Most Overrated Games Ever #10
Earthbound (SNES, 1995)
Earthbound is an adorable RPG released in North America in 1995. The graphics are technically unimpressive, but have a certain charm to them; the charm and cleverness of the visual and audio style, combined with the well-written and humorous dialogue, have led Earthbound to have a giant fan community even to this day. This is odd, considering that, when the game came out, Nintendo couldn’t give it away; they put a huge marketing push behind it, and nobody bought it. But, in the fifteen years since, it’s taken on a life of its own, and is now one of the most highly-regarded games of the SNES era.
Which is the problem, because, really, the game’s not that good. Don’t get the wrong idea, now; it’s cute, and it’s charming, and it’s amusing, but the gameplay was extremely dated even in 1995, and certainly hasn’t held up well. Earthbound is, fundamentally, a very basic RPG, about on par with Dragon Warrior 2 (JP 1987, NA 1990) in sophistication. You control a party that builds, over the course of the game, up to four characters, and you travel around talking to people and fighting monsters. The battles are structured exactly the same as the NES Dragon Warrior games, with party info visible (but the party itself hidden), and static images of the mobs filling the majority of the screen. Unlike the old Dragon Warriors, however, the mobs are standing against psychedelic backgrounds. Combat is completely turn-based, with no interrupts available, and the player characters don’t have a wide variety of abilities.
Outside of combat, the game is also very basic; you walk around and talk to people, get hamburgers out of trash cans, and then you have to spend time managing your inventory. Earthbound came out almost a year after Final Fantasy 3, which was totally free of inventory management bullshit, and yet failed to learn that lesson. Plotwise, the game is fairly loose; the dialogue and characterisation are excellent, but it’s not really very clear what’s going on or why. You wander from town to town fighting crime, then you end up fighting dinosaurs for a while, and then you go to the evil boss’ lair and fight robots. It’s more clear if you played the original Mother on the NES, but, since that game was never released in North America, that’s sort of a tough sell.
On the subject of the final boss, the fight itself is an incredibly stupid and frustrating gimmick, and you might not even figure it out if you don’t look it up.
So there you are. Earthbound: adorable, silly, charming, but pretty weak, gameplay-wise. And a shoo-in for this list, since it has one of the largest and most active fan communities of any game ever.
