Design Journal #1 – Why I Love Games

    There are a lot of games I could talk about for this assignment, and really no one option that, by itself, fully encapsulates everything I love about games and every type of game I love. In lieu of any "perfect" choice, I'll just talk about a particular game that's been near and dear to my heart for over ten years at this point.

    EarthBound Beginnings, known in Japan as MOTHER, and by fans prior to its official 2015 release outside of Japan as EarthBound Zero.

    Originally released in 1989 in Japan for the Famicom, and slated for a North American release a couple years later until the projected ROI on those plans was deemed unfavorable and it was canceled despite the localized game software itself being fully complete, EarthBound Beginnings, as it would come to be known when it made it to the Wii U Virtual Console outside of Japan in 2015, is a turn-based RPG and the first installment of Shigesato Itoi's legendary MOTHER trilogy, succeeded by 1994's EarthBound for the SNES and 2006's infamously, memetically Japan-exclusive MOTHER 3 for the Game Boy Advance.

    In comparison to its successors, EarthBound Beginnings is often rather overlooked. The series hasn't yet implemented its signature twists on RPG gameplay—field sprite-based enemy encounters rather than random ones, and the scrolling HP odometers for party members that tick down and up in real time rather than deducting or adding HP all at once, giving the player the opportunity to save a party member from a lethal attack with quick enough strategizing—and Beginnings is, well, a NES JRPG. This means that in-game direction isn't as plentiful or explicit as what has come to be customary, the player is expected to do some level grinding to supplement the EXP gained from simply traveling between main objectives, and "cutscenes" for the story are few and far between (though not entirely absent).

    Despite this, the game is quite ambitious in a number of ways. While the "in-universe" space isn't particularly big for the genre, taking up only one fictional section of the United States, plus a much smaller enigmatic wonderland called Magicant that rests at the heart of the game's story, the actual play area is stunningly large for the NES. While not all space in the game map is accessible during normal play, it sits at a whopping 16384 × 14336 pixels when exported as one image at full size, or 1024 × 896 16×16-pixel tiles, to put it in terms more relevant to gameplay.

    Much more key to the game's identity, however, is its writing. EarthBound Beginnings is one of the earliest examples of an RPG putting emotional resonance at the forefront of its priorities, which shines through in nearly every aspect of the text. Much of the NPC dialogue in the game is written not merely to deliver hints or exposition, but also to express the personalities of these random, oft-unnamed inhabitants of this fictional world. There are silly little jokes, musings on the nature of the RPG genre as it existed circa-1989, and even some social commentary in there, all delivered with warmth and sincerity even when things get a bit tongue-in-cheek. Even the final boss battle of the game is built around that priority of emotional resonance, which I'll touch on more in a bit, but it isn't a standard fight. The game's lead antagonist cannot be defeated through violence at all, and instead must be made to stop fighting via different means.

    Another interesting quality of EarthBound Beginnings relative to its successors is its nonlinearity. It's not entirely open-world—there are multiple instances of objectives you strictly need to accomplish to gain access to later parts of the game world—but you have a surprising amount of freedom to vary up the order in which you do things.

    At the beginning of the game, you name four characters: the lead protagonist, who initially had no "canon" name but has since come to be known as Ninten, the socially-awkward but brilliant Lloyd, the kindhearted and pious PSI prodigy Ana, and gang leader and physical juggernaut Teddy. The way things are "supposed" to go with these party members is that you start out with just Ninten, recruit Lloyd into your party once you reach the second town, grab Ana on your way out east to grab the fourth of the game's eight main plot tokens, swap Teddy into your team in place of Lloyd once you reach the final city, and then swap Lloyd back into your party after Teddy is injured in the game's last area.

    You don't actually have to do things this way.

    Strictly-speaking, aside from Ninten, who you start the game with and who cannot ever leave the party, Lloyd is the only other member of the renameable four you even need to recruit at all. His skills with technology are needed to clear out a landslide blocking the train tracks north, as well as to gain access to a laboratory late in the game where you find the holder of the seventh plot token. Ana and Teddy can both be skipped entirely. It's possible, through various shenanigans, to finish the game with Teddy rather than Lloyd in your party (although Lloyd still needs to join you for a bit to do his stuff), or even with just Ninten and Ana, or just Ninten by himself.

    Let's circle back and talk about those plot tokens, though. I've deliberately avoided mentioning what they actually are, because it's actually really neat, and I wanted to give them their own paragraph. Rather than collecting some manner of important objects or even abilities, the player collects eight measures of a fragmented lullaby, known in its totality, fittingly, as simply the "Eight Melodies". These melodies are obtained in a variety of contexts throughout the game, and it's more like a treasure hunt within the game world than going through a dungeon for each one. Only half of the Melodies even have boss fights tied to them, and the of those is the super-easy tutorial boss while the last is essentially a scripted fight you pretty much can't lose.

