Two decades late to the party, but so what?

I just finished Earthbound. Properly finished, not just beat the final boss. Said my goodbyes and talked to everyone, went home, watched credits, sniffled, saw post-credit cutscene. So how was Earthbound?

Good lord, where do I even start.

The game is a masterwork. It breaks the fourth wall to both comedic and dramatic effect, it manages to be utterly bizarre yet still fully comprehensible, and it was enthralling enough to keep someone who gets easily bored with RPGs playing until the bitter end. I mean, I give a lot of love to Amnesia for getting inside your head or Bioshock for playing with player expectations to make an amazing twist, but I'd venture to say Earthbound is one of the best games I've played in my entire life.

The overplot isn't particularly complicated--four heroes must travel to eight special locations across a vast world, defeat the large monsters therein, and collect Things that will then enable them to defeat the very large monster and save the world. In this case the heroes are four children (armed with baseball bats, frying pans, psychic powers, and in Jeff's case ray guns or grenade launchers), the Things are sounds, the world is a thinly veiled contemporary America (with excursions to England, South America, Egypt, and Tibet), and the monsters are everything from walking mushrooms to abstract art, but the basic concept's the same.

The subplots, on the other hand...well, at one part of the game you wind up having to engage in an elaborate trading system to feed desert-cave-dwelling monkeys in order to get a machine that makes trout-flavored yogurt because that's the only way you can get into a penthouse suite in not-NYC to rescue a partymember because they got themselves kidnappeded out of a department store by a tentacled alien and you lost them while battling your way through vinyl records and animate cups of coffee. And all of this makes sense in context. It's a weird-ass game but it never feels pointless or frustrating. Usually.

And the ending...I'm sure anything I could say about the battle with Giygas, the horror of finally entering its lair and grasping what exactly we were fighting, the despair as we realized we were hopelessly outmatched by this unspeakable evil, and then...well. If you've played it, you know what happens and if you haven't I won't spoil it for you. But I'd known for years what was going to go down and it was still one of the most emotional boss battles I've ever experienced. I shed a small tear at the credits because I didn't want it to end, but I made myself go through with it because I couldn't go through all that and not bring Ness home again.

...

Before anyone asks, of course I've started Mother 3, the sequel to Earthbound that was never released in America but was translated by heavily dedicated fans and is available for free download on several websites for those with GBA emulators. I've just finished the first chapter. So far it's been pretty good, kept the Earthbound quirky style but translated it into a far different setting with a much more dystopic tone and a different way of using characters and party arrangement. Very much what I'd call 'spiritual successor' and so far they don't seem to be reusing any major plot devices out of Earthbound, so I'm having a good time. Though damn, they do not mess around when it comes to pathos, ye gods.