Introduction

Earthbound is one of the most charming and unique games I have ever had the pleasure of let’s playing. It is bursting at the seams with personality and humor and I can’t believe I waited so long to sit down and play this gem. In an era where most RPGs were about far away fantastical lands, Earthbound is refreshingly down to earth and earnest in its satire.

Development on Earthbound (AKA Mother 2) began shortly after the release of Mother in Japan in 1989 by a combined team of Ape Inc. (who would later become Creatures, the dev team behind Pokémon) and HAL Laboratories (who most people would know as the developers of Super Smash Brothers). These two developers were comprised of a different team than the developers of the original Mother. To say the game had a troubled development would be an understatement, as it took over five years to complete with many developers working nights and weekends. The game was reportedly almost cancelled several times. According to director and writer, Shigesato Itoi, the project’s problems were solved when programmer (and future president of Nintendo) Satoru Iwata joined the team.

Itoi used a technique he dubbed "reckless wildness" to develop Earthbound, which basically means that anything was on the table. He wanted to encourage his developers to come up with news ways of portraying ideas in a video game medium. He recognized that they were developing a game and not what he called "big scenario scripts". He wanted the players to have an emotional reaction while playing the game. Music composer Hip Tanaka was a huge contributor to how well Earthbound pulled this off. Sound design is so often underlooked when evaluating why a game succeeds or fails, and I feel like it’s worth mentioning how well the soundtrack pulls the whole experience together. The fight music isn’t just standard uptempo fare, it’s discordant and it makes you feel uneasy. Almost like you’re an 11 year old kid who got thrown into a situation that was way over his head. There are so many instances where the sound design plays perfect with the visuals and the gameplay, but I don’t want to talk about it too much here for risk of spoilers, but we will be pointing out several of these as we go.

Mother 2 was released in August 1994 in Japan and localization on the North American release began. The original Mother was never released in NA and for fear of confusion about what it was a sequel to, the name was changed to Earthbound. Dan Owsen of Nintendo of America began translation but was moved to another project after having completed about 10% of the translation. Still, he is credited with coming up with some of the more memorable phrases, such as “say fuzzy pickles”. Marcus Lindblom took over localization duties and was faced with a rather interesting challenge, as he had to translate a game that was essentially "an outsider's view of the U.S." to American audiences. He was given an immense amount of freedom from Nintendo to do so and introduced many Western culture references to the dialogue, including Bugs Bunny, Benny Hill, and Spinal Tap.

Unfortunately despite the labor of love that localizing Earthbound became for Lindblom, Earthbound released to a lackluster reception in the US. This was largely due to a poor marketing campaign that revolved around the tagline “this game stinks’. Nintendo released awful smelling stratch n’ sniff stickers of the game to tie into the marketing campaign. In the end, despite spending $2 million in marketing, the game sold only around 140,000 copies in NA, compared to nearly twice that in Japan. I must admit that I didn’t even know Earthbound existed until Ness was a playable character in Super Smash Bros. Because of the poor sales and the decline of the Super Nintendo, Mother 2 did not see a European release until the global Virtual Console release on the WiiU. Nintendo also elected not to release Mother 3 outside of Japan, a decision which has yet to be rectified. Fortunately Earthbound has gained a comparatively massive following in the decade since its release and many critics today laud it as a wonderfully crafted RPG. Not only has Nintendo released Earthbound on the Virtual Console, but they also just recently released the original Mother (called Earthbound Beginnings in the US) on the Virtual Console as well.

