EarthBound (SNES) Playthrough [Pt. 1 of 2] - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Nintendo's 1995 RPG for the Super Nintendo, EarthBound.

The rest of the game can be watched in the second video:    • EarthBound (SNES) Playthrough [Pt. 2 ...  

In the English-speaking world, EarthBound was one of those rare games that, despite the praise lavished on it on hindsight, was completely ignored when it was first released. It was a complete and utter commercial failure.

It was only once the critical reviews, and the SNES itself, had faded from the public's awareness that it found itself recognized. EarthBound epitomizes the term "cult classic," and I can't help but think that maybe the west just wasn't ready for it yet. That it competed for shelf space with Square's heavy-hitters like Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger probably didn't help matters much either.

And I fully admit that I was one of the people who didn't care when the game launched. I was already hooked on RPGs - Final Fantasy II, III, and Dragon Warrior had long since become favorites - but the cartoony art-style, modern setting, and sense of humor flew directly against anything I knew about the genre at the time, and the game's huge ad campaign only further entrenched that idea in my mind. The full page ads of Belch and the scratch-and-sniff inserts made me laugh, but they also made it impossible for me to think of Earthbound as anything but a throwaway novelty.

How wrong I was.

It took me years to go back and finally play it, and it left me totally stunned. It was an incredible work that easily stood equal to the best that Square produced on the SNES, and its bucking of genre conventions was really what made it so special.

At the core of its gameplay systems, it is absolutely a Dragon Quest clone, but it does some awesome things with that structure. Everyone and everything has a personality that comes across as real and unaffected. Ness loses his motivation in battle if he starts to miss his mom too much. Sometimes an enemy will be in a good mood and will smile at you instead of violently lunging forward. There are so many little touches like this that the game uses to draw you in on a very emotional, very human level.

EarthBound is often irreverent, idiosyncratic, hilarious, and flat-out odd, but it paints a reality closely rooted in our own, and it never needs to be mean or fake to do it. Things do become extremely dark toward the end, and the game purposely poses some very personal, very uncomfortable questions to the player about the nature of existence, the place of the individual, and of the agency of humanity. It's beautiful yet disturbing, and by not holding back any punches, the game is spectacularly successful at fulfilling the vision that Itoi (the designer) had for it.

I had originally intended this video to be finished as my way to thank everybody that has helped me grow this channel to where it is today, but it seems that I missed the 50k subscriber landmark by a couple of weeks. Better late than never, though, so it's with my humble gratitude that I offer you this playthrough.

I don't want to spoil any of the game for those of you that haven't played it, so I'm just going to leave you all with some very general time-stamps. I hope you enjoy the video, and that you can appreciate the game as much as I did.

35:36 Onett
1:42:53 Twoson
3:24:42 Threed
6:21:25 Fourside
8:39:42 Heading to Summers

*There are a few times where I leveled up off-screen, so to show this, I open up the status screen to show the higher levels at the seams where the segments were edited.

For the first Earthbound game, check here:    • Earth Bound (NES) Playthrough  

And for the third:    • Mother 3 (GBA) Playthrough [1 of 2] -...  
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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