Mother 2 (EarthBound):
This— this is it? This is what people were willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a cartridge of? Honest question: is this a joke? Am I being punk'd? Where's Ashton, guys? Give it up.
I think I might actually hate this game; which would be upsetting because my roommate used to tell me how much he enjoyed this game as a kid. I don't know that I really hate it for any real fault of the game's, but it's so painfully mediocre, and has so many glaring design flaws. It's nowhere near the masterfully crafted game I was lead to believe it was.
I guess I'll start with the more objective issues: Wow! Slowdown and issues of collision detection in a 16-bit, 2D RPG. That's impressive, I suppose. Slowdown, I can live with (although it's completely baffling) but collision detection problems are annoying. I'm fine with back-attacking with visible enemy encounters, but the way it's implemented is pretty horrible. All the enemies immediately run at me, at blinding speeds, if they're near my level; and even if I do magically get the drop on the enemy, hitting them from the side, or back, chances are good that I still won't be rewarded with a preemptive attack turn. Also, the background motion is horribly choppy; and a special note for the crazy inventory/storage system. Was this really programmed by HAL?
As far as the more subjective issues I have go: This is Pokemon without the hook of catching, raising, and training pokemon. Maybe there's a little more to it. I'm selling it a little short, but really, the fart jokes, constant breaking of the 4th wall—yeah, I get it, this is a video game, I can plainly tell that there's a fucking controller in my hands, thank you—and all the stupid puns (oh, my god, the horrible puns) sell this to me as a game for children, and immature adults. I don't see the charm. I see a bunch of things my romper students would have laughed at. I don't find the premise to be all that novel, even for the time of its release, either. Speaking of the time of its release, the battle system is bare bones, almost to the point of liability, considering the state of the genre at its release. That's all right, I suppose. It's meant to be fairly simple for the audience, but there's wild inconsistency in the enemy AI, and little recourse outside of restarting.
Finally, the lead characters just disgust me. They may as well be pet rocks. I don't give two shits about them, and the way the game is written, I feel like the writer didn't really care about them either. The supporting cast interacts with them as if they were cardboard cutouts of little kids, which gives little to no sense of them having any personality outside of archetype. Ultimately it makes me feel like I'm not actually interacting with any of the supporting characters, and more eavesdropping on the stupid things they say from behind a wall. The 'monologue' characters do provide just feels like efforts to characterize the NPCs. It doesn't really matter who they're talking to, for the most part. They may as well be put in bubbles to talk to themselves. Instead of a grand adventure, I feel a mundane sense of futility in playing the game.
I'm going to go ahead and say it: I think this game deserved to sell poorly in the US upon its release. I would probably be more upset if it had actually sold well.
However, to leave this post off on a slightly more positive note, while there are a number of tracks I don't particularly care for on their own, as they seem to fall pray to the god awful instrumentation many SNES soundtracks do, the soundtrack as a whole is rather noteworthy for its eclecticism. There are actually some tracks that I really enjoy on their own, as well: particularly
Paula's Theme.
