow are right around 75%. It's not uncommon to miss two or three times in succession in battle which can be a real waste of time and HP!

One other thing that got to be a real hassle is that you can only carry 14 items at a time, and if you have two of the same thing, then it takes up two spots on the list. Then you also have to consider that there will be items like your cell phone and your ATM card that you have to keep in your inventory all the time. Sometimes if an item is important to progressing in the game, but you only use it one time, it still won't let you drop the item even after you've used it the one time. Fortunately you can also call your sister to come pick the stuff up and store it for you, but it's still a pain in the ^ss.

And finally, the photographer. Oh my God, can we say "the most annoying RPG character ever"? All of a sudden, you'll think your game is freezing when in actuality, you're stopping because the photographer guy is about to come spinning out of the sky to take your picture. The whole process takes about 30 seconds and occurs when you walk near a memorable spot, such as in front of the bicycle shop. Some of them you can learn to avoid, but man is it annoying! Especially in Dalaam where he stops you outside the "castle", and again inside, 4 screens away in front of the throne.

I'm gonna pull a Linkin Park, though, and say that in the end, it doesn't really matter. Earthbound was destined for classic status from the beginning because it is essentially an original cliche. The whole aliens attacking thing, it's been done a million times. What this game had that most other RPG's don't is that it refused to take itself seriously.

In spite of all its great humor, it is unfortunate that the main characters couldn't have had more interaction with the world around them, though. They probably speak a dozen times in the whole game, and when they do, it's just to tell the player what to do next, e.g. Let's take this back to the pyramid! No amount of humor can cover the fact that not only are they completely excluded (they don't even get to sit down at the Runaway Five concerts for cryin' out loud), but this is 12-year old kids leaving their homes, trudging through swamps that go up to their eyes and deplete their health, sweat away and get sunstroke in deserts that are 120 degrees (the guide even says the temperatures of each city), swim through sewer water, get puked on, get beat unconscious by zombies in a hotel, and "experience the pain of battle many times" as quoted by an unseen narrator on a coffee break. It's really kind of disturbing, but I figure maybe it's just me.

Otherwise, it's about as fun of an RPG as you can ask for, if you don't mind 8-bitish graphics on a 16-bit machine.

Recommended: Yes