EarthBound

Dark, dark, dark memory of holding this at the game store with its giant box for 49.99 and putting it down to buy the Pink Panther Hollywood SNES game.

Playing Earthbound as an adult is an emotional gut-punch - the equivalent of meeting your 7-year old self, and he gives you a warm, generous, uninvited hug, and tells you everything is OK. The gameplay and story of Earthbound greets the future with the wonder of a child: imagination, not cynicism; anticipation, not reluctance. It adds magic to life's real adventure. During the final battle - punctuated by the prayers of friends - I wasn't fighting Giygas, I was fighting back tears.

Yep, I'm one of those EarthBound cultists. Something about this game is just pure densely concentrated magic to me; something about the particular combination of its smooth colorful retro graphics and music that evokes autumn and winter makes me damn near tear up. This game's mix of humor and warmth and nostalgia and sci-fi and funk and emotion and (in the end) pure cosmic horror is just so unique. I don't have an official "top ten games of all time" list, but if I made one this would be on it.

Ness

I respect it, but the menu-based interfacing killed it for me even 20 years ago.

Earthbound is incredibly charming and its idiosyncrasies are iconic for a reason. It's a shame that the moment to moment, both in gameplay and plot, are just mind-numbingly dull. Earthbound is dedicated to its core theme to such a degree that it just can't breath without doing something to symbolize it, which comes across as boring to me since I don't find the theme THAT interesting and it results in the plot doing a whole lot of nothing otherwise.

There are some mildly frustrating mechanics, like the always-cramped inventory, and a general lack of options to revive teammates, but it's still a charming unique RPG. I can see why so many future indie RPG developers wanted to rip it off, and completely missed the mark in so many ways. Near the end, it kinda becomes your 1-shot abilities vs. the enemies' 1-shot abilities, which is not great, but the final battle is unforgettable.

I played as much of this game as I could stomach. It turns out I just do not like turn-based combat and I maybe never will. I acknowledge that this game does have a decent story and, at times, great atmosphere, I just can't get past what its gameplay is to enjoy it and that is probably my own personal failure.

Quirky and interesting as they are, I grow tired of these long grindy games.

Plain weird.