Review:
I am going to begin by stating something that is very obvious but needs to be said: Earthbound Beginnings is not a good game. It's slow, it's not well balanced, in many places it's not well designed. Enemies are overly frequent, there are massive difficulty spikes that require you grind. It's a very infamous video game and one that I completely understand if you find it to be unplayable. I adored Earthbound Beginnings. As a fan of this trilogy of games, Earthbound Beginnings is such an impactful work for me. It's like seeing the origin of so many things you love in real time, from the art style to the general themes to the music, Beginnings is, if nothing else, historically important. But for me it was also just a joy to play through. To see this sort of alternate universe Earthbound, one where the games still satirize but are far more serious and dark. Where they have more in common with Western RPGs, with an open world to explore and the only "roadblocks" in your way being not being able to fight certain enemies. And playing Beginnings made me both appreciate the trilogy more and understand the trilogy on a very deep level, it contextualizes why these three games fit together in a very meaningful way. I could never recommend this game to anyone who isn't an Earthbound fan and, even still, doesn't have a lot of patience. But I really enjoyed it myself. 8.1/10
Diary:
1/21/26
I am updating this blog after an hour of play, I got about the first hour of this game done before I had to make dinner. Already I'm super into this game, which like. I'm aware doesn't always have the best track record, I've been immediately into a few games in the past that ended up letting me down. But I think as an Earthbound fan, Earthbound Beginnings has a lot to offer. Especially if you, like me, are playing it third. I know this game is very archaic, don't get me wrong, but you can also instantly tell how much love is put into it, how unique it is as an RPG. Itoi cooked, I don't know what else to say.
I think as an Earthbound fan, the thing that works to its strength is how instantly it feels like coming home. Playing Beginnings third is, in my opinion, the absolute correct choice because it really feels like fulfilling the franchise this way. The presentation, atmosphere, and especially music just instantly feel so warm, so nostalgic. Beginnings defines Earthbound's sound, even as Earthbound is more iconic and Mother 3 has a more passionate fanbase, Beginnings is what Mother sounds like. It's impossible to overstate how happy I was hearing Pollyanna. Pollyanna is the best song in the entire series, it's not a contest. The title music too, Mother Earth, is also just such an emotional track, it's difficult not to latch onto. I'm pretty impressed by them being able to do these songs on an NES, they're pretty complex melodies and granted, this was 1989, they had a few years, but still. They feel like fully realized compositions and that's not always apparent in NES soundtracks.
But it's also such it's own thing immediately, it's very unlike the other Mother games. Like, in many ways Earthbound is, at least one the surface, a remake of Mother 1. So it can be easy to think Mother 1 doesn't have its own sauce, Earthbound just seems to be like "taking the core elements of Mother 1 and reworking them into an RPG that has a more solid structure and a more satisfying gameplay loop". But when you sit down to play it, it's so unique. It's way less jokey than its successors, it has some little gags here and there but it also has this way darker tone to it too. It's trying to be a more serious, more grounded story than its contemporaries, which are often overly optimistic high fantasy RPGs. This game instead takes place in, much like its successors, a satire of modern day America and has this real background of "the world is wrong now because we've messed with things we shouldn't have".
The most famous departure, perhaps, from the general Mother tone is that it sets up a mystery at the beginning rather than having it build. The game opens with a text scrawl discussing how the protagonists great-grandparents, scientists 80 years prior to the game's events, went mysteriously missing for two years back in the early 1900s and how only his great-grandfather ever returned. It's a very cool hook, and it quickly establishes Earthbound Beginnings as a unique science fiction mystery in a genre dominated by fantasy. It's super good, I'm excited to play more. Sometimes I wish this game had a remake so modern audiences could experience its unique flavor of Mother vibes without having to invest in an NES RPG. Not as many people have the same admiration for old RPGs as I do.
I've only had a couple encounters so far with the infamous encounter rates of Mother 1. It is pretty ridiculous though that immediately entering a battle after you exit one is an option? I do, however, think that, at least so far, people have overstated how brutal Mother 1 can be. That's something I've always heard, Mother 1 not just has a brutal encounter rate but also a brutal difficulty in fights and I will say, fights aren't easy per se. Enemies get way too many crits for my liking and leveling up can be pretty slow going. But it's not as bad as people tend to make it seem. The biggest problem so far is just that healing options are scarce and without scrolling HP like the later games, you have to be a bit proactive with healing instead of reactive? So you can't play risky to optimize damage knowing you'll have a safety net because you will often just die. Is it hard? Sure. Is it brutal? I don't think so yet. If anything I think people may have just accidentally wandered into areas they weren't prepared for and decided that the game was hard because they weren't used to its more freeform design when compared to later JRPGs?
1/22/26
Y'all, I think I might be too in love with the Mother series already to judge this game fairly. I try not to let this happen to me, I will absolutely be candid about how I think a game in a series I love is bad. But with Earthbound Beginnings it's become like "yeah the encounter rate can be a little ridiculous and the enemies get too many crits but as soon as I leave battle I hear Pollyanna and remember this series is perfect". And like, I got to hear Bein' Friends in this section too! I don't know if Mother 1 has my favorite soundtrack of the three games, but it absolutely has the one that makes me smiley the most. It's like I'm finally getting to see all these tracks that I've loved for so long in real time, it's so good.
