EarthBound Part 16. Paula rescued. (New Game)
3Welcome to my EarthBound let's play. My name is digidv85 but please call me dig for short. This is not a blind let's play. It will feature a new game to completion. Gameplay shown on SNES.
About Game: EarthBound, also known as Mother 2 in Japan, is a 1994 Japanese role-playing video game co-developed by Ape Inc. and HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System video game console. As Ness and his party of four, the player travels the world to collect the 8 melodies in order to defeat the evil alien force Giygas. It is the second game of the Mother series and the first and only to be released outside of Japan for two decades. EarthBound was released in Japan in August 1994, and in North America the next June.
The game had a lengthy development period that spanned five years. Its returning staff from Mother (1989) included writer/director Shigesato Itoi and lead programmer Satoru Iwata (later the president of Nintendo), as well as composers Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka. Suzuki and Tanaka incorporated a diverse range of popular and exotic styles into the soundtrack, including salsa, reggae, and dub music, and wrote enough music as to fill two compact discs. Most of the other staff members had not worked on the original Mother, and the game came under repeated threats of cancellation until Iwata joined the team. Originally scheduled for release in January 1993, the game was completed around May 1994.
Themed around an idiosyncratic portrayal of Americana and Western culture, EarthBound subverted popular role-playing game traditions by featuring a real world setting while parodying numerous staples of the genre. Itoi wanted it to reach non-gamers with its intentionally goofy tone; for example, the player uses items such as the Pencil Eraser to remove pencil statues, experiences in-game hallucinations, and battles piles of vomit, taxi cabs, and walking nooses. Japanese-to-English localizer Marcus Lindblom reworked the original puns and humor for the game's American release while adding private jokes and various allusions to Western pop culture. Its title, "Mother 2", was changed to "EarthBound" to avoid confusion about what it was a sequel to.
Initial reviewers had little praise for EarthBound in the United States, where it sold half as many copies as in Japan. Critics attribute this to a combination of the game's simple graphics, the satirical marketing campaign, and a lack of market interest in the genre. In the ensuing years, a dedicated fan community spawned which advocated for the series. Starting in 1999, Ness became a featured character in each of the Super Smash Bros. series of video games which helped popularize EarthBound. By the 2000s, the game had become regarded as a "sacred cow amongst gaming's cognoscenti", with multiple reader polls ranking it among the best of all time. A Japan-only sequel, Mother 3, was released for the Game Boy Advance in 2006. In 2013, EarthBound was given a worldwide release on the Wii U Virtual Console following many years of fan lobbying, marking its debut in many territories including Europe.
Gameplay: EarthBound features many traditional role-playing game elements: the player controls a party of characters who travel through the game's two-dimensional world composed of villages, cities, caves, and dungeons. Along the way, the player fights battles against enemies and the party receives experience points for victories. If enough experience points are acquired, a character's level will increase. This pseudo-randomly increases the character's attributes, such as offense, defense, and the maximum hit points (HP) and psychic points (PP) of each character. Rather than using an overworld map screen like most console RPGs of its era, the world is entirely seamless, with no differentiation between towns and the outside world. Another non-traditional element is the perspective used for the world. The game uses oblique projection, while most 2D RPGs use a "top down" view on a grid or an isometric perspective.
US Sales and Promotion: EarthBound was released on June 5, 1995 in North America. Though Nintendo spent about $2 million on marketing, the American release was ultimately viewed as unsuccessful within Nintendo. The game's atypical marketing campaign was derived from the game's unusual humor. As part of Nintendo's larger "Play It Loud" campaign, EarthBound's "this game stinks" campaign included foul-smelling scratch and sniff advertisements. At the time, Digital Trends described the campaign as "bizarre" and "based around fart jokes". The campaign was also expensive. It emphasized magazine advertisements and had the extra cost of the strategy guide included with each game. Between the poor sales and the phasing out of the Super NES, the game did not receive a European release.
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