continued playing earthbound, up thru beating the 5th sanctuary location (have not gone on the boat in Summers yet)
the game drags very intensely from threed (a bunch of running around in circles quests that don’t follow any logical flow, necessitating intense use of the hint guy) to belch’s factory (the first dungeon in the game that feels interminable) to the desert (unclear why we ought to come here, really unclear why we have to come back here). bright spots are saturn valley and the gold mine ‘3rd strongest mole’ gag. but yeah it’s really dumb that you go to a desert with a whole bunch of nothing, go to fourside, see nothing to do, have to go back to the desert to progress the story, see no way of proceeding, then go back to fourside again before the plot inches forward. and then in fourside you run into several roadblocks, the only girl in the party is kidnapped again without warning, a stupid department store dungeon, (a nice wacky detour to moonside) before going back to the desert fucking again for a stupid maze fetch quest. the trout yogurt gag after all that… doesn’t land at all
the game seems to speed up again once you get to summers, maybe it’s just the fact that you’re doing something new for once and the quests seem to make logical sense. like it feels like this entire portion of the game was just a bunch of sidequests that accidentally got made into the main quest, they don’t seem to connect to each other at all