EarthBound is an RPG about RPGs and what makes them such fun to play.
Right, right − a game about games. That's what everyone in the high-brow game design business is doing today. But EarthBound is close to twenty years old now. Itoi and APE were doing meta before the word entered the video gaming vernacular.
It succeeds so brilliantly because this isn't immediately apparent. Unlike a wide swath of the contemporary indie-meta crop, a player can enjoy and understand EarthBound without ever noticing or thinking about the game's sharp sense of self-awareness. It doesn't insist on being read of a self-aware text. All of the "meta" content is so seamlessly integrated with everything else that it can be easy not to be conscious of it. Moreover, it's not trying to impress anyone. Itoi didn't designEarthBound to show off how clever he was; nor was he ever one of those GAMES ARE VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS types. I think he was simply fascinated by the peculiar experience of the RPG trip and wrote the game to express and explore his fascination in a playful way.
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There are the innumerable minor bits: the sign asking people not to trample the flowers that can only be read when Ness is positioned right in a flowerbed. The jokes on the player involving a picture postcard in the Happy Happy Village, a house for sale in Onett, and a device called Super Orange Machine. All those little instances where the narration calls attention to what's going on and seems to react to it along with the player. And there are the bigger and more obvious instances: Buzz Buzz's frankly telling the player that Ness's journey will be pretty much the same as any RPG hero's arc. Frank Fly congratulating the player on reaching the game's first milestone (beating the first real boss, Frank Fly) and encouraging her to keep going. The game's heart-to-heart "chats" with the player in Saturn Valley and Tenda Village; Brick Road's meditations on dungeon design; Dr. Andonuts's insistence that the player press the button to take the Phase Distorter into the past; the return journey remaining in the player's control.
And of course there's the fourth wall-breaking final battle. Remember the movie The Neverending Story? The whole purpose of Atreyu's adventure in the book is to reach the heart of the boy reading the book, whose emotional investment in the "imaginary" world within its pages is the only thing that can save it. InEarthBound − well, what needs to be added but the oft-pointed out fact that the first time player will almost certainly be praying for the heroes' victory even before the game mentions it?
Beyond this, EarthBound really isn't "about" anything that any other 16-bit RPG isn't. It's about another hero's journey through another imaginary world, and about the people he meets, the struggles he pushes through along the way, and his return home when his work is done. That's pretty much all console RPGs are ever about, and EarthBound is no exception. But the difference is in the details, and we know that its architects pay very close attention to those. Despite (or because of?) its meandering pace, relative lack of drama, and cutesy pseudo-Peanuts aesthetic, EarthBound's trip is more interesting, funnier, stranger, sadder, and memorable than the rest of the 16-bit crop.
Games aren't serious business, but sometimes a good game is precisely what we need.
What Itoi gets is that the game (any game) is a means to an end. What matters ultimately is what it makes the player think, and more importantly, how the experience of playing it makes her feel. Your RPG can have a thunderous orchestral soundtrack, a thousand bonus quests, multimillion dollar graphics, and thirty hours of voice acted cutscene drama, but if all of this fails to tickle the player's brain and emotions, you're not doing your job correctly. EarthBound was designed with this result in mind; it plays around with what RPGS essentially do in order to do it more effectively. (What do RPGs do? Well − they make a world come alive in a player's mind while placing the player in an active role within that world. That's as good a guess as I got.)
