My personal history with this series: Other than seeing Lucas, Ness, and Porky in Smash Bros. Brawl, I remember a childhood trip to my cousin's house where he was emulating the fan translation of Mother 3 on a Pentium III running Windows 2000. I was quite wowed when he explained how it was a game Nintendo didn't translate/release outside of Japan, and how a group of fans did just that, as the patch looked official on first sight. I subsequently spoiled the final boss battles of all three games via YouTube, then actually played them all some years later. Thus, the series has always had a special place in my soul.
I tried playing earthbound twice over the past few years but it was only this last year with a friend's encouragement that I was able to get past *looks at notes* onett lmao
then I found out it was a pretty cool game! I just had to stick with it for a bit to let it get going. Then I tried to play Mother 1 and uh... haha I didn't beat it, but maybe one day I'll go back and try again. I've still yet to play Mother 3
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I'll never get over how the biggest difficulty spike in the game is right at the start and after that it's pretty smooth sailing.
Earthbound's one of those series that influences a lot of the stuff I work on in terms of imagination, like as bad as mother 1 can be (I really recommend checking out mother encore, I played the demo for it, it's amazing (roxy check out their FAQ section))
it's pretty impressive how many games this went on to influence, have any of you heard of this little indie gem that not a lot of people talk about called undertale?
Yeah that's an accurate point about Onett, I got stuck there on my first attempt, then learned to grind before it when doing my next attempt with the Starman walkthrough as a crutch. Same thing that got me through Beginnings at all.
And yeah I quite admire how much influence it's had overall. I guess part of that is its visual style, character design aesthetic in particular, which really speaks to me having had the Charlie Brown holiday specials ingrained into me as a toddler. Playing through the series also got me on a "I'm gonna make my own indie RPG with my own self-insert" kick for a good while, before I came to terms with the fact that I could just draw/express cool stuff without selling my soul to a big project.
I still remember seeing Earthbound (SNES) for the first time in 1998 on my friend's PC, emulated in ZSNES. The emulation scene was budding and quickly blossoming into a cool community on early web forums and IRC rooms. The game was so weird to me at the time because it presented as an RPG, but it was set in a modern world, close to present day, and all of the artwork and dialogue was so quirky. Took me years before I came back to it to fully appreciate it. Now the series on a whole is one of my favorites.
