>Earthbound was a notorious worldwide flop, and took years of lobbying to even greenlight Mother 3, which also flopped
>Every single person on the internet actually owned it as a kid, and it was their favourite game growing up
Wow really makes you think
Not really. Tell me about it op.
emulators and VC
blade runner is a huge flop too but every cinephile claims to like it
It was the Blade Runner of Vidya.
Hiivemind
the setting wasnt interesting enough with all those other games out there I guess
It's almost like the internet has the power to bring fans of selectively niche games together. Also, I guarantee you 99% of Mother fans just emulated Earthbound after discovering Ness in Smash Bros or more recently after playing Undertale
Truth be told, the series was way too pretentious. It was trying way too hard to "subvert" all the typical JRPG cliches. I know the games had some quality to them, but it was nonetheless annoying seeing the game sniff its own farts when it thought it was being clever.
>hah, you want to know what this item does? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! TRICKED XDXD!
>you want knights and dragons? Well, how about le funny random fire hydrants and cheese wheels of doom?!
>haha we're mocking typical cliches! You can't sleep off status conditions! you have to go to a hospital! look at us being so savvy and fourth wall breaking! laugh at our wit damnit
I honestly couldn't go back to the game after a first playthrough.
>blade runner
It's been aired on TV forever
You can much more easily watch a movie than find an obscure ROM
Had the biggest male lead in the world at the time in Harrison Ford
Doesn't compare in the slightest. Hell the name "Blade Runner" sounds a lot more intriguing to a total random over fucking "Mother 3"
I love Earthbound but I'll admit that nobody knew it existed until Ness appeared in Smash Bros.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is a dirty hipster. Earthbound was a flop.
That's not really what they're getting at
Finally. This is why i can't finish fractured but whole. That battle with Mitch Connor was too much. It was funny the first time but the entire battle is just bullshit
The status effects are pain in the ass, yeah, but there's nothing wrong with the game's art style or enemy designs. The genre cliches are so tired at this point that almost anything is better.
How do I get into these games? What one do I play first. Mother or Earthbound? I'm confused.
>Earthbound was a flop.
It was. There are a lot of great games that go unappreciated, but are in fact great games. was not the first one, wont be the last one.
Another great game that havent got the success it deserved was Secret of Evermore.
Play Earthbound (or Mother 2 in JP) first. After that you can play either Mother 3 with the fan translation or Earthbound Begginings
I'm not saying I have a problem with the art style, or even the attempt they made at a more original setting. But like you said, alot of decisions they made were purposeful designs to frustrate the player, for the sake of being original and unique, or to try and shove in realism like with the hospital thing. The problem is that it clashes with the rest of the game. So you say you can't sleep off a character who's KO'd, and you have to go to the hospital? That doesn't mesh well when you can eat magical life giving noodles and revive them in a pinch. It kind of destroys whatever realism angle they were going for.
Other times they just waste the player's time for no good reason. Like with the orange kid's machine, protractors, rulers, the machien that gets kid of erasers and pencils, etc. There was no internal logic to the game and it made it frustrating how half of it felt made up on the spot. And now that I think about it, they never did explain how Porky could time travel without being destroyed by the flow of time, yet Ness and pals had to become robots to do it.
I guess alot of these are story nitpicks, but Earthbound IS a JRPG, and that's supposed to be their specialty. This isn't a Mario game with a plothole after all.
Alien technology was just better than anything Dr. Andonuts and the Mr. Saturns could make at the time.
Nobody actually played Earthbound. All the people claiming to like it just read about it so they could be a True Nintendo Gamer and know about all the Smash Bros characters.
Porky had a piece of alien tech? I thought he took the first phase distorter and used that? And that was certainly less advanced than the phase distorter mk3, unless it was probably a souped up prototype, or pokey only took it to delay Ness from using it, and went back in time with another machine. Do they ever elaborate on that?
What about mother 1?
I only knew what Earthbound was because I always saw the bigass box for it at Blockbuster in the mid to late 90s. Then Smash Bros came out, next thing you know playing Earthbound
Earthbound practically owes it's popularity to Smash Bros
Generally seen as very frustrating and difficult. Try a fan hack, but it's still a NES JRPG.
It's as outdated as the NES versions of Final Fantasy and Dragon's Quest. If you can stomach that era of RPGs, go for it.
>Other times they just waste the player's time for no good reason. Like with the orange kid's machine, protractors, rulers, the machien that gets kid of erasers and pencils, etc. There was no internal logic to the game and it made it frustrating how half of it felt made up on the spot.