Videos

Episode 01 - Ness Ketchum


Episode 02 - Eating Socks


Episode 03 - Giant Step


Episode 04 - Fuzzy Pickles


Episode 05 - New Age Retro Hippie


Episode 06 - Exploding Trees


Episode 07 - Happy Happy


Episode 08 - Lilliput


Episode 09 - Zombie Town


Episode 10 - Tessie


Episode 11 - Zombie Haircut


Episode 12 - Saturn Valley


Episode 13 - Milky Well


Episode 14 - Fourside


Episode 15 - Mole Cave


Episode 16 - The Third Strongest


Episode 17 - Moonside


Episode 18 - Too Many Monkeys


Episode 19 - Runaway Choppers


Episode 20 - Fresh Sock Smell


Episode 21 - Dad Phone Man


Episode 22 - Bumpin Kraken


Episode 23 - Sneaky Hieroglyphs


Episode 24 - HNNNGGGG


Episode 25 - Vindication


Episode 26 - Lethal-Asp Hieroglyphs


Episode 27 - Come Play With Us


Episode 28 - Yellow Submarine


Episode 29 - Deep Darkness


Episode 30 - Kidnapping


Episode 31 - Stonehenge


Episode 32 - Starman Super


Episode 33 - The Great Escape


Episode 34 - Overcoming Shyness


Episode 35 - Dinosaur Land


Episode 36 - Smaaaash


Episode 37 - Analysis Mode Engage


Episode 38 - Unleash Your Potential


Episode 39 - Taking Back Onett


Episode 40 - The Fight With Giygas


Episode 41 - Going Home (Epilogue)

The Story So Far..

One of the wonderful things about Earthbound is that, even though it’s a sequel, the player does not need to have played Mother at all. The setup is simple: Many years ago the evil Giygas attacked Earth and was repelled by a hero, but he was not destroyed. Now he returns and seeks to destroy all that you hold dear...

Characters

The Heroes




Ness (AKA Alden, as we named him) is the protagonist of Earthbound. Being that you can not only name Ness, but he has no explicit dialogue other than the options you pick, it’s kind of hard to nail down a personality for him. He kinda falls into that blank slate protagonist area, where the player can insert themselves into his shoes.




Paula (AKA Jacky) is the first party member we get to recruit. Other than the fact that we have seen her character art and named her we have no idea who she is right now, so I will leave this blank until we get later in the story.




Jeff (AKA Alex) is our third recruit. Once again we have no idea who he is or what he’s up to, so he shall remain a mystery.




Poo, (AKA Droo) is our fourth and possibly most mysterious of mystery recruits, whose deeds shall remain nameless. For now.




Ness’ dad plays an important role in the game, despite being a phone. He deposits money into your bank account and acts as a save point throughout the game.




Ness’ mother plays a very important role in the story. She is a constant in Ness’ life, someone he can always turn to for a nice hot <your favorite food> and some motherly advice. Whenever Ness is feeling homesick he only needs to call his mom and hear her voice to feel better. There’s a reason these games are called “Mother”, but we’ll get more into that later.

The Villains




Giygas is the main villain of Earthbound, returning to reprise his role from Mother. At the end of Mother the player (a young boy named Ninten) manages to drive off Giygas, but Giygas is not destroyed. Now he returns to Earth and begins corrupting everything around him.




One of the most iconic villains of the series, Starman is featured on the box art of the North American version as well as in the Smash Run mode of Super Smash Bros for 3DS. His design is heavily based off of the robot Gort from the classic sci fi movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. At this point Starman has done little aside from travel back in time and try to kill us, but we can only assume his evil has just begun…




Pokey is a dick. There’s just no other way to say it. He’s self centered, egotistical, and a coward. Pokey was a trash human being before Giygas showed up and guess what? It’s all downhill from here. His brother Picky ain’t so bad though.

Seeing as this is an RPG and not only are there dozens of enemies but it seems like everything in the entire world wants to kill you we’re just going to say Giygas is the big bad and everything is his fault. Which is actually pretty accurate, as Giygas’ presence causes people to become corrupted and evil. When you defeat enemies you’re not killing them so much as you are snapping them out of their Giygas induced daydreaming.

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Below are some scans of the Earthbound preview that ran in an old issue of Nintendo Power, courtesy of Y-Hat. Thanks again, dude!