Originally released as Mother, the game was released in Japan back in 1989. Despite being given an official translation, due to waning interest of the NES after the release of the SNES, the game was shelved in favor of doing a translation of it's sequel, Mother 2 (known as Earthbound in the West). On June 14th, 2015, Nintendo surprised the world by giving Mother 1...now titled Earthbound Beginnings...the first official release outside of Japan 26 years later. Was the wait worth it?
Unfortunately, EBB's age shows through pretty strongly. The controls for moving about in the overworld feel extremely stiff, requiring you to hold down a button to get him to face a direction rather than just pressing it. When just walking through the wilderness it isn't too much of a problem, but if you need to get around an obstacle or line up to either teleport (a power granted to you late in the game) or talk to a character, it can really be a hassle; especially since to talk to a character, you must be facing them directly. Even worse is how the NPCs sporadically move, which means that even when you do line up, they can shift their position and force you to no longer be facing them by the time you hit the menu button. The game does have a 'run' button, which is actually just a debug tool that speeds up the entire world. It's rather funny watching the NPCs run very quickly about, and it is handy to get from point A to point B quickly
The menus themselves are a little on the crash side of things, as well. While the simple interface isn't a big problem to navigate, any time you hit the back button it exits you completely out. So if you select the wrong option, you have to exit the menu then restart. It's a minor complaint as the menus never take more than a few seconds, but it can be a nuisance on occasion. On the plus side, whenever you equip an item, it's actually taken out of the character's inventory and inserted into an 'equip' slot. This helps keep your inventory (mostly) empty for other important items you need to carry.
The game is also limited in just how much it could show on-screen at any given time, and sometimes when there's too much in a line characters start to flicker in and out of existence. Because of this, the game relies on random chance encounters for the battles instead, which can be decently frustrating. You can finish one battle, take a step, then find yourself in another. It doesn't always happen, but can with enough frequency to wear on your patience.
The battles themselves are pretty standard turn-base fare: Select what each character is going to do via the bare-bone menus, where all you have is the enemy portrait to look at with a black background, and try to survive the encounter. It wouldn't be until Earthbound that we get the psychedelic backgrounds and the rolling health meter, so once a character takes x amount of damage, they can be knocked out.
Story-wise, the game does okay. There's a thread in there about alien abductions, some supernatural elements, and...that's about it, really. The game is relatively light on the story elements, but what it does have are used to pretty great effect. It's pretty memorable as you clear a local zoo of a alien invader who is driving all the animals wild, as well as helping a kid who is bullied get his hands on some bottle rockets to set off.
One area the game really deserves praise in is the non-linear fashion of the game. There are party members you can or cannot pick up, certain important events do not depend on one or another, with certain specific ones requiring certain actions or events to happen before you can move on, but the game is amazing at just letting you discover and explore the world at your leisure, letting you really craft your own tale.
The graphics are pretty good for a NES title, with no two areas of the world map looking the same, and the music is pretty stellar for all the beeps and boops that had to be used on the NES. It's dated, both graphically and musically, but neither are bad for their age, either.
The game does have some flaws, which do hurt the overall experience. But I found myself constantly being tugged back to it, to see what new or unusual monster would come up next, or how the characters would resolve their story. Despite the age and the flaws, the game has a certain quirky charming quality to it, which is probably the biggest reason it's endured a fandom as long as it is.
The sequels would go on to better refine a lot of the mechanics introduced here, but after playing EBB it's clear to see it had a very strong basis to build upon. Earthbound may be a superior game, but it's hard to say it would've been as great as it is without this first step.
4.0 out of 5.0 - Despite some problems and slightly irritating random encounter mechanics, the game's sense of quirky humor as well as being very solid a foundation really helps keep the game intriguing throughout.
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Published:
9 years, 7 months ago
26 Jun 2015 19:20 CEST
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