King B Kool Quick Review: Earthbound

I, like many of you, never played Earthbound when I should have. I even owned a copy of the game- and still never played it. (I was really lucky- a nice mint condition cartridge that I just never got around to playing still sits in its box in my room) By not doing so, I probably committed the ultimate childhood sin- or did I?



There are a lot of reviews on this game already. The only reason I chose this game is because of its re-release on the Wii U Virtual Console. Now that it's a more accessible game (instead of hundreds of dollars on eBay, a copy can be had for $9.99) I feel it's worth mentioning my own personal interactions with my first playthrough.

Earthbound is quite a flawed game- the menus and talk commands are cumbersome, and sometimes even annoying. The extremely limited bag space is one of the most dreadful things in this game. Levels are laid out in a poorly designed maze type fashion, and grinding can get boring fast. Some characters are not memorable at all, and the reasons for leaving your party to go finish some side quest are poor at best.

For all these flaws, this is easily one of my favorite games on the SNES though. There is a funny photographer who manages to stop you at just the right point every time and make you look back on your quest so far with a smile. Environments are varied enough to keep you interested, the flow of the game quite good for the most part. Earthbound doesn't take itself too serious, either. The game screams nostalgia- which is amazing for a game that I don't have any ties to.

I regret not playing Earthbound as a kid, to some extent. I feel like I missed out on one of gaming's greats, and that's a hard feeling to swallow, especially since the title was so close to me all these years. Every time I started to regret it while playing though, I would stop and think about how well crafted the majority of the game was, and how much fun it was. I wouldn't have gotten a lot of it as a kid, and for that reason alone, I'm glad I never popped it in my SNES while I was younger, got a quarter way through the game and decided it was dumb, damning it to life on a shelf in my parents basement, or worse- being traded in at Funcoland for pennies. Instead, I have a small treasure, and one of the best SNES RPG's ever made in my collection now. If you were on the fence, or even if you weren't, but you own a Wii U, grab this game! You won't regret it.

Say *Fuzzy Pickles!*