Protect Trans Kids

where nothing you know.....

is ever going to make sense again.

(With reference to this post here.)

The big-name marketing engine and where it happens to be situated in time is certainly a big part of it, but something that's easy to overlook about EarthBound if you're not familiar with the timeline of console generations is that EarthBound is so frequently name-checked by weird meta retro games because EarthBound is, itself, a weird meta retro game – one of the very first of its kind.

It's funny to think of a Super Nintendo game from 1994 as "retro" from the perspective of 2022 – isn't that just what games were like back then? The thing is: no, they weren't. Most Super Nintendo RPGs did not look like EarthBound.

A big part of EarthBound's aesthetic boils down to juxtaposing current gen flash and spectacle (understanding that "current gen" means "for 1994") with deliberately shitty graphics and audio and mechanics that are janky and counterintuitive in a calculated way to create a very specific experience.

This is apparent in everything from the old school pick-a-verb menu interface that you literally never have to use because the game also has a context-sensitive action button, to the soundtrack's whiplash-inducing transitions between NES-style bleeps and FM synth (wait for it at about 0:53), to the American localisation's script being a blatant spoof of the frequently genuinely terrible translations of the game's NES predecessors.

Plus, the weird meta stuff that modern retro RPGs are known for? EarthBound already has that. It's famous for being one of the first console RPGs where diegetically acknowledging the human player as a separate entity from the player character is an explicit plot point. It even has a clever sleight of hand where it asks the player to fill out a fake consumer survey partway through the game so that it can drop your real name into dialogue later on, prefiguring the way that later games would lift information from your Steam profile to similar effect.