I'm really impressed by the Bread Crumbs item. So Earthbound Beginnings has bread as a healing item you can use. This is common for the series, they take place in some approximation of the modern day, so instead of like item shops you have commercial bakeries. Beginnings, however, allows you to use the bread as an item. This will allow Ninten, your protagonist, to set down a "trail of bread crumbs" That allows you to generate a fast travel point, you can select the "Crumbs" item in your inventory and Ninten will follow the trail of bread crumbs back to where you laid the first one. It's such a great mechanic and I'm surprised they got it working on the NES of all things. Fast travel itself was always such an iffy concept back then but to then be able to allow the players to set fast travel points? I'm sure other games did this, don't get me wrong, people did amazing things on the NES but it's still so impressive, especially for a game as relatively simple as Beginnings.
It's also super interesting seeing the origins of a lot of tropes in the Mother series. Like I guess technically the origin of these tropes is that capitalism is awful and our lives are all hell, but like. In the Podunk section we see a lot of similar themes that would later be revisited in the sequel, once again kind of establishing Earthbound as a pseudo-sequel to Mother 1. We have like, a little girl getting lost in an unnerving area. A corrupt politician who is manipulating the main character into doing his dirty work because reelection is coming up and he needs to put on the impression that he cares. A zombie infested graveyard that is slowly encroaching on the world of the living. The same mayor sending you out after he solves all his problems in town to someplace super dangerous to reap all the benefits from your actions. It's like the Podunk section of the game is a microcosm of the first, like, 8 hours of Earthbound, it's super neat.
I am, however, starting to get more into the "pain points" of Beginnings. Enemy encounters are pretty ridiculous, it especially feels like it in the graveyard. As you're walking the lost girl out of the cemetery, it feels genuinely like you're encountering an enemy every step. It's not just annoying because of how overtuned the encounter rate is, but also because 90% of the encounters are not worth your time. Like it's mostly just bats that go down in one hit but spawn in four at a time, making battles not difficult but very tedious. But like, running from an encounter also isn't worth your time, you are in desperate need of the experience because you spend so much of the early game severely underleveled. As with other NES RPGs, to pad out the time and make it more of a full experience, Mother DEMANDS you grind. Especially in the early game, there are two immediate difficulty spikes where if you don't level up properly, you're going to be taken down in only a couple turns while you're doing nothing to the opponents. As people who have read the blog before may know, grinding is not my favorite thing to do in an RPG, but at least Beginnings has a pretty competent auto battle system to make this point less problematic. Still, while I am enjoying myself quite a bit for other reasons, playing Beginnings is incredibly frustrating at times.
1/23/26
We are the topiary creatures, we're very pleased to meet ya's, señors and senoritas too. The animals we feature you know they'll never eat ya, they'll sing so very sweet to you. You know it's kind of crazy that Earthbound Beginnings is the only game in this series to have a zoo as a proper set piece. Like Mother 3 kind of has a zoo section where Porky keeps his prized hybrids, but Mother 1 is the only game in this series with an actual zoo. Given that a central idea of this series is to portray the kind of adventures a normal kid might have, you'd think having a zoo in these games would be a no brainer. It must've been iconic to Sakurai too, as the "Mother" section of the world of Subspace Emissary in Brawl is comprised of the Mother 1 Zoo. I really wish I could capture my WiiU because it's just crazy how, despite the three pretty different art styles that the Earthbound games have, the monkeys just look the same. They got those in one, they made a perfect monkey sprite in the first game and have just been tweaking it since.
I was surprised to get the Franklin badge this early. Like maybe it's not actually early, I was about 3 or 4 hours into the game when I got it which was also probably about the point where I'm getting to Happy Happy in Earthbound. I guess because you don't leave Podunk for such a long stretch of time it FEELS earlier. It had never occurred to me that the Franklin badge is named after Ben Franklin. Until I got it in this game that thought had never occurred to me but that makes total sense. It's the Franklin badge because it's said to be the badge that Ben Franklin wore to make sure he wasn't hurt by lightning during his experiments. It's also crazy to me how it's kind of optional? In practice it's not, the boss you need it for, the Starman Jr., is likely to just hit you with an instant death move during the fight if you're not wearing it. But if your run is cracked, you could hypothetically just go without grabbing the Franklin Badge at this juncture. Earthbound Beginnings continues to be such a fascinating game, like an alternate history Earthbound.
Speaking of which, we got to Magicant! First of all, amazing song. Love the Magicant theme, even if it's very scuffed in the NES soundfont. I'm a little surprised this is the only game that has Magicant as like. A recurring location we can and do visit. In my opinion, Magicant is one of the most decidedly "Mother" areas in the series and it's really only a proper location in this game. Side note, is Sakurai just a very big fan of Mother 1 specifically? I'm realizing now how much Mother 1 keeps showing up in Smash, to the point where one of the new stages in Smash 4 was Magicant which, while it does have some bits from Earthbound (Dungeon Man, the Flying Man sprite), it's clearly built after Mother 1. It's very interesting how "real" Magicant feels in this game, like it's an actual magical world in the clouds that Ninten is just passing through. In Earthbound, they're very candid about Magicant just being a place in Ness' subconscious but the Magicant in this game is like a proper kingdom with a Queen who Ninten needs to aid. It feels very Little Nemo-esque, where this world, despite being very dreamlike, feels as though it exists independently of the protagonist.
But this also somehow makes Magicant feel more like a dream that Ninten is having as a result. Like, in dreams you don't know the world is a dream, right. You do think that this is all "normal" until you awaken and your memory grounds you into reality. Much like the other Magicant, the people in Magicant are there to love Ninten, to make him feel safe. The literal queen of this realm says as much, that this world exists to love Ninten unquestioningly. It also exists in a neat contrast to the "real world". Whereas before entering Magicant, Ninten was fighting normal animals and weird, angry people, in Magicant we get more into the Earthbound style of enemies the series is famous for. Weird floating eyes, sentient trees with unnerving faces, creatures with backwards names and designs. There are talking cats who swim through the clouds and birdman who serve Ninten in the hopes of dying a glorious death in battle. It's a truly magical place, I'm glad we will seemingly be coming back to visit it often!
I'm surprised how many of the 8 melodies we already have. In Podunk alone, 3 of the 8 melodies were hidden. I have to wonder if this indicates we're either, a, going to go a long time without another melody being added to the song or, b, the eight melodies aren't actually the "end goal" like they are in the sequel. Like, clearly the eight melodies are the main quest of this game, the Queen of Magicant needs to hear the complete song in order to sing it for you to beat the game. But I have to wonder if this quest will end much earlier than I'm expecting. Like there's maybe more to the "endgame" in this one than there was in the other game(s), we maybe go to Magicant and finish that quest at the 2/3 point and then have to quest to find the final boss. But I could also see it being an instance of going a very long time without obtaining a new melody, just by how freeform Beginnings' design is. Like there's not as much of a solid linear structure to Beginnings like there is in the other two games, it's way more of an open experience where you can tackle objectives at your speed. We'll see, I guess, there's a lot of game left! I haven't even gotten a second party member yet (even though I'm already level 18, oops).
The pain points of Earthbound Beginnings are real bad, by the way. I want to be clear, because I know I'm gushing about this game 90% of the time, this game sucks. I could not recommend this game to anyone who doesn't already love the Mother series and have a lot of patience for old game design. I will inevitably rate this game much higher than it deserves because I am just feeling very good about playing it, I have a lot of bias going in. But this game is awful to actually play. Its encounter rate is ridiculous and enemies just exist to be annoying. Like, maybe it's because I'm fairly overleveled I think, again I'm level 18, but enemies are doing like 1 damage to me. So basically every fight is "get into it, enemies poke for one, I try to run, probably fail because running is not always a guarantee in this game even with a massive level difference, have like three more enemies poke for one, do it again next turn". It's a very annoying game to play and if I didn't love literally every other aspect of it, I would be out.
Earthbound Beginnings hates cops and the American healthcare system. Based take. When you finish up at the Podunk Zoo, the mayor is hesitant to "lift the curfew" that restricts access to and from Podunk and keeps most residents in their houses because like. He already secured reelection through "saving the lost girl", what does he care. So the cops near Podunk proper are like very hardline about the rules and are enforcing the barricade. But talk to them and they just literally go "yeah, we may be doing our jobs, but that's just because eyes are on us. Those guys up north near the zoo will probably let you around the barricade, cops are lazy after all." I've had very little time to delve into the second town in the game, Merrysville, but one of my few interactions is a cop just roaming the streets harassing minors to get to school instead of doing, like, anything worthwhile. Shigesato Itoi hates cops as much as he hates capitalism. He also takes time to have a go at the American healthcare system. When you reach Merrysville, there is a hospital you can visit and, should you go inside and require their "services", they charge you like half of the money you currently have on you. Just straight up being like "yeah, American doctors squeeze more money out of you because they know that they can get away with it". Even on the NES, Itoi's social commentary was on point.
1/24/26
I finally got another party member!!! Unfortunately it's the items guy!!! So, I made it through the quest in Merrysville. The railway out of town, funny that Itoi thinks that America has a usable railway system, anyways the railway outta town is blocked and you have to find someone who knows a lot about explosives to remove the blockade. It is here that you find Lloyd (I accidentally spelled it Lloid because I didn't look up the names and thought it was like the Gyroid from Animal Crossing for some reason), a shy but intelligent young boy who has been sneaking into the factory south of town to experiment with the fireworks they have there. If you can bring him back a firework, he'll join your party and help you on your quest to clear the rockslide that is preventing the train from running. Lloyd, unfortunately, is awful, at least in the stage of the game I'm in.
So, the Mother series has this archetype in all three games. The guy who fights moreso with items and tools than he does with weapons. Jeff is a very famous example, so much so that Jeff's usage of bottle rockets made it into Smash. And then Mother 3 has Duster, who uses a variety of tools instead to inflict statues on enemies. Lloyd is more like Jeff, his whole deal is using items in his inventory, namely explosives, to gain an advantage in battles. He's the first party member who can hit multiple enemies at once and, if given the right tools, can deal massive damage to all of those enemies. Unfortunately you just don't really have access to anything good that Lloyd can use just yet, assuming there is anything Lloyd can use at all. Bottle Rockets are a now iconic weapon in the Earthbound series, dealing massive damage to groups of enemies and being the big win buttons in Jeff's inventory in Earthbound during various parts of the game. In this game they do around 20 damage. Not exactly 20 damage, they instead roll a random number that seems to be no less than 16 and no more than 24. Which not only makes them incredibly unreliable, they are also already powercrept when you get them. 20 damage is insufficient, even as a full party attack. By the time you get Lloyd, enemies are regularly beginning to have 80-100 HP, Bottle Rockets are just a waste of time.
Getting a new party member also meant that I had to grind them up. Earthbound Beginnings starts the "main" party members at level 1 regardless of where or how you get them so you probably have to grind the moment you get them. First off, just wanna say how amusing it is that Earthbound Beginnings constantly displays your EXP in your UI. It's amusing to know that there will always be around a 6000 EXP gap between Ninten and Lloyd. As far as grinding is concenred, luckily this isn't an impossibility for them to get caught up easily, the game gives you the ability to transport yourself to Magicant at any time so you can grind off the relatively easy, high EXP enemies there. It's a little funny, actually, for how infamously brutal Mother 1 is, it feels like it has a lot of little things to make it a much easier experience for the player. That being said, grinding is still super annoying. Like even if I'm one shotting every opponent in Magicant, which I am, it's still just fighting the same basic enemies over and over ad nauseum for like an hour straight while I get Lloyd up to a workable level.
