Text Play: EarthBound Beginnings [Mother (Famicom, 1989)/Switch (2022?)] : Issue #000: What's This Now? Mother...?

This promises to be tough on a lot of levels.

This is one of those JRPG franchises that I've heard about here and there, mostly in passing, for a good fifteen years, anyway, and never really had the time or inclination to get to until now. I'm coming into this thing with little more than the vaguest of awareness of it. The first thing that comes to mind is the Super Nintendo title that came out in the mid 1990s, 1994, I think. I'm sure I saw the bit about it in the Nintendo Power magazine when it came out because I still had the subscription my parents got me several years earlier. Never played it for various reasons that I've covered a time or two here. But it was actually a sequel to a game that came out exclusively in Japan, from what I understand, called Mother.

From what I gather from the quick research I've done, this version of it, titled EarthBound Beginnings got a Western, if not global release on the Wii U's virtual console service in 2015. Unfortunately, this means it was coming out at a time when I was at least pretending to not be so much into video games, so I let the Wii U pass the same way I would have its immediate predecessor had I not won it in a contest at my day job.

I remember seeing a handful of ROM hacks of the Super Nintendo title played as part of a rather lengthy series of such things done by one of my favorite Let's Players on YouTube. I'd put specific episodes in here, but at this point, the relevant ones are probably just shy of a decade old, minimum, so I'll just link to the playlist instead. There's 125 episodes, but if you're into that kind of thing, it's an interesting watch just to see what kind of screwball ideas some of these ROM hackers came up with, and how the guy playing them reacts to it. Even if Seraph hasn't done these things for his own channel in a couple years, his work is kind of an inspiration for what I'm doing with these things and my own videos. It's also one reason why my titles can be kind of hit or miss as to what the post is actually about.

At any rate, the point here is that I'm coming into this pretty much blind. I've heard of the franchise, and even played a little bit of Beginnings just to see what it was like. Beyond that and the aforementioned ROM hacks I've seen, my knowledge of this is minimal at best, coming mostly from GameFAQs and Wikipedia. What I've learned is that this game is a little on the tough side and takes somewhere in the area of 20-30 hours to finish. Hopefully, I'll be able to get through this a little quicker than I have FF9.

With that in mind, I'm going to wrap this up here and get on with this and a few other things. See you soon, and until then, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA.