After playing some games I'd never played before recently, I went back to playing games from my childhood (but in Japanese this time) with Mother 2! Earthbound was a game I played a TON growing up and always really loved. It's been a good few years since I played it last though, so I was excited to see the original version's text and get a new perspective on the overall quality of the game. It took me about 2 and a half days, so I'd reckon about 25 hours in total (I don't think the Wii U counts your play time for software like the Wii did?), and I didn't need to use a guide or anything because I just already knew my way through the game from how much I played it when I was little XD
So the story of Earthbound/Mother 2 is one that I've always felt is more the sum of its parts rather than the whole. The overall narrative is a story about how you are always ultimately your worst enemy, and that only by overcoming your inner reservations and inhibitions will you be able to become something larger than yourself. The four main characters of the story, Ness, Paula, Jeff, and Poo, are very light on characterization and have a very small amount of dialogue between them. Ness is definitely supposed to be a stand-in for the player character, but the whole party effectively plays this role with how little character they each have to them. However, there is SOME character there, and especially with how other characters talk to Ness, talk him up as this big figure of prophecy and this chosen child, and with how familiarly his friends and family talk to him, I don't think they do a very good job of making a "player avatar" character. Ness lies somewhere in-between a player avatar and a character of his own, and I believe this ultimately really undermines the "you're your own worst enemy" message for the player that the game ultimately has. However, where Mother 2's writing really shines are in the myriad of vignettes that you encounter as you go through the story. So many colorful characters of roles both big and small, as bombastic as the silly (and VERY obviously Blues Brothers-inspired in the Japanese version) Runaway Five, to just simple NPC's walking around town with a quirky line to say. Mother 2 is packed with wacky and irreverent humor and charm that will turn of some, certainly, but will be very quickly endearing to others... at least in the first half. By the time you finish up Fourside, the story really gets bogged down in the overall plot of Ness being this chosen child, and the game's second half is far less interesting than the first. I remembered it being this way before I did this playthrough, and this replay reconfirmed that opinion. However, I will definitely add that the Japanese original does have a sense of humor and charm to it that the English version approaches but does not surpass. The only exception being enemy names, which are often quite dull in Japanese (the main wordplay around them often amounting to "it's an English word and/or an oddly specific description in Japanese") compared to the puns in English. The gameplay of Mother 2 is really a pretty shameless copy of Dragon Quest, although there are MANY other beloved RPGs of this era, as with the 8-bit era, that that description can also be applied to. The way every character has their own inventory, each one fills a kind of specific role in a balance of different kinds of magic or special tool items, the first-person battle perspectives. The only truly remarkable innovation of the combat system is the way your health scrolls up and down instead of moving all at once, so a dying ally is actually in the process of dying (or healing), so can be saved with a heal before they actually get KO'd. Mother 2 is very much a sister game to Far East of Eden as far as its cultural memory goes: a DQ clone whose sense of humor and irreverent use of setting made it an enduring bit of culture among Japanese gamers. Compared to something like FF6, another 1994 SFC RPG, the UI is honestly really fluid and brilliant, and Mother 2 is a fantastic first RPG for people new to the genre (something it succeeds at little better than Mario RPG, imo). This was the first time I'd played through the game really utilizing the L-button as a catch-all inspection and talking button and that is just SUCH a clever bit of design I can't get over it. Inventory management between party members can be a bit of a chore at times, but the menus move so quick that it really just goes as slowly as you'll make it go. The game has some pacing and difficulty curve issues, with some bosses early in the game being very hard where most bosses are quite easy, and some later game areas like Magicant that force you to use only one party member yet again remind you just how not-fun having only one party member is just for the sake of a neat setting to explore. The game also has some points where the signposting just is not very good. I used to get stuck in Fourside ALL the time as a kid because there are just suddenly so many dialogue flags you need to trigger before plot elements can progress. Using the Hint Shop and just talking to everyone you see will get you past most of these, but not all. The game's signposting is about as good as it could be for 1994, but it's still rough enough in retrospect that it's worth mentioning here. Verdict: Recommended. Mother 2/Earthbound is a game that a lot of people don't like, and I think that's a totally fair attitude to have towards the game. It has some pacing issues and the writing really doesn't carry the whole way through like it really needs to, so only the competent yet fairly bog-standard combat system is really there for a good portion of the game. There is little on the SNES like it, for sure, but I think a lot of this game's appeal lives and dies by its writing, and if you aren't captured within the first few hours/areas, chances are this is a game you're gonna have a hard time pushing through to the end on. It's a game that has a really unique and shining personality, especially among RPGs that made it to the West for that era, and there is a lot to enjoy if you're into what the game is delivering on.
