it’s taking all my willpower not to argue with some of these like oh my god are you trolling (not God hand I can make sense of that one)
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Maybe Contact? It quickly becomes miserable to play and it’s translation is pretty bad but vibes wise it fits (and that’s what we’re all going by right???)
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At the risk of being annoying, I’m gonna turn the question back on you: what about Earthbound are you seeking in another game??
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first gen pokemon definitely had some grit, with the stark and rigid character of the world and the lawlessness of kids, mobsters and biker gangs roaming around fighting each other with dangerous creatures. later on the scenario feels more smoothed over and presented as a hobby.
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Anything NIGORO has made, though maybe La Mulana 2 isn’t the best fit. First La Mulana would probably fit, especially the original and not the remake. All of their flash games would, especially Ghost House and Lonely House Moving
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I wanted to leave this question unanswered at first. The answer is different for everyone, as we can see. A big animus for creating this thread was believing that the answer to the question was almost certainly not just quirky writing, turn-based combat, and a modern setting.
For me, there are probably two elements that I admire most. One is the writing. It’s not just quirky. It’s poetic. These little computer people are like philosophers (sometimes they are actually self-professed philosophers). You can feel a current of individualism running through the culture of Mother and Earthbound. Sometimes that makes people selfish and violent. Other times, they find their own self-created peace. I adore talking to every single person I meet.
I’m having a hard time naming the other element. Let’s call it make-believe. Before I played these games, I could not predict what was going to happen in them. That inspired something childlike in my imagination. The worlds were funny, confusing, and scary. Even though the genre is full of tropes, the designers are always making things up for the first time. In Mother, a woman invites you for a drink at a bar. You can accept. Then the police come and throw you in jail. The officer asks if you have learned your lesson. If you say no, he tells you to sleep it off for another night. The hotel resting jingle plays and he asks you the same question again. After everything, they confiscate your weapon. It’s inspiring. That’s why I suggested Mercenary for Atari 8-bit computers. In that game, You explore a wireframe world. You can enter underground rooms and mazes. You can drive around a city with a car and some vehicles even fly. If you fly to one speck in the sky, you realize that it’s a city floating in the air. The feeling that gave me reminds me of the feeling I get in Mother when I first got to Magicant. The older I get, the less surprised I am by art and media. Engaging with them starts to feel like homework or a merely killing time. Mother/Earthbound inspires an actual feeling of play.
There, now I have it my pretension quota. You’re welcome.
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All that said, I’m really pleased with what everyone has suggested. Reading them has been such an antidote for what I was feeling with that AI article. I get the sense that everyone has their own relationship with the work.
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Thanks for answering! I think it’s actually very helpful to put these kinds of things into words as a partial antidote to the frustration you experienced when searching for similar games.
Also, while I get it was probably just you being glib, I do wish people in general would stop apologising for being pretentious when in actuality they are just engaging with art and discussing their thoughts about it. I get we live in a time where the broader culture feels particularly hostile towards this, so as a result there may be some embarrassment around having more complicated thoughts about a work than just “I think this is good”, but I do also wish there was a bit more willingness to pushback against that attitude in general.
I guess that was part of why I felt the need to prod at you a bit, hoping that maybe there was more to your thinking than just “Earthbound is good”, and hey, turns out I was right! 
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I agree with you on “pretentious.” It’s a pet peeve of mine when people use that to describe people who like certain things or try to talk about things more deeply. People should like what they like! Or dislike what they don’t like! “Pretentious” shouldn’t be a shorthand for “noncomformist.”
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MINTY I HOPE YOU DONT MIND I WANNA ANSWER TOO. im bouncing off what you said i woudl have never formed these thoughts on my own
biggest thing for me is writing by someone who at the time isnt super entrenched in videogames and/or actually has a writing career and hobbies outside of videogames. thats the big thing. give me REAL writing
second biggest thing is playing with the form. expecting familarity and then toying with it, without doing what all other games like that do which is MAKE IT SO HARD CUZ YOU ALREADY KNOW WHAT YOURE DOING AND HAVE TO PROVE YOURSELF GAMER STYLE. the guy that tells you to go away and gives you 50 bucks after you talk to him like 10 times. people asking you why youre walking up to them and bothering them in the middle of their meal. stuff like that
i think these two are intrinsically linked. you cant be clever and surprise me if youre a bad writer, you cant reform a familar story if youre a shitty storyteller. i think a lot of games have one or the other but very rarely both
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Having an outside perspective is important. It’s also probably important that the game was influenced by things outside of typical nerd-culture interests. I mean, yeah it’s a variation on Dragon Quest, but it’s influenced by Peanuts and the Beatles.
