EarthBound, and Here’s Why

On a forum I frequent someone asked what our favorite RPG. The rules stipulated that you had to pick only one and had to explain why. Most answers were along the lines of “Chrono Trigger because it’s really great” or “Star Ocean 2 because I’m a big moron who wouldn’t know a good game if crawled into my ear canal and laid eggs.”

My immediate answer was the game I’ve considered the best for years: EarthBound. But I’ve played some mighty fine RPGs since EarthBound cemented itself in my mind, Suikoden II, Mother 3, Final Fantasy V… Did EarthBound still hold up as the number one Animal King Takeover? I looked long at my affection and re-evaluated EarthBound’s place in the pantheon of video games and decided that hell yes EarthBound is the best damn RPG. Forget RPGs, it’s the best damn game ever, damn it! I pulled up all my passion and admiration and love for this old game and poured it into a gushy response.

I know the trend for the past few years when analyzing EarthBound has been to eschew anecdotal response and focus on a more academic approach. And that’s an important, if difficult task. So much of what makes EarthBound special is anecdotal in nature. The fan translation of Mother 1 + 2 is going to drop any day now and I figure that’d be a good time to play the game again and attempt a critical analysis of my own. So consider this an introduction, a purging of all the doe-eyed affection, before we move onto a more rational reading.

Warning: the following post was written out of passion and more concerned with conveying a personal experience than sparing the sentimentalities of the reader. It’s overwrought and sugary and should be taken with a whole shaker of salt.

A lemon wedge wouldn’t hurt either.

Super Squad Book: Progress at Last!

Last… July was it? I announced that I had started work on a Nintendo Super Squad graphic novel. I foolishly predicted that it would be done in late September, November at the most. I figured I could do a page a day and even with something like fifty pages (my high end estimate for how long the story would take to tell) the project wouldn’t take more than a couple of months. However, I failed to account for the needs of a pregnant wife and my own deep-rooted laziness. August came and went without much progress, and on September 10th my son was born. Suddenly laziness wasn’t a problem anymore. Who has time to be lazy when a baby’s on the line?!  Suffice to say, my creative life jet rocketed into the ground.

I was bemoaning this change the yesterday during one of my many hour long commutes, regretting that while I love my son it would still be nice to have time to create. Even better would be creating and getting paid for it, rather than these night shifts at a job I tolerate just to make ends meet. After I was done with my little pity party I crawled out from underneath the porch, tossed away the empty bottles, and set out determined to make time gosh darn it!

I’m happy to say that work as resumed on Tales of the Supper Squid, Vol 1: The Case of the Missing Mario (tentative title). I’m not going to even guess when it will be finished. I still think if I could dive in it would be done in a month or two. But let’s be realistic. I don’t even know if it’ll be done before 2012. I’d like to think so. It’s nice to have goals.

I was a little afraid today when I cracked open the ol’ Super Squad file. I was worried the pages I finished last year would be terrible and I’d have to re-do them. Fresh perspective always brings the potential for cringes. Luckily, they were a delight! Each page made me laugh out-loud, which is my own barometer for if something of my own is actually worth showing to other people (not that it’s ever stopped me from throwing crap up on the Internet for everyone to see).  Re-reading the start of the book was great way to get excited about the project again and I jumped it with gusto.

Lennus Underground

Lennus II is a direct sequel to Paladin’s Quest, not that you would know it from the outset. Like a Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest it shares gameplay mechanics and aesthetics with its predecessor, but there’s very little in the way of direct story ties. The game opens on the Underworld, a group of four islands floating in a featureless void. A piercing light shines from above and awakens the game’s hero from a 10,000 year status. Emerging into a temple dedicated to him, priests explain to the hero that prophecy has foretold that he will find four magical goo-gaas that will bring about The Great Union, a mysterious event that’s said to bring happiness to all. The first five or so hours of the game are spent searching for the for the four thingies in The Underworld, which, even by Lennus standards, is a very weird place.

A Day in the Life On Lennus

I think a reason why a lot of people didn’t get Paladin’s Quest (as much as a C-list 16-bit JPRG can be gotten beyond its C-list-16-bit-JRPGyness) is that the title changed from the original Japanese moniker “Lennus.” For one, it’s a terrible title; instantly forgettable and not even accurate. Sure, there’s a big honkin’ quest, but Paladins? None to be found. The title is so generic that for years I had confused this game with that other SNES C-List JRPG, Lagoon. I thought I had given it the cursory download-emulate-dispose treatment such C-listers deserve, so when Talking Tyrant Sanagi started a Paladin’s Quest Let’s Play I wasn’t expecting anything new. Not only was Paladin’s Quest something I hadn’t seen before, but it turned out to be much more intriguing than I had been lead to believe.