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Another Final Fantasy game done, and another one I'd never beaten before~. Over the course of like 27 hours, I played through this in Japanese on my Famicom Mini. I will be the first to admit, I think I abused save states in this game more than any other I think I've ever played (granted I've played very very few games with save states) because this game can be a proper mean ol' bugger at times. Between that and fighting the with crappy controller on the Famicom Mini, this is definitely a game I don't see myself ever revisiting on this hardware, but it was still one I enjoyed a lot more than I didn't.
FF3 starts out with 4 unnamed orphans stumbling into a cave to find the wind crystal that vanished in a big earthquake, and it propels them into a fateful quest to save the world. I named mine after people who voted for me to play the game on the RB Slack chat (Mr. Popo, Flake, and Marurun) as well as Gunstar, since I needed a 4th member XD. FF3 doesn't have named characters, no, but they're kind of a group character unto themselves. Your party leader will talk and the characters will refer to you as the heroes of light, but there's not a great amount of characterization present. Characters are almost entirely one-dimensional and just there to move the story along, but it's an entertaining story that does the job more than well enough. Honestly, the most interesting part was seeing just how much DNA of this overall plot is present in FFIV and V (and VI to a somewhat lesser extent) with how those two games also take the idea of world crystals being taken/controlled by some otherworldly malevolent demon thing (and V of course going as far as to also link its world crystals to jobs the party gets). More of an evolution on FF1's job choices than FFV's full blown job system, FF3 has jobs your party can switch between to give them different base stats that effectively just stack a modifier on top of their existing level stats. The only real difference your job makes upon level up is how your max HP is affected (life-long mages will have less health than life-long fighters, for example). You can only change jobs so fast though, as it uses a capacity resource that you build up as you fight things, and the longer you used a job in the past, the cheaper it is to switch back to. However, with how small your limited inventory space and how you NEED to unequip yourself before changing jobs, it's not very practical to carry around more than one or two alternate-jobs' worth of gear at any given moment. The game's dungeon and boss design likes throwing you into situations that FORCE you to use these jobs, like a boss who constantly changes his elemental weakness so you need an otherwise nearly useless Scholar to tell his weaknesses, or a boss who does lots of horrible AOE magic so you need a lot of dragoons to do Jumps to both avoid his attacks and do big damage to him. The game always tells you when you need to do this though if you just talk to people around towns. It occasionally really sucks, especially when they throw enemies that split upon physical strike at you before you really get the job that can deal with those (dark/mystic knights), but they're generally fairly tolerable gimmicks and never make the game outright boring. It has several dungeons that force you to be mini, so only magic attacks really do anything, but at least those are proper dungeons. The worst gimmick dungeon in FF3 is better than the single gimmick dungeon in FF4 (the atrocious magnetic dungeon). It is also really odd seeing those mechanical steps BACK FF4 has compared to FF3, as this game also does a MUCH better job of automatically stacking and sorting your inventory where FF4 does nothing of the sort. But compared to all 3 SFC games, this game is FAR harder. The lack of inter-dungeon save points or tents/cottages to heal up in them as well as sprawling late-game dungeons that are far more numerous than any of the SFC games really makes the Famicom version of FF3 something not to be taken for granted. This game easily would've taken me at least 3 or 4 more hours of grinding and redoing large segments of dungeons if I didn't have the Famicom Mini's save states to back me up, and that's a low estimate on my part. Especially the final dungeon, whose beginning has a lot of very difficult enemy encounters, and whose later half has a point-of-no-return and a huge boss rush AND really tough enemies all with no tent heals or save points, it's quite the marathon without the ability to save state. The game's pacing is often quite brisk and didn't really require any grinding on my part, but running from battles is so difficult (and dangerous as it means you take colossal defense penalties) as well as how frequent and incredibly deadly back-attacks are in the late-game, if you wanna do this game as it was originally intended, you're gonna be dying and redoing a lot of stuff a LOT. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. The game is fun, but it can just be SO unforgiving at points that it's really hard to outright recommend this game in any capacity on the original hardware. I would bump it up to a Recommended if you're using save states like I did, but for the Famicom version as it was originally played, this game is just way too brutal for anyone who doesn't really love old RPGs and isn't afraid to grind and redo areas because of that difficulty and lack of respect for the player's time. And my adventure through the Final Fantasy games on Super Famicom comes to an end with one I've never actually beaten before! Popo gave me a guide to how the job system works, and I got right to work. And 34-ish hours later, I'm done! I didn't do anything absurd like maxing out every job, but I did do all the sidequests to get all the spells and super weapons and such. And also like FFIV, I played through this on my Wii U Virtual Console, so I played it in Japanese and with the benefit of a save state (so I needed to reset properly for deaths and such a lot less, basically).