The most annoying thing is that the best enemy for this, the Grouchos, are entirely luck based for how they give out EXP. The Grouchos, modeled after Groucho Marx's iconic look, are non-threatening Magicant enemies that both have low HP and low strength. They go down in one hit and deal 1 damage, but they have this gimmick where if you leave them alone they'll just leave. In doing so they will gift one member of your party randomly about 130 experience, way above what the average currently is for EXP. It's a great way to grind up your party fast, unfortunately it's also entirely random. There is no way to get the Groucho to put experience onto the party member you want it to go to, just a coin flip at two party members and a 1 in 3 at 3, which I did also get the third party member but I haven't done any grinding with her yet. It's really not difficult to see why Beginnings has numerous fan mods to make EXP grinding a lot less problematic, this game has so much of it. Again, if I didn't love basically everything else about this game I would be bouncing off of it due to the excess grinding.
There were some really cool tracks in this section of the game. The theme to the elementary school where Lloyd attends, Twinkle Elementary, was a neat track to experience. Like it has the normal chimes you associate with like a school or a clock tower, but then it also has the melody for the file select theme from the sequel in it. Was excited to hear that out of nowhere. The train theme, The Paradise Line, is such a good train theme. Very high energy, very bluesy, you can absolutely tell the impact it had on the rest of the series. I got to the town of Snowman in this section, Snowman is one of the most iconic and possibly my personal favorite Mother song. To me, Snowman is THE winter song in gaming history, there are loads of good ones but Snowman is THE track. Also now that we have party members, the "generic overworld" song has shifted from being Pollyanna to being "Bein' Friends", which isn't like "better". Pollyanna is undoubtedly the better song, but I do love Bein' Friends.
I think it's really interesting how they depict Merrysville. Like, Mother is obviously a satire of American culture but I feel like this is probably also very personal to Itoi as he grew up in the ever changing, rapidly urbanizing Japan of the post war. Whereas Podunk is a small town through and through, a place with a single shop and a small hotel and not even a proper hospital. It's very rural. Merrysville looks like it was much the same until pretty recently, when factories started popping up in the area, causing a rapid industrialization. This tiny town is suddenly being grown into a "big city", or at least the kind of smaller city where a lot of people live for work but want to get out of. And you're seeing that impact through NPC dialog. They mention that one of the corporations that has set up in their town has started buying up land en masse, including land where people work and live, to try and establish more facilities to entertain their workforce. In a surprising move they even directly reference that they're building a strip club, much to the chagrin of their citizens. Surprised Nintendo allowed that one past censors when they rereleased the game for WiiU.
It's really interesting how Beginnings has more or less already settled on what the Earthbound character archetypes are going to look like, but it doesn't balance them in a way to where they're particularly effective. Ninten is a good example of this, much like Ness and Lucas after him, Ninten is your tank. While he does decent damage in a fight, and especially in a game like this where Ninten being overleveled is almost an inevitability due to how long you go with just him and how crucial it becomes to ensure you can one shot enemies because of that, Ninten is meant to be your support. His "magic" is all healing and support. He casts shields and heals statuses and stuff like that. Ninten is supposed to be your support line. Ninten does not have an HP healing spell better than the base one at level 23, which means that his PP doesn't really do a whole lot right now? Like Ninten is one shotting most things and there's rarely a moment where he needs to set up a shield so all Ninten really does is go super aggro on opponents. His status healing PSI abilities also don't seem to be useful, though I imagine that will change? I've encountered like two statuses so far and neither of them are healed by his status healing techniques. What's more is that Ana, the offensive PSI user, COMES with the level 2 HP recovery PSI, something Ninten still has yet to learn.
1/25/26
I swear it feels like in each of these sections I don't get, like, anything done because of how much grinding I have to do. I promise I won't complain about the grinding again, it's obnoxious, we all know it. There's only so many ways I can say "I love everything about this game except for the process of actually playing it, which is often rather annoying". I will say though, it's very funny how much NES RPGs rely on grinding to pad for time. Like, this game would be 10 hours EASY if you took out all the grinding. This isn't the first or last grind session I've had that took up the majority of my play time, two of the three hours I played last night probably went to grinding. This is not the only NES RPG on my "to-play" list either so expect me to be complaining a lot about grinding again when I play Final Fantasy 1.
A lot of this session was spent just exploring the world. I think I commented on this once, but I'm actually a pretty huge fan of how open Mother 1 is. Like, the game started out "open", the town of Podunk was a very open area for the player to run around in and explore and just kind of find the walls on their own. Which I'm sure a lot of people were mad about when they first played, the fact that the game doesn't have any real guard rails up for the player to be like "you can't do this yet", but it's game design I'm rather fond of myself. Anyways, after you finish up the quest in Merrysville, the game becomes fully open to you more or less. You gain access to the train line and after that point, the world's your oyster. There are large parts of the game that you could theoretically never go to if you know what you're doing, entire party members and towns that you could entirely skip. Ana, your primary offensive PSI user, is entirely optional, at no point in the game do you have to go to her hometown of Snowman and even if you did, the quest needed to unlock her is also optional. It's so interesting how freeform Beginnings is, the Earthbound series has always been good about feeling like "the kind of adventure a kid would imagine they had" but in Beginnings it feels very grounded in a way that's like "this is just the kind of adventure a kid would have". I could imagine Mother being adapted into an 80s kids movie and becoming a massive cult classic, it's that sort of vibe.
I think it's also interesting from a historic standpoint as well. Like we now associate JRPGs with linearity, you know? JRPGs tend to be very narrative driven and their game design trends towards having either partial or full linearity. A lot of JRPGs prefer a "world map" style where there is technically an open world but it's really just a big field to roam around to simulate passing over long distances quickly. The sort of open design where you can explore the world at your own pace and tackle objectives in an order you prefer tends to instead be associated with Western RPGs, games like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. It's to the point where a lot of JRPG fans are mad in the modern day that so many JRPGs are trying this open world game design, believing that it is just a cynical ploy to appeal to Western gamers. So it's really fascinating to see these old NES RPGs where the game design is super open, that the player kind of has full reign of the world and it's just whether or not they can fight the enemies that determines whether they can progress. That these game design ideals that we now associate with entirely different cultures and thought processes were once more similar than they are different.
I think I was wrong about the "character archetypes" as I talked about them last time. While Ninten is clearly meant to be a support unit, don't get me wrong, I don't think he's necessarily meant to fulfill the same role as Ness and Lucas in the subsequent games. I think Ninten is just supposed to be your primary damage dealer who just so happens to have a lot of support options to take advantage of his high speed stat in harder battles. The more I play the game, the more clear it is that Ana is instead just intended to be your all around PSI user. She learns, like, every PSI tech in the game it feels like, be it offensive, defensive, or support. Each levelup comes with some new tool for you to use, be it a powerful offensive attack, a powerful healing spell, or some sort of really strong support tech. It's become clear that what Mother 1 wants you to do is attack with Ninten, use items with Lloyd, use PSI with Ana. Which makes sense, as far as I know Ninten never learns a really powerful offensive PSI technique like the subsequent protagonists of this series, so his primary option is just a standard attack. And his attack stat is overtuned on top of it, while enemies are finally keeping pace with it as I get further into the game, Ninten is still regularly dealing between 60 and 80 damage to enemies whose health remains in that range.
I previously mentioned how strange it was to get three melodies effectively in a row at the beginning of the game and one of my speculations did end up coming true. You do kind of get three melodies and then go like 4-8 hours without grabbing a fourth one. But once you do grab the fourth one, four, five and six are kind of all lined up for you. Granted, I have a rough idea of what I'm doing, I'm not super familiar with Beginnings like I am with Earthbound and Mother 3 but I had seen a Let's Play or two back in the day, I know the rough structure of this game even if I don't know the details. But it seems like what the game intends for you to do is "get three of the melodies, play for a while, get three more of the melodies, play for more of the game, get the last two".
The sixth melody in particular is pretty tricky to get, as it requires you to fight what is probably the hardest boss in the game: the Magicant Dragon. The Magicant Dragon lies in wait in the labyrinth that bridges Magicant with the real world, sleeping eternally until Ninten is strong enough to fight it and obtain the sixth melody. I'm honestly surprised it only took me two attempts to beat the Dragon, I'm kind of underleveled for it to be honest. I fought it more or less as soon as I was able, you're able to fight it when Ninten is level 25, I got him to 26, and Lloyd and ESPECIALLY Ana are super underleveled for it. Like if the dragon had done anything else but PK Fire turn one, which trades off damage for the ability to hit your opponents' entire party, Ana would just not have survived long enough to setup properly and mitigate the damage it otherwise would deal. To be honest, it's probably the only super interesting fight I've had so far in this game, most of the others are just like "Ninten hits hard, Lloyd hits less hard, Ana uses PK Beam to one shot". And that's only if the enemy doesn't have an instakill attack, which for some reason, one in 10 enemies have instakill attacks!!!
We kind of got back into the Earthbound tropes in this section, though again they're just a little off. Like, this section featured an abandoned town where the residents were run off by the undead, very similar to Threed in the second game. There's even a fake hotel where the owner tries to dispose of you immediately. But in this one the spirits are directly attributed to alien meddling and not something more supernatural, a Starman is pulling the strings. You go to a desert and adventure around the endless sands, but the sands are untouched, the only person living out there being a pilot who suspiciously wants you to get rid of his definitely not stolen tank for him. There's a secret civilization comprised of bizarre characters who speak in weird ways, but in this game they aren't Mr. Saturns, who haven't been created yet. No, they're monkeys. Just an underground civilization of monkeys. Which ALSO harkens to a trope in later Earthbound games, wherein there's a cave system inhabited by intelligent monkeys, but these monkeys are also wrong because they always lie and don't want anything from you.
The more I play Beginnings, the more I'm like "this might actually be my favorite soundtrack of the three". Like, it doesn't sound the best and the other two probably have more tracks I'm passionate about, but genuinely this is what Mother sounds like. This is Earthbound. These songs are primitive, don't get me wrong. And they don't always sound the best because of the hardware. But this soundtrack is masterful. I'm glad most, if not all, of the songs that originate from this game have gotten remade in later entries. Yucca Desert is an all timer, an iconic desert theme that made it's way into Earthbound, complete with a little radio effect. Airplane Ride is a classic, a very 80s rock inspired tune that really feels like you're flying above the ground in a small plane. Monkey Cave, though, was such a wild track to hear. Sometimes when you're playing Mother 1, you can feel like you've stepped an alternate universe. So many things are like Mother 2/Earthbound but they're all just somewhat wrong in some way. An uncanny Peaceful Rest Valley, if you will. Monkey Cave sounds like "Saturn Valley but wrong" and it's one of the most uncanny valley moments I've had in this game.
