Game Review: Earthbound

Earthbound, Mother 2 in Japan, is that game where Ness from Super Smash Bros originates. His attacks in Smash Bros are a mixture of mundane kids’ toys and powerful magical spells, which describes the off-kilter mundanity of Earthbound perfectly. Earthbound evokes real life in its treatment of status effects, character names, attacks, and music. Half the encounters of the game are representational of some real-life animal, occupation, or person. However, by expressing gameplay in specific descriptive terms about actions these enemies perform in real life, the player is forced to rethink how real life operates. In doing this, Earthbound flips around Jenkin’s Evocative Space structure by alienating real life through gameplay. We will start through an analysis of the opening segment.

The game opens when a meteor crashes into a nearby hill and wakes the player character (default name: Ness). Ness speaks to his mother, who knows he will sneak out to see the meteor, so she tells him to at least bring a bat with him and wear appropriate clothes. Armed with a cracked bat, Ness scales the hill taming (read: defeating) Spiteful Crows, Runaway Dogs, and Coil Snakes only to be rewarded with a roadblock by the local police. Not to worry, Ness returns soon on the search for his neighbor’s missing brother. After finding the missing kid, a light beams down from the sky, illuminating the meteor, revealing the time-traveling beetle Buzz Buzz and a prophecy surrounding Ness. A mid-game enemy zaps in from the future, but Buzz Buzz’s magical defense saves Ness and friends. Buzz Buzz is tragically murdered seconds later by Ness’ neighbor’s mother swatting them down.

This sequence of events begins Earthbound’s process of conflating the fantastical and the mundane. The player beings with teenage rebellion: Ness attempts (and succeeds at) leaving the house in the middle of the night to investigate a shocking occurrence. His mother’s admittance that she can’t stop him turns a simple act of leaving into an understood rebellious act. Ness takes a cracked baseball bat and goes about terrorizing local wildlife. But, Buzz Buzz complicates this by saying, “Animals are also becoming violent due to Giygas’ influence over the evil in their minds (Earthbound).” Giygas, the main villain of the game, is sending enemies and bringing out the evil in all animals and people. Defeating foes now turns into dissipating darkness. Which explains why defeating opponents gets renamed to taming for animals, stopping plants from moving and causing people to return to normal. Earthbound’s encounter design bakes fantasy elements into the mundane enemies you encounter. On the flip side, Buzz Buzz is killed by being slapped. Enemies like UFOs and living piles of slime are primarily taken down by objects like yo-yos, laser pointers, frying pans, and baseball bats. The mundane overtakes the fantastical, making it feel more mundane.

The specific language Earthbound employs in enemy encounters forces you to rethink real-life actions in terms of fantasy battle. Consider the enemy “Mole Playing Rough.” His attacks include “scratch with claws,” “claw with sharp nails,” “size up the situation,” and “be absentminded.” The first two are weak and strong attacks, respectively. Sizing up the situation causes the mole to “feel strange” and if the mole is absentminded, nothing happens. This move set exemplifies how Earthbound makes you think of descriptions of actions a mole would perform in real life and turn them into game meaning. What does “feeling strange” mean, and how would it affect play. This condition is equivalent to “confusion” in most RPGs. But Earthbound takes a typical moment of “I am feeling off today” and transforms it with mechanics. Unlike the evocative space example of American McGee’s Alice, which turns the outward aesthetic of Alice in Wonderland, Earthbound changes the underlying meaning of an aesthetic without changing the aesthetic. The actions we are dealing with are never made separate from real life. The details of language make this correlation unescapable.

Music and graphics in battles combine to defamiliarize the familiar seeming enemies. When fighting a Mole Playing Rough, the music takes on a folky atmosphere. The almost pastoral score gives a quaint vibe to the enemies you encounter that use this music. Enemies you fight have familiar sprites. Maybe a Spiteful Crow is grinning in a way that a real crow could not, but the image matches the feeling of crows as mischievous. The mole playing rough looks like the best approximation of a mole in the art style of Earthbound. The background of pulsating psychedelic patterns sharply contrasts with the otherwise representational art. An over-world cave will transform into a mess of nothingness. The contrast between the two visuals and the music lends an air of paranoia to the gameplay. It makes the player question what is going on and why. Why would such a “normal” seeming mole be an enemy? This question makes the player reassess their relationship with ordinary objects.

Many encounters in Earthbound attempt to reflect life. However, their reflection of life distorts and reassesses the actions and abilities of mundane entities like animals. After playing Earthbound, feeling odd becomes more than an occasional nuisance and a sort of alien effect. The scratches of a cat reinterpreted into language of turn-based combat. Lazing about becomes a mechanic. Through developing a world that evokes our own, Earthbound reverses the evocation to make real-life more fantastic. In doing so, Earthbound shows the power of Jenkin’s Evocative Spaces to not only evoke an aesthetic and narrative for a game, but also to force reinterpretation of existing narratives and situations such as real life.

Bibliography

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” Accessed October 18, 2019. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f82f/061e7a44530d1dee281b96d9b1640485aa74.pdf?_ga=2.104234432.1514035165.1569005838-766539797.1568228898.

Nintendo, "Earthbound." Accessed October 18, 2019.