BATTLE SYSTEM INTERACTION ORIGINALITY STORY MUSIC & SOUND VISUALS CHALLENGE Medium COMPLETION TIME 15-25 Hours OVERALL 2.5/5.0 Rating definitions

   In 1989, Nintendo produced the Famicom RPG Mother, a sort of parody of the Dragon Warrior series albeit with a modern setting, which never saw light beyond Japan despite receiving an official translation. A little over half a decade later, Ape Software developed its first sequel, Mother 2, localized as Earthbound. While it does have its quirks, a few certain flaws easily prevent it from being in the top tier of Super Nintendo RPGs.

   To their credit, though, the folks at Ape actually did a pretty nice job putting together a battle system. Most notable is the collision encounter system, which is close to flawless in execution. Enemies, of course, randomly wander the game's various fields, and how you and the enemy are facing when you make contact determines how the battle begins. A blue swirl means that you input your commands normally when the fight starts, a green swirl means your party gets a surprise attack, and a red swirl means that the enemy gets the first strike. During the swirl process, more enemies may walk up to the enemy you contact, determining the number of foes you face. One thing I found particularly interesting is that if your party is powerful enough, you'll automatically win the fight without having to go to the battle screen, replete with experience and money.

   The battles themselves are fairly generic in nature, though not without their quirks. You input your commands and let your party and the enemy beat the crap out of one another, with unpredictable turn order as usual, not to mention the escape option not always working. However, Earthbound introduces the interesting concept of "rolling" HP, where, for instance, if an enemy deals mortal damage to a character, you can still heal that ally the next round and prevent him/her from reaching zero life if you're fast enough. Moreover, most battles don't tend to drag on forever, and while they do get a bit tough late into the game, Ness pretty much becomes a powerhouse compared to his three allies, and in the end, things work out pretty well despite not being perfect.

   One thing that's farther from perfect, though, is the interface. Those who have played the Dragon Warrior games will almost instantly be at home, with a pop-up menu that isn't too bad in essence, though flaws still persist. Most grievous is the limited inventories of each character, and while this does add to the effectiveness of the battle system by restricting the number of items each can carry into combat, it creates of the problem of constantly having to discard items just to acquire new ones from treasure boxes with full inventories. While you can call Escargo Express to store excess baggage, a simple sack for non-character-inventory items would've been far more convenient. On a lesser note, purchasing new items from stores requires a lot of button-pressing and confirmation, though your characters' stat panels flash when equipment is more powerful than that they have equipped, and warp spells eventually provide rapid conveyance among visited areas. Overall, interaction in Earthbound is functional, though barely so.

   Though many have appropriately compared Earthbound to the Dragon Warriors, and it is the second in a series, it's still surprisingly original. While the original Mother featured collision encounters to a limited extent, its sequel vastly improves upon this, with instant victory in encounters being a first for an RPG in its time, with the only other title coming close to imitating this quirk being Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. Moreover, I have yet to see another RPG with "rolling" HP, and it bears some other features not present in other RPGs such as being able o call out for pizza, ATM machines, and so forth. In the end, even today, Earthbound stands well apart from most other titles in the genre.

   The story occurs in the country of Eagleland (basically a parody of America), where a meteor strikes in Onett, the hometown of the protagonist, Ness, who goes to investigate, meets a fly who tells him things that make marginal sense, and then goes off on an adventure to visit eight Sanctuaries and find the three allies destined to help him. While Ness receives a bit of development as the player visits the Sanctuaries, that background doesn't really seem to be meaningful to the main events. Worse, though, is that there doesn't seem to be much plausible explanation as to how Ness' neighbor, Pokey Minch, goes from his role in the opening sequences to the role he plays throughout the course of the game's events. Add to that a repeat appearance by a stalker who regularly plummets from the skies to photograph your youthful party, and it becomes painfully obvious that the writers should've given the story a more thorough once-over.

   The music, though, is more abhorrent, with the composers seeming to work under the theory that randomly cramming notes into a song would sooner or later make it sound good. The only passable music includes some of the town themes and maybe one or two of the battle tunes, but most everything else can make your ears bleed, and I even played with muted volume at times. The sound effects in battle don't really help, either, with annoying comical blips and duts that become especially insulting when you're close to dying. Theoretically, one could say that the aurals fit the game's modern, comical setting, though modern and comical doesn't have to mean awful, and in the end, Earthbound goes to show that musical composition isn't for everyone.

   The visuals, however, are far more passable, despite being mediocre. Some of the scenery is quite pleasant, despite odd coloring at times (purple water?), and your party's sprites, while a bit low in detail, face eight directions (all other sprites are unfortunately doomed to four directions). However, when designing the battle visuals, the graphics designers evidently took a bit too much psychedelics, since instead of having actual battle scenery, Earthbound settles for weird retro hippie seizure-inducing backdrops, alongside inanimate enemies, many of which actually look okay. Overall, while the game doesn't have the best visuals on the Super Nintendo, it most certainly does not have the worst.

   Finally, Earthbound pretty well strikes the balance between easy and hard, and is fairly short, as well, taking anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five hours to complete.

   Earthbound, in the end, is the RPG equivalent of one of those cheesy old science fiction movies. Sure, it can be fun, though a weak interface, shallow storyline, and some really rancid music make it mediocre at best. While it did receive a port alongside its predecessor on the Gameboy Advance recently, the collection is probably doomed to remain in Japan, and though a third installment was announced for the Gameboy Advance sometime ago, little has surfaced on the title, so the franchise probably won't be rising from the ashes anytime soon.