1/27/26
I made it to LA baby!!! Literally, the last town in this game is called "Ellay". It's very funny that Itoi's opinion of Los Angeles is apparently "it's a city that's ruled by gangs where the cops are corrupt and ineffectual". To the point where if a grown woman offers to buy a minor a drink, the cops arrest the minor, for seemingly no other reason than wanting to steal their cool stuff! I have to wonder if Itoi had ever actually been to LA before making this game or if he got this depiction from, like. Movies and TV shows. There were a lot of depictions of LA in the 80s especially that depicted the city as grimy and violent. Which I guess wasn't inaccurate given what would happen there in the early 90s when all that tension in the city came to a head, but like. It was definitely exaggerated to essentially fearmonger to middle America.
But before you go to Ellay, you have to go to Youngtown. Youngtown is a town we've heard a lot about throughout the adventure. Various NPCs have talked about trying to venture onto Youngtown as their friends and relatives have, previously, headed off to Youngtown as it's the last train stop before you get to Ellay, only to never be heard from again. This is the reason Ana had joined us on our journey, her mother had left for Youngtown and had disappeared shortly thereafter. When we arrive in Youngtown, we find out why pretty quickly. All the adults in the village have been abducted by mysterious ships that come from the giant mountain to the East. The children have been left to fend for themselves, trying to develop a sense of normalcy by mimicking their parents' jobs and roles while constantly breaking down from how scared and alone they are. A lot of children have taken to wandering the streets, crying for their parents, and those that are trying to keep it together are still like "I'm so lonely, please come by more so I have someone to talk to". Except for the guy who took over running the town store. He seems to be doing great!
The song that plays in Youngtown, by the way? One of my absolute favorite Mother songs in general. I know I said that about Snowman too and probably a hundred songs in Mother 3 but this is really high up there. The Youngtown theme is the theme that plays in Earthbound when you enter Paula's home and she's not there. It's one of the most beautiful pieces of music in this series to me, it's unnerving and hopeless but so mystical. It's the exact perfect theme for "something very strange and potentially supernatural has went on and really imparts a sense of "this is bigger than your adventure, this is about the fate of the world". I don't know if anyone reading this is familiar with the Rock Candy albums, they were Mother fan albums back in the day that you could download off Starmen.net which featured loads of interesting and amazing Earthbound fan covers. Shoutouts to Stephen Georg and his evergreen classic I Am Earthbound. Anyways, I loved the Rock Candy albums so much back in the day and one of my favorite pieces from that collection was a cover of the Youngtown/Paula theme, PSI Piano Omega. It's so beautiful, I love it so much. Still sad Rock Candy 6 never materialized but like, most of the core people from Starmen had moved on by that point I feel. Shout outs to the community.
As we are approaching the end game, I feel like combat is finally becoming interesting. Like, a big problem with how Beginnings is structured is that you spend so much time in the early game leveling up Ninten and accomplishing your goals there that for the next like 50% of the game, you are just going to breeze through it. Even moreso because enemies pose no threat to you, you have access to the best defensive equipment in the game once you reach Magicant. Ninten is probably going to one shot everything at least until you make it to Duncan's Factory, there are very few enemies that require any actual strategy. And even past that, you're going to be running into a lot of enemies that, thanks to your expanded party, still go down in one or two turns with basic attacks. Namely because there are very few encounters for the first 75% of the game that even contain multiple enemies. But as I approach the endgame, I'm encountering more enemies with interesting stat layouts and party compositions to where I'm like "okay, turn one, Ninten sets up our defenses while Ana goes for PSI damage and Lloyd uses his Plasma beam to get off some beam damage, turn two I attack with Ninten to clean up the HP of whatever wasn't finished off turn one and then finish off the remaining enemies". It's not AMAZING, the gameplay is still the worst part about this game by a mile, but it's something.
We also received the second third party member. Mother 1's party is a party of three, Ninten, Lloyd, and Ana, but there are technically four party members as, in the endgame, Teddy joins you. Teddy is the leader of the gang in Ellay and took great offense to you roughing up his guys. After a brief back and forth in a boss fight you can't actually lose, he joins up with the party, telling Lloyd to take a breather as Teddy needs to go up to the mountain, Mt. Itoi, to seek revenge for his murdered parents. Teddy is broken! Teddy is so incredibly strong that once he joins the party and you equip him with the best stuff possible, he's probably one-shotting whatever you throw him at. A big part of this is that, unlike the other party members, you don't receive at level 1 and need to train him up. You receive him at level 18, already kind of on pace with the rest of your party. And with naturally high strength and speed, he becomes the one shot king either out the gate or after a few level ups. It's actually kind of nice QoL, you can, theoretically, beat this game at very low levels aside from Ninten if you wanted to avoid the process of grinding, and Teddy just lets you cover your weaknesses if you're doing that. He's just a big ol' beatstick.
Ninten finally learned Lifeup Beta!!! PSI techniques are wild in this game. Like I'm fascinated by how they function and how the characters get them through level up. Ana didn't get the ability to use PK Fire until she was like level 20 or something crazy like that. PK Fire Alpha is a useless PSI ability that deals ~20 damage to all foes. PK Freeze Gamma, the penultimate upgrade of Freeze, doesn't actually deal damage, what it does instead is reduce the target to 1 HP. It does this whether or not the enemy has already taken damage as well, meaning that because Ana goes after Ninten, it's useless in a lot of one-enemy scenarios as it would just be "Ninten hitting only to have progress undone because it's being set to one anyways". Ninten, the "healer" of the group, doesn't learn a proper healing spell until like ~level 30. The game design is just exceedingly weird and while it definitely feels intentional with its quirks, it doesn't always make for the best experience. I'm glad that later Earthbound games really refined these ideas.
