How EarthBound Beginnings brings us back to the days of sticks and stones
EarthBound Beginnings (1989)
EarthBound Beginnings (1989)
I took a deliberately slow meander around my old housing estate the other day, the neighbourhood where I grew up. Not that I had to wait until moving out of there before walking around it, of course, the place wasn’t that bad.
But after I left, this urge struck me to come back and have an outsider’s look around the old place. It’s like what they always say: you can live somewhere your whole life, but it’s only when you come back and visit the place that you truly see what it’s like. I think I’ve mangled that phrase a bit, but anyway, that’s what I was up to. A tourist in my old childhood estate, the streets where I used to tramp. And to be blunt, it was a bit depressing.
Don’t worry, the area hadn’t become badly run down or anything. Of course there were a few local yahoos, galoots and bottom feeders still milling around the place, causing noise and being a general nuisance, but that was fine. No big deal. In fact, you’d miss those types if they were gone.
Nor had a gigantic chemical plant been erected while I was gone; some evil, sterile building looming ominously over the estate and poisoning my old friends. Nor had the land fallen to an army of knuckle-dragging miscreants. In fact, I was almost wishing to see a few chavvy youths in and around the area.
But you see, that was precisely the problem - there were no kids playing out on the roads, none at all. No unwashed lads throwing stones at passing cars, either. This wasn’t the pandemic lockdown, or Christmas day. This was the mid-term break from school, and a perfectly nice day too. So what’s going on?
It used to be that, on any given day of the week, there’d be a whole gaggle of us kids all out playing together. Usually it’d be football, the universal game that anyone could play - any kind of round object would do, use a couple of trees or jumpers for goalposts, have dozens of boys and girls on either side of the field and you were laughing.
It didn’t just have to be sport though; another favourite game was Kick the Can, or Tip the Can as we called it. Remember that one? That was a cruel old game, you know. If you were “it”, you could be right on the cusp of victory, until some awful bugger came rushing from your blind spot to free everybody. Then you howled, cried and went home in a rage. Bet you don’t remember your last game of Tip the Can, do you?
The age range of all of the kids out playing didn’t matter all that much either; you could be anything from 6-years-old to about 14, and all be involved in the same game of twenty-a-side football. You were just waiting for your time when you, too, would be one of the big kids.
It’s a bit ghoulish to say, I know, but childhood play really is one of those things to reflect on. How did it all end? It seemed like there was some imperceptible moment in your life where playing on the street was no longer the done thing. One day, your friends stopped knocking on your door looking for a game of football. Or one other day, you went inside and just never went back out to your old childhood pals.
Those playful days of childhood yore is why a game like EarthBound Beginnings will always appeal. Mind you, you may know this game better as Mother. Ultimately, it’s a game that closely resembles the Peanuts comic strip - so much so that the resemblance necessitated design changes to some sprites when this game finally got localised.
There’s some crazy, psychosomatic things going on in the world of EarthBound Beginnings, way beyond anything you and your pals saw on your travels in the vast, open world that was your neighbourhood. But ultimately, whatever about its abstract plot, the game is all about a group of young kids going on an adventure together - the way it should be.
It reminds me greatly of what I find to be one of the greatest movie lines of all time, purely because it’s so true: Stand By Me’s ending quote, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”
That’s the mantra that the Mother games seem to live by. I’ll always remember the fun and games I had with my very first proper group of pals, many of whom I haven’t seen for a very long time. Or even when I do see them, often in a local den of iniquity, too much time has passed and we’ve drifted too far apart to reminisce about those days. Sometimes you just have to be in the right mood before you get nostalgic.
Anyway, they just spotted me as a 7- or 8-year-old child, wandering around near my house one day, they invited me over for a few silly games, and then we got to know each other through play, as kids should. We saw each other and grew up together every single day after that.
But I think we both know why roving hordes of children, whose leader you could always tell by looking for whoever held the biggest stick, no longer abound the estates. It’s a mixture of indoor technology - tablets, TV, video games.
I’m certainly not blameless in this regard - yes, I used to bring my Game Boy Advance out with me, all the goddamn time. And there were definitely occasions where, while everyone else would be pretending to do WWF Wrestling, I’d be sat in the corner trying to shave milliseconds off my times in F-Zero. I don’t regret any of that, but you can see how we’ve swung way too far in the opposite direction.
None of that technology existed in the late 80s, when EarthBound Beginnings took place. Well, the TV existed, but it wasn’t worth watching back then, believe me. But anyway, if EarthBound on Super NES was obscure, which it’s pretty much grown out of by now like we all outgrew our childhood friends, then EarthBound Beginnings never got a chance to grow at all.
This game was meant to be released on the NES outside of Japan, with a full translation completed even, but its US release was cancelled right at the last second. Needless to say, Europe never even knew about it. Only in 2015 was this localization made available to a worldwide audience, finally showing us what came before Mother 2 and 3.
And the result? Honestly, you might as well stick with EarthBound, a game that did most of what EarthBound Beginnings did, but far better. There’s some interesting story here, and Mother series enthusiasts - who certainly exist in droves - will definitely want to see how the series got off to a start.
You have to remember that EarthBound Beginnings, and for that matter EarthBound, is essentially a send up of Dragon Quest - a franchise that’s synonymous with RPGs in Japan, but seen as a bit of a creaking antique wardrobe elsewhere in the world.
This means EarthBound Beginnings is very much a product of its time, and its general release in 2015 was far more hype than end-product - a bit like my performances in the football fields among my friends. You know it’s funny - despite our youthful confidence, none of us ever played for Man United like we always threatened.
From a modern RPG perspective, EarthBound Beginnings does an awful lot wrong. Unlike its two sequels, you don’t see the random encounters before they happen - they just flash up in your face all of a sudden. And ‘up the wazoo’ is probably the best way to describe how frequent these battles are.
None of the SNES game’s psychedelic backgrounds to gaze at in battle either, just sheer blackness. The dialogue and text in and out of battle is a bit more straight-laced than the SNES game as well. It’s all relative though - had you played this game in 1991, it would have shown a lot more levity than nearly every other game around.
You’ll need to grind like hell at times to progress, which is definitely very Dragon Quest, and the end of the game has become infamous for being entirely unbalanced and far too difficult. In similar fashion to EarthBound SNES, the graphics in this game are pretty risible as well.
You should just stick to the Super Nintendo game for the best of wacky childhood adventures. That said, you know as well as I do that the most efficient planning committees of all are gangs of youths – you’ll surely remember how kids in your neighbourhood got things done, bases built, fights arranged, and they knew how to delegate. And if you didn’t like it or you didn’t want to be a part of it, then you could naff off home.
Well, these childhood gangbangers have grown up now, and some of them even make up part of the ever-rabid EarthBound fanbase. You should just leave it to them to release a fan remake of EarthBound Beginnings because – like Kick the Can - it’s a bit of fun we all need in our lives again.
23 January 2024