That absurdity of it is part of the fun. The random jrpg roadblocks, having to actually wait on the phone for Pizza. Buying into Orange Kids shit etc.
SoE kicks ass, better than secret of mana but not seiken densetsu 3
How's the Secret of mana remake?
So to reiterate, I played earthbound and then Mother 3.
And if this was an art exhibit, or a parody video of RPGs, I would definitely appreciate it more. But actually playing through it feels like a slog. The game is honestly saved by some of the more ingenius design choices, like the lack of random enemy encounters, having a party member who doesn't rely on PSI and has to use other methods of buffing and supporting his team (a trait I enjoy seeing with Duster as well), the teleport system which I found cute, and the post-final boss ending exploration. Plus, as much as I didn't like the cast being all kids, I did like that they weren't annoying crybabies. I appreciate that kind of detail after having grown up with generic anime protagonists everywhere crying about their feelings. Shucks, even Lucas is conservative with how much time they spend on his sad past. It's a welcome change of pace, and I think the game deserves credit for that.
>SoE kicks ass
a lot of people deem it less than secret of mana.
I wouldnt even say that Seiken Denetsu 3 was better.
I dug the Alchemy System and the whole World Build. Being send trough different Eras was fucking awesome!
It's the Twin Peaks of vidya.
>directed by a celebrity author in their respective countries, renown for work outside of the medium.
>victim to an American studio that sullied the original vision
>similar paranormal themes
>noob filter. Those who get it "get it," and those who can't it'll always be too deep for.
>prequels are hated or at least seen apathetically by the fans for being too different from the topical entry.
>had a missing entry in the series that may only by divine intervention if ever be totally completed that fans are still putting together.
>sequel released with relatively little advanced notice.
>director/company saying "the door is always open" for new sequels even though likelihood is zero.
Oh third point from the bottom, I'm referring to the Missing Pieces and various paraphernalia which supposedly contradicts canon or real world history. And of course Mother 64.
>tfw you still have a copy of a magazine with the scratch and sniff Earthbound advertisement in it
Earthbound was just an exploration in RPG storytelling. The writer was inspired by Dragon Quest.
If you actually look at it closer, Earthbound is a fairly straight-laced Zen story. There just aren't many of those, so you have nothing to compare to. Giygas is some ultimate psychic force of bad vibes and his influence is causing everything on earth to animate and turn into bad vibes monsters. Using the power of good vibes, you stop him.
And that sort of story requires really different storytelling compared to a high fantasy JRPG. Earthbound was very good about that. Everything you mentioned was to further that end.
You can think a certain website for that. Starmen.net
I actually did have Earthbound as a kid and it's one of my earliest video game memories. I think the game is partially responsible for me learning how to read. I played it for years with the strategy guide and I never beat it. I think I got a little bit farther than that big desert area with the underground mole people and even with the guide, I couldn't figure out what to do after that.
I still remember that the intro of the game terrified me when the UFOs on screen were zapping the houses and that music got all loud. To this day that makes me strangely uncomfortable and I'm 24. I remember wanting to play the game because my older brother was too scared to play it. He thought when pokey knocks on your door at the start of the game that it made someone in real life knock on the door. That's how young we were. I think the guide had lots of scratch and sniff parts in it too, that was cool.
I had no idea who Captain Falcon was in smash though, and I owned F Zero but didn't like it because it was boring. To this day racing games are my least favorite genre and I've never enjoyed any besides Sonic R and Snowboard Kids 1 and 2.
>nintenbros are also posers
who wouldve thunk
We should blame the REAL culprit: Super Smash Bros. The whole of Starmen.net was literally started by 12 year olds who wanted to be the only kid on the block who knew what game Ness was from.
mother 3 didn't flop you retarded faggot. game sold like 200k in its first week in japan.
>tfw you could have all 3 on the GBA alone if translators wouldn't be such cocklickers and do a script rip of Earthbound.
Mother 1 has been translated, 3 has been translated, translate the motherfucking last one goddamn. You don't even need to translate anything it's already in FUCKING ENGLISH.
>It's the Twin Peaks of vidya.
Wasn't Link's Awakening inspired by Twin Peaks?
I'll actually defend the fan-translators in this case, because I hear the code the original devs wrote for showing text in Mother 2 was the mother of all spaghetti code, only made to accomodate japanese characters, making implementing the translated script a herculean ordeal. It's just not worth the effort for a group of hobbyists when there's already an official translation on another system.