At first glance things seem to be right on course: flat-graphics, lousy translation, clichéd scenario. But then the hero steps outside and…

Oh.

Oh wow.

Weekly Drawing: Bear

Over at Talking Time there’s an attempt to kick start the ol’ “here’s a thing now draw it” deal that was going on a while back but died out due to lack of participation. That was partly my fault, so I was eager to join in the revival. Guy couldn’t have picked a better theme either. I swear this drawing didn’t start as fan-art. But when I had finished the bear it just looked like he needed a rider and, as always, things came back to Zelda. One of these years I’ll draw something that isn’t a videogame. But until then:

Year in Review: Best Things of Two-Thousand Thing!

Another tedious year-end retrospective?

You know it!

BEST THINGS OF

TWO-THOUSAND THING!

Nintendo Power Retrospective: Issue 14 July/August 1990

The July/August 1990 issue of Nintendo Power was the first I ever owned. Sure, I knew about the magazine beforehand. Which kid hadn’t? But not being an NES owner I didn’t have much use for tips and tricks “straight from the pros.” I don’t who, but someone got me this issue. Probably my parents as Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers was one of the first games I did own. I don’t think I got the issue from a friend – Nintendo Power was just too valuable to give away. However I got it, Nintendo Power soon became a major part of my childhood. I begged my parents for a subscription and borrowed every copy I could until they relented. Nintendo Power was my entry into a world I only had little access. I would study each issue, learning the in’s and out’s of games I would never play. Like I pointed out last post, I often have a greater fondness for NP articles than the games they cover.

Eventually, my parents pressured me to throw out my magazine collection. Those issues had covers missing and pages ripped and generally would have made bad retrospective material. Such is the price for being loved. Then where did all these images come from? Why the good people at RetroMags of course! These guys are doing the saintly work of preserving the detritus of our misspent youth and this series couldn’t exist without them. Thanks, fellas.

So won’t you join me on a nostalgia trip through the wonders of early Nintendo Power: the worst/best magazine ever printed? I plan to start here with my first issue, about half-way through the NES life-cycle, and go through to when I stopped my subscription, a bit into the N64 days.

We start in the early 90′s: a time of neon highlights, denim jackets, and unrepressed extreme Raditude. Also: the Disney Afternoon.

 

Snow Games

Yesterday we got our first big snowstorm of the year (about two months late for Denver). I was walking the dog through ten foot high drifts of snow, bitter wind slicing through me like a hot (cold?) knife through warm (frozen?) butter, as several layers of frost formulated on my exposed skin when all of a sudden I was beset by memories. Delicious, delicious memories. Back in my capricious youth – when I could spend all my time fixated on video games – I formed some associations of particular games with this time of the year. The evil storm brought these memories back (also, frostbite).  So let’s trip the light nostalgic and take a look at winters past.

“Experience has taught me to investigate anything that glows.”

So says Sonic right before a flying candy pirate ship with a chocolate Eggman Robotnik face for a figurehead arrives for a tussle. Suffice to say, we’ve come a long way since

Mystic Ark: Consider the Happy Book

A friend read my last post and said that Mystic Ark sounded a lot like Demon’s Souls. I thought I had failed at conveying what the game was like, because really, they couldn’t be more different. He clarified:

I’m not talking about Demon’s Souls notorious “soul-crushing difficulty”. I’m talking about world-building.

The premise is pretty much identical. You’re trapped in the Nexus. Worlds are fucked up and it’s your job to go in and fix things. Each world tells a story through it’s interesting locales and their inhabitants. There isn’t so much of an overarching plot as there is an emphasis on scenario, setting, and tone. You are but a guest in these worlds, and the game doesn’t bother to concern itself with a standardized storytelling when it gets the job done through other less conventional means.

Which is true! I haven’t played Demon’s Souls myself, but for what I’ve read it also shares a tone of isolation. However, Demon’s Souls is more about stranding you alone in an extremely hostile environment. Isolation is used to create horror. In Mystic Ark the isolation is used more to create a feeling of loneliness or melancholy. Also, it is very much buried in the background, while Demon’s Souls is all about being trapped, alone (or so I hear). In the last post I threw 1400 words at the screen trying to define this aspect of the game that is very intangible.

So if everything I wrote about last time is subtext, what is Mystic Ark like on the surface? I think what best summarises Mystic Ark is a little something called the Happy Book.