On a presentation level, FFV falls right between FFIV and FFVI in basically every respect, as one might expect it to. The only slight exception is with music, which I have to put V at the bottom of that list for, as while Clash at Big Bridge is a GREAT song, basically every other song in the game is really forgettable. The environmental and monster graphics look beautiful though, as do the animations. The combat is a really nice sister experience to FFVI (which is basically just FFIV but better) with its big ol' job system. I personally prefer FFVI more, if only because FFV does a fairly terrible job at actually informing the player about very large swaths of mechanics that the job system contains. Even things as basic as how many levels are in a certain job or what those levels unlock are entirely unmentioned until you just go and unlock them. If you don't have the patience for a LOT of experimentation and grinding, or you aren't willing to use a guide like I did, you are probably going to bounce off of FFV very hard, especially in its 3rd act (exactly like I did when I attempted to play through the PS1 version when I was younger). But I did use a guide for it, and had a lot of fun optimizing my team incrementally as I unlocked more jobs~. A lot of your enjoyment of the combat system in this game will be a lot on how you enjoy experiencing your RPG combat, but as long as you know what you're getting into, you'll probably have a good time. To reiterate, FFV's job system is not a bad system, it's just a very poorly explained one for the level of complexity it actually has. The story is also a really nice advancement on IV's narrative. Because it can't rely on a character's combat job to do legwork for developing their character (as IV does a lot), V spends a lot more time developing the characters as people via their interactions between each other and with other NPCs, and it's done really well. It's use of overall themes isn't nearly as well done as VI does it (Exdeath is basically Kefka if Kefka had a story presence but no actual characterization), but its uses of comedy and levity break tone far less heavily than VI's do. Aside from some fairly serious issues I have with Faris' character (about whom I'm currently writing an entirely separate essay about), I really enjoyed the characterization methods used in V, and it's fairly easy to see how these translated to how VI would do its storytelling (right down to the final act of the game being far more non-linear with lots of optional side-goodies you're encouraged, but not required, to get). Verdict: Recommended. This just barely doesn't make a "highly recommended" status because the caveat of being adequately prepared to deal with the job system is SUCH a big one. That withstanding, however, it's a fantastic game, and an excellent parallel experience to FFVI on the Super Famicom. What it does well it does nearly as well as VI, or does an entirely different way to VI such as to make V stand very well on its own as simply a game for a different kind of JRPG fan. My exploration of JRPGs I played as a kid but this time in Japanese continues with Final Fantasy IV. Although it's kinda hard to call it an exact replay, as there's quite a fair bit different between the original SFC release and the American SNES localization. I originally started on the PS1 version before the red laser (the PS1-reading one) in my PS3 died and I had to start over on the Wii U Virtual Console, so between both versions it took me about 28 or so hours. FFIV, as a whole, is a very transitional game from the 8-bit era to the 16-bit era, and that can be felt in just about every part of it, from the mechanics to the narrative.
