The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

On The Stick did an SNES draft. It was totally fun, just like their NES draft! But it had one huge flaw.
No Earthbound.
Blew my mind. I mean, Final Fantasy 2 is a fine game, but when you’re picking that over Earthbound? You’ve got your RPG priorities wrong. I wasn’t really mad? But the idea of doing a “protest” and replaying Earthbound stuck in my mind. Then I started thinking about the last time I replayed Earthbound, and what a delight it was to revisit it, not being completely useless at RPGs. So I decided to do it. I started playing Earthbound again. Named my party Alex, Cris, Brer, and Ecks, and set out. Then I was thinking about commenting on twitter, but that seemed more a thing to do here. So here I am.

Today I played up to getting the Pencil Eraser. Here’s what I noticed.

The game, as it always has, has a lot of heart, but I personally enjoy the way that the game does the “chosen hero” thing. Buzz Buzz mentions you’re a chosen hero, but you don’t really tell that to anyone, and nobody but Pokey really even knows about the prophecy, though of course that is relevant. At the same time, it’s like your parents always knew. When you head out the door after the meteorite crash, your mother tells you to have a nice adventure. She knows you’re now an adventurer. It’s just kind of accepted. Same with your father. He just accepts you’ll be traveling about to save the world, and makes sure you have the cash for it. It’s like… it’s like Ness had always wanted to be an adventurer, in the same way someone has always wanted to be an artist or something like that, and his parents are ready to encourage him and support him because they know he can do it if he sets his mind to it. It’s just really endearing. You really like your parents in the game. It’s cool.

When you get to Twoson, the game really takes the kid gloves off, though. Even grinding up to the point where I didn’t even have to heal during the Frankystein Mark II fight, the Ramblin’ Mushrooms and Walking Sprouts are just brutal. Hitting your single character with the “Feeling Funky” mushroom debuff and PSI Magnet is really kind of cruel, especially since there’s nowhere to buy better weapons and armor in the Twoson. On top of all this, Twoson is where you get things like the Bicycle, Pencil Eraser, and the Receiver Phone, which basically make Ness’s inventory all but useless and full of key items. You need Paula desperately, if just for the extra inventory space, but they just take awhile giving her to you. Which is weird, because you get Jeff like… immediately afterwards. Well, after his little side thing in Winters, anyway.
In any case, I think Twoson, almost single-handedly, is why I thought this game was so hard in my youth. It just doesn’t let up! Of course, being smarter now, more willing to use PP to kill regular enemies and whatnot, it’s a bit less of an issue, and once you manage to get to Happy Happy Village, the difficulty calms down a bit.

But I’ll have to experience that another day. Time to bed. We make a great team, don’t we? Be sure to turn the power OFF instead of just pressing RESET, alright?