Earthbound is such a programming jumble I'm surprised it doesn't randomly combust.
>pretentious
There's that buzzword again.
How the fuck was Earthbound pretentious? You might be thinking of some of the fanbase, but the game was anything but. There wan't any 2deep4u dialogue or anything like that, no angsty characters, pretty much everyone had smiles on their faces at all times.
>You can much more easily watch a movie than find an obscure ROM
?
literally google "earthbound rom"
i did it when i was nine
What?
Doing random stuff is fun, because you explore the world and its nonsense.
Just like when you were a kid.
>It's been aired on TV forever
Same goes for the Shawshank Redemption.
Didn't do too well in the cinema but the structure of the film really suits TV and you can jump in at any point in the movie and follow it without feeling confused.
Earthbound wasn't but this is the fanbase that spawned Undertale.
>Nintendicksuckers only buy BING BING WAHOOO and MUH ZELDA
More news at 11.
>spends 30 minutes attacking giygas and wasting my pp to revive jeff every other turn
>doesn't realize you have to pray with paula to actually get anything done
who else brainlet
Thank Iwata for helping it make it out the door.
>tfw had a second hand copy as a kid
>bought it for 20 leafbux
>worth it
>friend found a sealed copy at kmart when it was closing out here
>mildly angry he also bought it for cheap
>ended up buying it on both wii u and 3ds
I kinda wish the game sold more, if only to see what it effect it would have.
Why would anyone lie on the internet?
Mother 1 needs a remake
>EOPs are retarded
Thanks for proving what we have always known.
do you visit a specific site from Roms? I used Cool Rom before, but those Dudes have no more SNES Roms.
I switched for a time to Emu Paradise, but those Roms lack quality.
Vimms lair has good quality Roms, but has not all of them.
Oh shit, Earthbound thread?
I get your argument and why you would hate it, because I use the same arguments against some of my closest friends' favourite comedies (how the fuck is Seth MacFarlane still respected by anyone), but Earthbound in particular has such an endearing attitude about it. It loves the genre it's parodying, and it uses the same shit as any other game but makes the player aware, and adds its own bizarre elements (usually stuff about childhood, Americana, puns and wordplay, etc) into that mix of things that it already knows and loves.
To me, Earthbound reads like a game where the creators know the tropes and cliches are still there but they aren't trying to elevate themselves above what their game literally is (a JRPG) unlike Family Guy for example, which wants you to laugh at le funny recycled jokes and le extended extreme animation and recycled animations that only an adult sitcom or cartoon could get away with but it's going on for too long and that's the joke because we and our audience know what the joke is so we're better than our source of comedy har har.
Thos also shows in that there are somewhat serious inspirations infused into the game, like religion, family, at a stretch the concept of a psychosphere and how we can be affected by our surroundings, and so on, that the creators obviously genuinely believe in
Don't tell me the whole map was on one screen or something?
>Undertale
Undertale wasn't pretentious either. It was shamelessly in love with JRPG tropes about the power of friendship
Undertale wasn't pretentious either, i'm getting a feeling you haven't played either of these games and are just going by what Sup Forums says.
Everybody argues with me when I say this but pretentious is a word better applied to AAA games like CoD because they often attempt to incorporate a daring narrative while actually only existing so the player can kick ass and chew bubblegum. There's a hell of a lot of pretence when those games turn around to heighten the drama while featuring characters as shallow as a pool of water who nobody gives two shits about. Bulletstorm (and probably Wolfenstein) are perfect reactions to them. They really highlight the absurdity of trying to sell a game as serious when it's anything but.
Nobody calls blockbuster games out for being pretentious; it's only ever indie/arty games. And that's often true but somewhat sad. Earthbound is much more earnest by comparison to most AAA games. It's strange yes but it's not pretending to be anything else. Just like Undertale.
I don't like either game that much.
I knew from having seen it on a magazine, a two-page article, no less. Always wanted to play it, but rental stores around here didn't know it existed. The internet was the way to finally get to it.
God, imagine being this much of a child. It's clear you came from there.
A relatively small hivemind. Though it seems you follow the hivemind that thinks liking Blade Runner is only what followers do.
>tfw was going to sell my carts for CT, EB, SOM to a store until my friend told me not to
That's actually a really good point. "Muh Russians, muh topicality" when most people just hammer through the cutscenes to shoot a hundred soldiers as fast as possible (if they even do the campaign) is pretty pretentious. At least they're aware of it when they do zombies mode though
v was dickriding undertale until tumblr started liking it