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After rolling around what you described liking about Earthbound in my head, two games immediately came to mind:
The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls
This also does that thing of using preexisting tropes and genre conventions as the basis upon which to just riff like crazy and have a lot of fun with the form. Lots of surprising turns you don’t see coming and a real willingness to drop its commitment to a certain system or mechanic the moment it’s no longer relevant to the story it’s telling/fun it’s having. Also just really nice to play something so technically rudimentary and yet it somehow manages to blow most modern games out of the water!
Cookie’s Bustle
Bit of a hassle to get the English translation for this up and running, but if you can manage it it’s well worth the effort. Uses the basic structure of a point n click adventure to string together a bunch of bizarre set pieces that are mostly impossible to predict. The tonal whiplash with this one is something else. Notable to me personally for being the first game I had played in long time that actually elicited real surprise and childlike wonder.
Also second @iguferon’s recommendation of Planet Laika, a game so alien it made me feel like I was dissociating at certain points… It really gets in your head!
Just minimized my post in progress only to see @daphaknee honing in on the exact sorta thing I feel like these games represent! Piggybacking off of what they said, Consume Me is a really good recent example of something with writing that feels predominantly informed by things outside of videogames while also messing with familiar sorts of systems as the building blocks to map out a more complicated and dynamic story than something that’s just focused on the following the expected beats provided by the shape of those systems/mechanics themselves…
(also saw you mention you were planning on getting Stray Children so no need for me to recommend it further, but all I’ll say is I think it probably fits a lot of what you described enjoying as well )
Edit: ALSO ALSO SEAMAN!! How could I forget?! A virtual pet that regularly makes YOU feel like the pet instead. You only have to read @thecatamites recent posts on it to get a sense of how effective it is at disarming the player at almost every turn!
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These are great additions to the corpus. A couple more came into my head today:
Energy for the PC Engine. It’s kusoge, but every time it breaks, it feels intentional. Reading my post, I’m thinking yep, that’s a game someone who likes Earthbound should play. PC Engine: WELCOME TO THE IDEAL WORLD! - #209 by MintyJuffowup
Now that reminds me of Maru’s Mission, another kusoge on the GAMEBOY. La vie en vert (GAME BOY thread) - #66 by MintyJuffowup
Okay, and now I’m reminded of Great Greed, an unusual RPG on the GAMEBOY. La vie en vert (GAME BOY thread) - #154 by MintyJuffowup
Huh, I certainly write a lot on this website. Glad I found this place 8 years ago.
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cave story
seiklus
demon’s souls
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I was just being silly when I brought pretension into this convo but I agree that theres not only nothing wrong with trying to reach for something complex or poetic with your posts, it’s something to be commended. It’s really cool that even after many years and many Earthbound threads, every time we do one it’s interesting and fresh.
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giving a rec to beeswing - the allusion is not opaque at all there, but its an incredibly earnest attempt to extrapolate the ending sequence of earthbound into its own game
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Be a bad guy, if you want! SteamBot Chronicles!
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Deadly Premonition is the game that lines up with Earthbound the most to me. A simulacrum of a realistic world that simultaneously exists on multiple levels of fiction for the inhabitants of it. Police cars exist in Earthbound not because the police cars make sense inside that world, but because police cars exist in the real world, and they’re being borrowed by the game.
Unfortunately Earthbound’s game mechanics are a little bad, and Deadly Premonition’s game mechanics are a lot bad. Deadly Premonition would be a lot better as a Super Nintendo game, or, if it was a Super Nintendo game, it could be patched into a very good Super Nintendo game.
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Dragon Quest writing doesn’t necessarily share the same influences, but it does share the same qualities, I think. So many NPCs just living their life. A sense of scale, your adventure bringing you much further than you’d have expected, small threads and tangents converging in unpredictable ways. Nostalgia, moving on, things lost to time. The way the Dragon Quest series has steadfastly refused to “modernise”, setting it apart in the world of games.
The influence of Dragon Quest is much deeper than the surface mechanics. Mother is often thought of as a subversion of Dragon Quest but that’s completely wrong to me. They’re reaching for the same feeling. They’re the same game.
(caveat, the more recent english translations are extremely obnoxious)
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