    The Melodies are not contained within physical objects of any sort. Whenever you find one, it plays with a unique chiptune instrument crafted to reflect the source it's coming from in-game, and you're told that "Ninten remembered the tune." There's an item you can obtain in the aforementioned Magicant, the Ocarina of Hope, that you can use outside of battle to play the pieces of the Eight Melodies you've found in order, just to listen to them and hear what you've found so far put together. You never need to even get this item, much less use it; the two instances where you need to play the full melody in order to complete the game happen the same whether you have it or not, presumably being sung vocally by the main party rather than being played on the ocarina. It exists strictly for the player's benefit. The Eight Melodies are not just a set of little music note check marks on the status screen; they're real pieces of a real song that you, the real-life you playing the game, can learn and remember, even if you still need to collect all of them in the game in order to complete it.

    These Melodies are also key to winning that final boss fight I mentioned earlier. The last enemy is an alien named Giegue (later localized as Giygas in EarthBound; the name is the same in Japanese) of an advanced race whose mastery of both technology and psychic powers far eclipses humanity's. His attacks are so far beyond your level that the battle narration simply reports that "The form of Giegue's attack was inexplicable!" as heavy damage is dealt to the whole party. Giegue has no battle theme, only a constant, droning ringing noise briefly drowned out by the low, backwards-sounding hum that accompanies his attacks. The atmosphere of the fight is tense, like waiting with bated breath for something terrible to happen. Giegue cannot be defeated through violence, but there is one way to stop him: The Eight Melodies; the lullaby Ninten's great-grandmother Maria used to sing to him as a child to calm him when he was placed in her care. She loved him like he was her own child, and he her as his own mother.

    It takes several turns—eleven uses of the new "Sing" battle command, if I remember correctly—but the song eventually fully breaks Giegue's will to fight. He calls off the invasion of Earth and withdraws his forces, and the game is over. The world is saved not through superior martial prowess, as is the case in many games, but by reminding the final boss of the love and compassion that still exists in his own heart, even now, after decades without the human woman who nurtured those seeds within him.

    I haven't particularly touched on the music itself, but the game's soundtrack is superb, and is used to great effect to heighten the story and atmosphere. There are two separate adventuring themes, one for when Ninten is by himself, a somewhat-melancholy track titled "Pollyanna", and another, more cheerful tune for when you have at least one buddy with you, fittingly called "Bein' Friends". There was even a vocal album released in Japan, featuring a collection of arrangements of tracks from the game played on real instruments and given English-language lyrics, including all three specific songs I've mentioned as of now. You can listen to it here; it's really quite lovely.

    The game's nonlinearity, the warmth and sincerity, and the massive world all add up for me into something way greater than the sum of its parts to me. As Pitchfork puts it in his excellent writeup on the trilogy on socksmakepeoplesexy.net, "Almost every console RPG made during the 1980s uses the familiar zoomed-out world map; the decision to exclude it from MOTHER must have been made very deliberately. Rural America is not a flat, colored carpet that Ninten and his friends march across − it is something that looms over and envelopes them. [...] Itoi presents us with a mundane world rendered massive and mysterious by Ninten's vantage point. He recalls our mutually-shared (but none precisely the same) memories of a world that was too new to us to be known, and too large to comprehend − the world which we saw at the age when we had stopped believing in monsters but still remembered our fears keenly enough to wonder what might lay just out of our sight." Have you ever been out walking, or driving, or riding in a train, looked at the world around you, and seen someplace that inexplicably caught your attention? Maybe a building, a grove or a tree in an odd place, a big lot you're not sure of the purpose of... Someplace you look at and wonder "If I were to go there, really explore that spot, what might I find? What other such places and mysteries and discoveries are out there in the nooks and crannies of the world around me?" It's that sort of feeling the game evokes in me as I wander through its massive fields, cities, and hillsides. In that respect, it shares something with early Pokémon titles, although it doesn't achieve it through quite the same means.

    Combine this with the warmth and love felt through details like the finale, the fact that Ninten and Ana's parents, as well as the mysterious world of Magicant, always greet the heroes with compassion and healing, and many other touches, the game takes on such a fundamentally hopeful, boundless tone to me. The world is a vast and mysterious place. At times you will be faced with trials so great they may as well be from another world altogether, but courage, friendship, and love will connect you to others around you and light up the dark, even in the heart of one who has strayed so far from that light.

    Strictly in terms of gameplay, EarthBound Beginnings is a pretty standard RPG for its era. It's not bad in that respect, but it doesn't particularly stand out, either. I have a hard time deciding whether or not to recommend it, since you really have to be amenable to or at least patient with its "NES JRPG-isms" to get the most out of it, but it truly does have one of the biggest, warmest hearts and most imagination-tickling atmospheres of any game I've played for that system, or at all. If the pros sound intriguing and the cons like non-dealbreakers, I would absolutely recommend giving the game a shot. I believe it's currently legally available via the NES Nintendo Classics app available through a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. To all those who decide to try it, I sincerely hope you enjoy, and get even a fraction of what I did out of it! To put it in internet parlance, EarthBound Beginnings rewired my brain and expanded what feels possible in video games to me, and I don't regret playing and falling in love with it for a moment.