Stop me if you've heard this before: A boy, who is either orphaned or who's parents have recently been mamed/slaughtered/murdered/blown up/etc. gets recruited by a man/secret society to help stop an inexplicable evil from destroying all mankind/the planet/existence itself and on the way meets like-goaled individuals who help him on his quest by providing fighting skills/magic skills/comedy skills/bedroom skills while they save the world by defeating the dragon/evil queen/empire/god/their "dead" father (or any combination thereof) and on the way someone dies, then gets brought back to life at the last minute to provide that extra oomph necessary to achieve their goal while teaching the hero about himself and the importance of friends in the process.
Okay now throw about 90% of that right out the window, tack on some of the mechanical elements of your typical jRPG (like experience, items, turn-based combat, etc.) and you have Earthbound... or as the Japanese call it "Nyah nyah nyah, we have backstory and you're playing the second game in the series because you were a bunch of xenophobic pricks back in the NES days (a.k.a. Mother 2)." Earthbound sheds off the shackles of traditional jRPG storytelling in that: your parents are both alive and you call them regularly (to save the game, check the status of your bank account, because you miss them, etc.); you use weapons like baseball bats, yo-yo's, frying pans, etc.; your dog is kind of a coward; your friends are all really weird (and you love them for it); and you're fighting exceptionally overly-dramatic aliens.
Besides all of that, the game is genuinely clever and funny even when being run through the translation mill. I'm sure certain liberties were taken with the "interpretation" of some (read: most) of the dialogue to make it more palatable for the western audience and kudos to the translation team for keeping it all together and not ruining the experience. Few games these days take a sort of subtle approach to genuine humor without being overtly over-the-top on a consistent basis. While this may be a bit of a rough comparison, this game would be more likened to a "Pleasantville" kind of humor rather than a "Van Wilder," so to speak; everything is done very tongue-in-cheek without any sort of crudeness (save for a certain slime-boss) and often times the game itself has a sense of "self-awareness" in the fact that it's a game and brings that into the humor as well.
This Princess needs saving because we've only got one game out of the three game series officially released outside of Japan. Mother for the NES and Mother 3 for the GameBoy Advance were released to the JP market while the rest of the world only got the second game of the series. Put quite simply, there absolutely needs to be more of this kind of creativity in the videogame industry. Most everything about this game was fresh and different while keeping it familiar enough to still be playable. The music (speaking as a composer) is probably some of the most creative scoring I've seen in any media (Film, TV, Game etc.) and massive kudos go to the three guys behind it (Hiroshi Kanazu, Keiichi Suzuki, and Hirokazu Tanaka); the art direction was brilliant (and brought us Ness to the Super Smash Bros. Series), the pacing was near-perfect and anyone who hates conventional Final Fantasy-esque jRPGs but likes the idea of an RPG in general should play this game.
This PWS is the neo-retro-vintage-modern-punk-pop girl with the chin-length tri-color hair playing saxophone in the new-wave 80's jazz-fusion ska punk rock band that orders the Shirley Temple with six extra cherries at the bar after the show listening to her Sony Discman with the oversized headphones; smacking it on occasion to get the disc to stop skipping. She's the one that invites you to the parking lot to get busy in the back of her Karmann Ghia with the pink and black fuzzy dice hanging off the rearview mirror. You're not quite sure what to expect, but you know you're going to leave the situation better off than when you went in.
-SP
Okay now throw about 90% of that right out the window, tack on some of the mechanical elements of your typical jRPG (like experience, items, turn-based combat, etc.) and you have Earthbound... or as the Japanese call it "Nyah nyah nyah, we have backstory and you're playing the second game in the series because you were a bunch of xenophobic pricks back in the NES days (a.k.a. Mother 2)." Earthbound sheds off the shackles of traditional jRPG storytelling in that: your parents are both alive and you call them regularly (to save the game, check the status of your bank account, because you miss them, etc.); you use weapons like baseball bats, yo-yo's, frying pans, etc.; your dog is kind of a coward; your friends are all really weird (and you love them for it); and you're fighting exceptionally overly-dramatic aliens.
Besides all of that, the game is genuinely clever and funny even when being run through the translation mill. I'm sure certain liberties were taken with the "interpretation" of some (read: most) of the dialogue to make it more palatable for the western audience and kudos to the translation team for keeping it all together and not ruining the experience. Few games these days take a sort of subtle approach to genuine humor without being overtly over-the-top on a consistent basis. While this may be a bit of a rough comparison, this game would be more likened to a "Pleasantville" kind of humor rather than a "Van Wilder," so to speak; everything is done very tongue-in-cheek without any sort of crudeness (save for a certain slime-boss) and often times the game itself has a sense of "self-awareness" in the fact that it's a game and brings that into the humor as well.
This Princess needs saving because we've only got one game out of the three game series officially released outside of Japan. Mother for the NES and Mother 3 for the GameBoy Advance were released to the JP market while the rest of the world only got the second game of the series. Put quite simply, there absolutely needs to be more of this kind of creativity in the videogame industry. Most everything about this game was fresh and different while keeping it familiar enough to still be playable. The music (speaking as a composer) is probably some of the most creative scoring I've seen in any media (Film, TV, Game etc.) and massive kudos go to the three guys behind it (Hiroshi Kanazu, Keiichi Suzuki, and Hirokazu Tanaka); the art direction was brilliant (and brought us Ness to the Super Smash Bros. Series), the pacing was near-perfect and anyone who hates conventional Final Fantasy-esque jRPGs but likes the idea of an RPG in general should play this game.
This PWS is the neo-retro-vintage-modern-punk-pop girl with the chin-length tri-color hair playing saxophone in the new-wave 80's jazz-fusion ska punk rock band that orders the Shirley Temple with six extra cherries at the bar after the show listening to her Sony Discman with the oversized headphones; smacking it on occasion to get the disc to stop skipping. She's the one that invites you to the parking lot to get busy in the back of her Karmann Ghia with the pink and black fuzzy dice hanging off the rearview mirror. You're not quite sure what to expect, but you know you're going to leave the situation better off than when you went in.
-SP