I am very close to finishing the game. I have just entered Mt. Itoi, the game's final dungeon, and I find it doubtful that I will have to split it up into two play sessions. So, as I typically do with the "penultimate chapter" of these gaming diaries, time to post my sort of overall feelings about this one. In many ways, Earthbound Beginnings was a delight to play. As I mentioned in entry 2 of this one, as a fan of this series, Earthbound Beginnings is a magical game for me. It feels a bit like coming home, Beginnings is seeing this franchise I love so much at its origin point. Unrefined, but still every bit of itself. The music, the presentation, the themes. It's all stuff I do love and have loved for many years. It's also just an awful video game. I will not mince words with you, for as much as I love about this game, it's like genuinely terrible. Poorly balanced, poorly paced, uninteresting gameplay, insane encounter rates. It's an archaic NES RPG, and I can totally understand why so many people just skip it outright. When it comes time to rate, I will be very kind to it because I've adored playing this. But I just wanna be clear, this game is awful. See y'all next time for the finale!
1/28/26
So uh. I'm emotional now. Look, I've made no pretense that I am being overly kind to this game because of how I much I love this series. I am being overly generous to it, I am too emotionally attached to judge it fairly. But y'all don't understand what the Eight Melodies do to me. This song is ingrained into my soul at this point. Finally forming this song after an entire game of hearing it bit by bit, here and there, it's just. I can't help but cry. I'm sorry that I love the Mother trilogy. It as I said forever ago, "yeah, the encounter rate is ridiculous and enemies get too many crits but then I get out of battle and hear Pollyanna and I remember this series is perfect". I'm apologizing more to myself right now, by the way, I know you, dear reader, don't care if I'm an Earthbound shill. I'm more mad at me for always being like "if the game's story is good but its gameplay is bad then it's just a really bad game and/or a really weird book" and now here I am having feelings about this objectively terrible NES RPG from 40 years ago.
I'm honestly starting to wonder if, at a certain point, Itoi was just like. "You know what, we screwed up, our game is too hard, let's just make the coolest enemy designs possible because our player is just going to run from everything anyways." Mt. Itoi is grueling, it's the first time I would say this game's infamous reputation for being brutal is founded. Between the bottom of the mountain and the top, enemies start snowballing out of control in difficulty. It's to the point where, by the time you reach the peak, you are fighting enemies that have the potential to one shot you if you're at level cap. They even give you the Ultimate Weapons for this game all together just so the player has some sort of safety net, even though giving Ana any weapon at this point is little more than a funny joke. On top of that, you have to climb the mountain twice, once with the very powerful Teddy who can split the difference for you and deal massive damage to opponents, but then a second time with Lloyd who just, frankly, can't do anything. Lloyd might be the worst party member in the entire series, even moreso than like. Salsa from Mother 3. And like, there's not really any reason to level yourself up other than to just get ever PSI technique because the final boss is, honestly, kind of a joke.
Oh also Teddy just straight up dies. Not really, but he does go into a coma after a certain point in the story and that's why you have to take Lloyd back up the mountain. There's a very interesting tune the game plays both at Teddy falling into a coma and later on when you reach the peak of the mountain and find the Gravestone of... I think the game implies it's Ninten's great-grandfather George's but it makes more sense for it to be Maria's. Simply titled Tombstone, it may sound very familiar to Earthbound fans but in an entirely different context. It sounds eerie now. Sad. Like the kind of song you would hear while mourning or reflecting on the dead. It's a bit like how the core theme of Mother 3, the "Love Theme" that plays in various contexts, is kind of a reinterpretation of Eight Melodies. The music in this series is so good and so impactful, I adore it.
It's unsurprising to me that they do try to put in a romance between Ninten and Ana right at the end. Again, in another way Earthbound is sort of a remake of Mother 1, Ana, like Paula, has developed very strong feelings for the protagonist despite only having met them recently. The reason being that, due to their psychic powers manifesting so much sooner than Ninten/Ness', they've spent their entire lives plagued with visions of the boy they would eventually save the world with. And like, especially in Mother 1, it makes sense to do this, this is way more of a traditional RPG where the protagonist isn't a character in their own right but rather a blank slate for the protagonist to put their self into. But also like, this does just come out of nowhere. Even among the scope of NES romances, which are all bad due to how primitive storytelling has to be, this is a bad one. Ana is on this journey for her own goals, she does not have a specific reason to latch onto Ninten, it's just. You get to Mt. Itoi and Ana is suddenly like "I love you and have loved you since you first entered my dreams". If anything I thought that it would end up that Pippi, Ninten's neighbor he rescues back in Podunk, would be Ninten's love interest at the end, since at least those two have that "saving her life" connection. Oh well, at least the song that plays, Fallin' Love, is lovely!
I cannot believe that they just give Ana an instantkill move. Once again, the game balance in this game is actually insane. PK Freeze Gamma, one of Ana's oddest moves, is already a move that reduces your opponent's HP to 1. This is very powerful, obviously, but not the most useful because, at least at the time Ana learned it, she was in a party with two people who were faster than her. She would just be setting up for next turn. Thankfully, Lloyd rejoins the party so that solves that issue in theory but by that time you've learned PK Beam Gamma, a move that just kills any enemy that isn't immune to Beam damage. This does make Ana the "win condition" of the party, mind, and keeping her PP up is a main objective of the end game. It's just weird. Looking at PSI I didn't get too, Ana just will learn a move that instakills all enemies if I wanted to grind her up that much? Handy, why is the game designed like this?
