Gaming Writer Jake Riley-Cross reflects on his experience playing EarthBound Beginnings in his quest to gain appreciation for turn-based combat
EarthBound Beginnings, originally released as Mother, a 1989 Japan-exclusive RPG for the Famicom, is an interesting case. One side of the proverbial coin states that it is a masterpiece of its time and hugely influential.
On the other hand, its two successors markedly overshadow it, both within the JRPG genre and the Mother trilogy itself. The Super Smash Bros series of games popularised characters such as Ness and Lucas. Still, mentioning characters like Ninten would only result in confused looks from most gamers.
A quick search of the best way to play the game will bring up anything but an actual answer. Countless pages of gamers advising to try several fan patches and hacks instead of the original game. These are typically bundled with various combinations of difficulty tweaks, quality of life features, and translations.
Some recommend to skip the game entirely until you have tried its cooler younger brother, EarthBound. The latter has a higher level of polish and more reasonable balancing, not to mention the greater cultural relevance. So naturally, I put EarthBound Beginnings on the back-burner and got straight to enjoying the pleasures of 1994 SNES glory. Right? I even argued that turn-based combat systems were inferior to their real-time counterparts
Well, not quite. I recently finished Toby Fox’s Undertale (only ten years late) and fell in love. Before this, I enjoyed half of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door during the pandemic, and some Pokémon as a child.
Safe to say, JRPGs are not exactly my area of expertise. I simply preferred the unique offerings and styles of pretty much any other genre. In the past, I even argued that turn-based combat systems were inferior to their real-time counterparts.
After finishing my final run of Undertale, going the genocide route, I began to develop a new perspective. Between how much I enjoyed all three-and-a-half of my playthroughs, and the sustained success of the genre, with notable recent titles such as Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 both receiving glowing reviews and praise, maybe there was value in a slower-paced combat framework with more emphasis on storytelling. If I could survive the NES original, I would be in good standing to take on anything
However, neither Undertale nor debatably Paper Mario are conventional in their combat. If I was to truly turn a new leaf on the genre as a whole, surely it would make sense to continue from the beginning and go far back to one of Undertale’s primary inspirations, the Mother trilogy. If I could survive the NES original, I would be in good standing to take on anything.
Thus we conclude the story behind why I chose the vanilla EarthBound Beginnings as opposed to EarthBound, despite all of the advice pointing towards fan patches or the sequel being better. Now, how is the game itself? That depends on who you ask.
Is EarthBound Beginnings worth seeing through to the end?
If we compare it to Undertale, the difference is night and day. Certainly not a bold claim, but indeed, Undertale clearly has more engaging gameplay, better environments, an iconic soundtrack, a stronger story, more polish. The list goes on, and you should not need this article to guess that would be my take. So perhaps instead we should ask: With sufficiently tempered expectations, assuming someone has already decided to try and stick it out, is EarthBound Beginnings worth seeing through to the end?
After doing exactly that, I believe there are three major points in the game in which a player can safely decide it is not worth continuing. Coincidentally, they align quite nicely with the early-game, mid-game and late-game. Roadblock number one is the cemetery. This is, in some sense, the first true area of the game.
The game begins in a relatively novel and fun way, with you waking up to objects in your house possessed by some unknown force. However, after battling your way through and entering the outside world, enemies suddenly become rather tough. The encounter rate of the game is tuned glaringly poorly, with multiple consecutive encounters being a normal occurence. Until you level up a bit, it will be hard to make any real progress without dying or spamming heals.
The game picked up steam in the next area, the zoo
There is a weapon in the nearest town’s shop which makes things a little easier, but you still need to grind to save up enough money for it. Plus, unless you go out of your way to look around and chat to many NPCs, you are given no direction on where to go, let alone what to do when you arrive. Between the archaic controls, the lack of direction and the unapologetic encounter difficulty, you would be forgiven for leaving things here.
To tell the truth, the above does not stray too far from my own experience. However, I knew what I was getting into and wanted to give the game a fair try. Luckily, I thought the game picked up steam in the next area, the zoo.
The charm of the game seemed to present itself more here in particular, and it became more apparent that the pitfalls are more a product of the times rather than developer incompetence (not to imply that was a worry in the first place). This continued until what I believe to be the mid-game roadblock, being Union Station.
Once you have unlocked the station, the game presents you with three others to visit via train. Maybe it was some slight fatigue, but I felt that most of the areas immediately beyond this point seemed underdeveloped and not as interesting compared to the ones beforehand. Most of the areas immediately beyond this point seemed underdeveloped
This feeling mostly lingered until the late-game. As I was not sure if I was even supposed to take the train yet, I decided to explore the immediate area instead, only to stumble into a desert that seemed intended for later in the game. Death was the punishment for this misstep.
Feeling slightly frustrated from the general lack of direction in the game up to this point, I resorted to a walkthrough for the rest of my playthrough. In hindsight, I may have been able to get by without one for a little longer. I still feel justified in my choice, lest I wasted time in choosing the ‘wrong station’, or found out I needed to visit the aforementioned desert after all. Exploration was never really rewarded and eventually felt like tedium between the actual fun parts. However, if you can get through this, there is little left in your way, save for the final roadblock.
If you have heard anything about EarthBound Beginnings before, you may have heard about the difficulty. You may have even heard about the last area of the game and how brutal it is. After all, the recommended way of playing it is just to flee each encounter, instead of strategically using all of your experience and abilities to the fullest. In terms of the combat, it is definitely the lowest point of the game.
Fortunately, if you can look past that, the area does make up for it in spectacle. This final stretch has arguably the best representation of the story the game has to offer, along with a few unique encounters and interesting set pieces to cap the game off nicely.
All in all, EarthBound Beginnings is not something I can recommend to most. When judging by today’s standards, it is easy to see the shortcomings. A multitude of factors, not their creativity and potential, limited the developers. However, with the right mindset, expectations and intentions, there do lie fragments of greatness. This game did not convert me into a JRPG lover yet, but it was definitely worth my time, at least.
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