i can’t believe this was the same kickstarter as the eb handbook. undertale was so epochal for all involved they barely feel contiguous
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alright, look, I can’t stand the earthbound people anymore. I said it.
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kill yr idolizers
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The prophecy had long foretold that whomsoever creates an RPG where you can eat a hamburger would be granted the curse of unimaginable power
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i do regret never going very far with the arrangement album of the Earthbound OST i started organizing circa 2005 (which some random tracks that trickled onto OC Remix later were from i.e. this and that and this) because of how much an impact Earthbound fans have had in the ensuing years. too bad i had to do this pesky thing called going to college.
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Secret of Evermore flopped because it had no hamburgers…
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Phantasy Star strayed from god’s light when they stopped localizing Monomate as Hamburger
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I was just thinking Earthbound had something in common with Phantasy Star II. Same general RPG-design approach of disorienting mazes and vicious RNG, and both possessing an unsettling magnetism that hints at hidden depths.
Also both games reached their peak of hipness simultaneously in the mid-2000s, as people revisited them in emulators and contrasted them with that era’s variety of mediocrity
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they just announced that caves of qud is hitting 1.0 next year
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That trailer reminded me that The People Versus George Lucas came out 13 years ago.
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I like the idea of earthbound but I wasn’t able to get very far (the starman village?) in the first one, Mother 3 I made it a few hours in but quit unceremoniously
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this is interesting!
i’m not sure i really agree. i’d much sooner make a comparison between mother 1 and phantasy star ii, everything relating to disorienting mazes and vicious RNG is significantly toned down in M2 versus the first game. the dungeons in M2 aren’t particularly bad, either. the worst dungeon in the game difficulty-wise is the department store and it’s only a few screens long. is Starman Base a disorienting maze? not really. compared to Uzo Island, or Climatrol in PS2, it’s an absolute breeze.
here’s a late-game sanctuary in M2:
here’s a late-game dungeon in PS2:
Monkey Cave is confusing but a totally different experience than the crushing ambivalence of PS2 dungeons
compared to PS2, M2 is a dear friend that gives you warm fuzzies every time you meet. PS2 is a fucking serial killer
(both games are great, to be clear)
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OK yeah that’s a pretty big difference, I suppose my comparison was more headcanon vibes than substance. At the time my main RPG design reference point was SNES Final Fantasies, and I didn’t make it very far into either game.
At a time when my ideal of an RPG involved dungeons with lots of landmarks and battles with narrowly controlled RNG distributions, Earthbound felt unexpectedly punishing. I suppose Earthbound was in the process of leaning out of 8-bit RPG design whereas PSII empathically leaned in.
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And you couldn’t even Pet The Dog
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you can play earthbound with switch online right? i just wanna play the game without a bunch of emulator bullshit. i have never played and i want to. did y’all know that haruki murakami of all pple has involvement?
duckduckgo can’t find the article i read years ago but i think he and the creator are friends
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this is cool and all but i also wanna add that certain tribes, like the cherokee / tsalagi didn’t fight the settlers and actually agreed to assimilate ( at their own peril ; trail of tears happened anyway ) and like i’m getting kind of tired of every native thing being ab warriors and fighting. tell another story already, there’s more than one narrative. like hey no shade to my ancestors who did fight white settlers off but what ab those who chose the other path. i want more media ab them b/c i’m tired of being in the dark ab that particular thing.
it also kinda shits on the ’ noble warrior ’ shit that is beyond old at this point.
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you can yeah, they also put mother 1 up in english as ‘earthbound beginnings’
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War and colonization are huge themes in boardgames, they’re everywhere, and in the history of modern boardgames they were there right at the start with war gaming. And of course it’s a very hegemonically white hobby. So while a story about indigenous warriors and the cliche noble warrior thing is arguably pretty played out, or maybe just taking too much space when other stories can be told, for me, it’s interesting to have a story like this in a space like that. I do not know how many games about indigenous resistance already exist, but it doesn’t seem like they are ubiquitous or very common at all. So that’s what perked my interest a bit about this project.
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