So, as you may expect, once you get to the top of Mt. Itoi, a lot of the questions this game has produced get answered. You reach a lake at one point, despite the aliens' attempts at stopping you, and by boarding your grandparents' boat to head to the center of the lake, you find their underwater lab. In it, there's a massive robot named EVE, who explains that she was built by George to combat the evil alien Giegue and to protect the chosen one, Ninten, on his journey. In the two years that George and Maria disappeared, they encountered the evil alien Giegue, who held them for two years at the end of the universe. Eventually George would escape and, knowing that the alien would eventually find him and his family again, built EVE as a measure to defeat the alien. Unfortunately, Giegue was keen to their plans, and EVE would end up being destroyed by his own robot, the two taking each other out and leaving the children helpless and alone at the top of Mt. Itoi. EVE's last parting gift being the seventh melody, allowing the children to continue their true goal.
Upon receiving the eighth melody from George's spirit at the top of the mountain, we return to Magicant for the final time. We must go to the Queen, Mary, and finally restore what she has lost. Unsurprisingly, Queen Mary of Magicant is actually our Great-Grandmother Maria. While George was able to make it back home, Maria got caught in between dimensions, attempting to set things in motion to stop Giegue. Her body fell into an eternal slumber, a state of both waking and sleep, and from it spawned forth the magical realm of Magicant. This is why Magicant was seemingly created to protect Ninten, to make him feel safe and loved, it's a reflection of the love Maria herself has for her family that she never got to show them in life. Her soul, though, scattered across the world, finding its home in various melodies hidden throughout. The Eight Melodies, once returned to Maria, restore her memories and awaken her finally, allowing her to rest after eight decades of being trapped in limbo. But before she does, before she moves on and reunites with George, she tells us a story.
When George and Maria were sent to the end of the universe, they did indeed meet Giegue. But unlike what EVE implied, Giegue was not some sort of horrible alien conqueror. Not yet, at least. No, Giegue was a baby. Maria mentions specifically how happy he was, how his adorable little tail would wag. Seeing the alien conqueror like a small animal to be loved and cherished. But darkness entered his heart. Loneliness. He was a sole being at the end of the universe and eventually, George and Maria would have to go home, have to return to their family. He grew bitter and resentful of this "real world", and wished to keep George and Maria to himself. And that is why he has arrived on Earth these 80 years later. He wants to kidnap or eradicate Earth's populace out of his resentment for their love for each other. Love he only had for a fleeting instant. With Maria awoken, Magicant disappears, and she imparts us with the final weapon we need to defeat Giegue. The lullaby she used to sing to him when he was a baby.
Equipped with out final gift from our great-grandparents, we enter the cave where Giegue has been hiding this entire time. Bypassing a room full of all the people Giegue has kidnapped, including Ana's mother and all the adults from Youngtown, we reach the end of the pathway and find Giegue's mothership. The alien steps out of it, existing within a giant life support pod, and enters battle with us. In true Mother fashion, his attacks are incomprehensible, so powerful and so metaphysical that our protagonists cannot even begin to understand what they are. It is here he tells his own version of his past with George and Maria. Giegue paints them as liars and thieves, saying that their love was simply a ploy to steal his secrets, exploit his technology. His heart is so infected by his bitterness, by his resentment, that he no longer remembers the kindness he was shown. The love he experienced. But some part of him still considers them his family. In all his want to eradicate humanity, he cannot bring himself to hurt Ninten outright, hurt this boy that he considers family. He offers him a choice, join him and conquer the universe by his side. Ninten, unsurprisingly, refuses, and Giegue flies into a rage.
Unable to hurt him and with our backs against the wall, the party only has one option: to sing. To make Giegue listen to the lullaby that used to soothe him so long ago, to feel Maria's love for him envelop him. It's a long fight, he interrupts you before you finish the song many times. His own hatred fighting the battle against Maria's love directly. He becomes more erratic and violent, devolving into incomprehensible screams as he loses his battle against Maria's love for him. In the end, the lullaby soothes the conqueror. For a brief moment, Giegue allows himself to be wrapped in that warmth that he had so long ago. But before he can allow himself to be taken by it fully, Giegue retreats, promising one day, one fateful day, he shall return to have his vengeance on this world of love. Giegue flies off to the far reaches of time and space, wherein he will fester in his hatred until he becomes Giygas. But for now, the day is saved. Everyone returns to their normal lives, Ninten, Lloyd, Ana keep in touch, and the world seems to go back to normal. That is until a post credits stinger where our father, who had been talking to us this entire time through the phone, calls us with "important news", setting up a sequel that will never technically come to pass as the actual sequel is effectively in a new universe.
I really liked Earthbound Beginnings. Is it a good video game? Absolutely not. It has so many problems, a lot of them due to its age but even more due to just transparently bad game design. Like a lot of what is wrong with Beginnings does come from it being an NES RPG, lots of padding, lots of grinding, not enough structure to point the player in a proper direction. Final Fantasy 1 was an NES game and I don't Final Fantasy 1 has aged especially well either but a player who really likes RPGs will be able to pick up Final Fantasy 1 and still get a lot out of it. Because despite its age, it's still a good game. Beginnings doesn't have that, the gameplay is just strictly very bad. But as an Earthbound fan, as someone for who this trilogy means a lot, this was masterful. It made me happy, made me emotional. It felt like coming home. This game, this trilogy means a lot to me. I will never tell you, you should play Earthbound Beginnings. But I will always tell you that I really liked it, and if the gameplay was just a little more interesting or better designed, this would probably sit with its brethren in my favorite games of all time list. 8.1/10
