EarthBound

EarthBound, known in Japan as Mother 2: Gīgu no Gyakushū (“Mother 2: Giygas Strikes Back”), is a 1994 role-playing video game developed by Ape? and HAL Laboratory? and published by Nintendo? for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System?.¹⁴ It is the second entry in the EarthBound series — known in Japan as the Mother series — succeeding the then Japan-only Mother of 1989, and the first installment released worldwide.¹⁴¹³ The scenario was written by Shigesato Itoi?, the Japanese copywriter, actor, and television personality who created the series.¹⁵¹³

Set in a fictionalized, hyperbolic version of America called Eagleland, the game follows a young boy named Ness, who is awakened one night when a meteor crashes on a hilltop near his home in the suburban town of Onett.¹⁴¹⁶ After investigating, Ness encounters an insect-like alien from the future named Buzz Buzz, who warns that the “universal cosmic destroyer” Giygas has cast the future into eternal darkness and instructs Ness to seek out and record the melodies of eight “sanctuaries” to gain the power needed to confront him.¹⁴⁷ Over the course of the roughly thirty-hour journey, Ness is joined by three companions — Paula, an eleven-year-old girl with telepathic and psionic powers; Jeff, a bespectacled boy who escapes a northern boarding school; and Poo, the martial-arts prince of the faraway kingdom of Dalaam — and together they travel a world of zombie-infested towns, blue-painting cults, neon dimensions, and a New York-like metropolis called Fourside.¹⁶⁸⁷

Setting and design

The game deliberately abandons the medieval sword-and-sorcery conventions of contemporary role-playing games in favor of a modern-day setting.¹³⁸ In place of mystical swords and magic scepters, the children equip baseball bats, yo-yos, and frying pans, fight enemies such as possessed hippies, piles of vomit, and killer robots, and explore arcades, cult colonies, and other dimensions rather than castles.⁸¹³ Combat is otherwise familiar turn-based fare, with party members drawing on psychic “PSI” attacks, hit points, and status ailments.⁸¹⁶

Several design choices set it apart mechanically. EarthBound was among the first console role-playing games to abandon random battles entirely; enemies appear on screen, and a party will only enter combat when an enemy makes contact, while foes much weaker than Ness are defeated instantly on touch.¹² Its rolling hit-point counters drain gradually rather than instantly, so a heal or a victory executed before the numbers reach zero can save a character from apparent death.¹² The game opens by asking the player to name each protagonist and to enter a favorite food and favorite thing, customizations that recur later in the story.⁹

Critics traced the game’s roots both to the role-playing tradition and to American pop culture. At heart it has been described as a Dragon Quest clone — a hero rounds up a battle party to face foes in combat described in text — but one that functions more as a send-up of the format than a slave to it.¹² Itoi drew on a deep affection for Western touchstones: in-game characters resemble the Peanuts gang, Mr. T, and the Blues Brothers, while the quest spans an America-and-Europe pastiche running from a midwestern Onett to a New York-like Fourside to a genuine Stonehenge.¹² The science-fiction plot owes a debt to kitschy 1950s and 1960s matinees, with sleek silver UFOs and Klaatu barada nikto-inspired Starmen, though it presents America through a distorted Japanese lens — Ness must call home to avoid homesickness while his salaryman-like father appears only as a disembodied voice on the telephone.¹² The series’ Japanese title, Mother, was taken from the John Lennon? song of the same name, a choice Itoi connected to his own largely absent father.¹³ The game’s musical jokes extend to a “New Age Retro Hippie” enemy theme that parodies Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” ⁸

Development and release

EarthBound followed a difficult development that ran some five years.¹⁴ English localization was led by Marcus Lindblom, who worked to carry over the game’s goofy tone.¹⁴ The name “EarthBound” itself originated with the localization team for the unreleased first Mother: in 1990 its head, Phil Sandhop, conceived the title “Earth Bound” while riding a bullet train to Kyoto, and the 1995 translation team carried it over as the single word “EarthBound.” ¹³

The game was released in Japan on August 27, 1994, and in North America on June 5, 1995.¹⁴³ In the United States it was promoted with a roughly two-million-dollar advertising campaign, given a jumbo box packed with a full-length strategy guide, and afforded the preferential treatment of a first-party Nintendo title, including a major spread in Nintendo Power and a lower price than third-party Super NES role-playing games.¹⁴¹² Despite this, it sold poorly and met lukewarm reception in America, where console role-playing games remained a niche and the deliberately retro, NES-like graphics did not impress buyers accustomed to Donkey Kong Country and Super Street Fighter II.¹⁴¹² Shigeru Miyamoto later remarked, “We had high hopes for Earthbound in the US, but it didn’t do well,” recalling a fan petition that gathered 30,000 signatures.¹⁰

Legacy

Although a commercial disappointment at launch, EarthBound amassed a devoted cult following, fostered largely through Internet forums such as Starmen.net.¹⁴¹³ Its post-modern, self-aware writing has been credited with paving the way for later “mind job” games such as Metal Gear Solid 2 and WarioWare, Inc..¹² The game was rereleased on the Wii U? Virtual Console in Japan on March 20, 2013, and internationally on July 18, 2013 — marking its debut in PAL regions, eighteen years after the original — followed by releases on the New Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console in 2016 and on Nintendo Classics for the Nintendo Switch in 2022.¹⁴ During the Virtual Console era it was consistently among Nintendo’s best-selling downloadable titles.¹³

EarthBound - Official Nintendo Switch Online TrailerIGN

The series continued with a Japan-only sequel, Mother 3?, published for the Game Boy Advance? in 2006.¹⁴⁴ Mother 3 was first announced some twelve years before its eventual release and endured numerous false starts before Itoi finally announced its imminent Japanese release on his blog in 2005.⁴ It was never given a Western release; in response a group of fan translators extracted the game’s text, translated thousands of lines of dialogue, and on October 17 released a complete English patch built using EarthBound’s English-language font.⁴ Ness, EarthBound’s protagonist, became a recurring playable character in the Super Smash Bros.? series, where Lucas of Mother 3 also appears.¹⁴¹³