This game has a few very notable exceptions in its difference from the SNES port. A very different script, some different enemy and boss balancing (I think), a removal of the multitude of items that are just spells in item form, a removal of the multitude of status recovery items and their replacement with cure-all Remedy items, as well as making MP restoring Ethers much more plentiful and making most hidden passages completely visible as opposed to just hinted at subtly. Most all of the mechanical changes made for the localization I would personally say improve the overall game, as especially having so many more items really clogs up your inventory and highlights just how much of a pain manually sorting your inventory is. The only real advantage I would say the original game has over the localisation is script-wise, but that's only a minor advantage (as I will explain in more detail later). The really cool thing the SFC version has that the SNES version doesn't is a secret room in the Dwarf Castle where you can talk to (and even sometimes fight) a bunch of the developers and staff from the game! It's a really fun, silly little bonus room where they talk about everything from how they wish they had their own personal desk to how they'd like you to try out Seiken Densetsu after you're finished with Final Fantasy 4 XD. The mechanics are a weird first step towards the real time battle system that would define the next two generations of FF games. Instead of the timers represented as bars as so many later FF games use, FFIV has hidden timers. Couple this in with weird transitions as to when exactly you can start telling a character what to do, what menus do or don't seem to stop that timer, and the fact that a lot of spells have quite long casting times (which were mostly heavily reduced for the SNES port), and the combat can feel quite frustrating at times as characters just seem to refuse to fight when you tell them to. Item management is a real pain, you need to reselect spells in menus to cast them in the inventory outside of battles, there's no in-battle cursor memory feature. A lot of this game's runtime is honestly just fighting with the menus to try and make the battles go better. The difficulty curve is also all over the place. Maybe it's like this in the SNES version as well, but there are numerous dungeons that have SUPER hard and deadly normal encounters and utterly trivial boss fights. Mostly due to how a lot of enemies have really viscous counter attacks that range from a really powerful physical attack to casting stone or even confuse on a party member. It makes grinding a really difficult thing to judge the timing of (although I honestly barely had to do any, thankfully), as it frequently feels more efficient to just run from difficult encounters because you'll probably be able to rush down the boss anyhow. I had also heard for the longest time that the final boss was made a lot easier in the American version of the game, but I honestly couldn't notice that. I beat him on my first real attempt (the first actual attempt I immediately had to restart because I used an item I didn't know the purpose of an it casted reflect on Kain, so I couldn't heal him XP), albeit by quite a lucky break with only one character surviving a cast of meteo XD Another thing the game suffers quite frequently with is putting mechanical/plot convenience in front of actual character development, and simultaneously also struggles just as much with putting huge design inconveniences in the game for the sake of sticking so some (occasionally nearly pointless) plot contrivance. We'll start with the latter. Two points in the game REALLY stick out for me in this regard. The first is Cecil climbing the Mountain of Trials in order to become a Paladin. There are a lot of really powerful undead enemies here who Cecil can almost literally not affect at all, so all you're left with is hoping your 2 offensive mages in your party can rush them down before they kill you (or you just run away). It makes the whole walk-up the mountain super tedious and frustrating. A much more magnified version of that is in the Magnetic Cave, where having any metallic armor equipped results in your being perminantly held (and effectively dead) in battle, so your party that the game barely half an hour prior made such a big deal about reducing down to one mage and 3 fighters is effectively whittled down to one mage and 1 fighter, as you're forced to basically run from every encounter in the dungeon because your resources have been stripped away so harshly. All this for the sake of a long, cinematic and uninteresting boss battle for the sake of a totally flat character whose payoff you don't even SEE unless you remember to talk to them afterwards. It is a baffling bit of game design that the game would lose almost nothing for for cutting entirely. On the subject of plot contrivances at the sake of characters, this happens very numerous times, but largely towards Rhydia (whose name utterly baffles me, as Lydia is a super obvious translation of her Japanese name, but I digress). Being introduced to her is a really neat bit of storytelling. Cecil and his best friend Kain accidentally carry out a plot to burn down her village and kill her mom, and Cecil is left to carry her to safety after she inadvertently summons a titan and creates a massive mountain range. She quite logically doesn't trust him, which he accepts, but he wants her trust her anyway. Some guards from Cecil's kingdom come to take her away, he defends her, and she believes that he does actually want to protect her and tells him her name. It's a really nice little scene. There's even a brilliant bit of mechanical storytelling in how Rhydia, despite knowing black magic, never learns fire spells, implying that she still has a fear of fire from when her village was burned to the ground days prior. But it's all downhill from here. How does Rhydia overcome her traumatic fear of fire? Her friends REALLY need her to because there's an ice block in their path. Not even a boss battle she needs to save them from: Just a stationary ice block the plot would prefer to be gone. It is an absolutely baffling bit of short-changing that element of her character given how carefully it was set up. Then later on, she get taken from your party by Leviathan when it attacks your ship and she could be dead, but then later saves you as she's mysteriously all grown up. She says she was raised in the world of summon spirits that Leviathan took her to, and time passes more quickly there so now she's like 8 years older. But now Kain is back in the party, so perhaps there's some element of mistrust between her and he who murdered her mom? No. There's nothing like that and it's just hand waved away as she trusts him because the summon spirits brought her up to speed on EVERYTHING. This is a really common problem throughout the whole of the game, and is probably the roughest element of FFIV's status as this transitional Square game from 8-bit RPGs to 16-bit RPGs. SO much linguistic real estate is wasted for throw away line after throw away line on countless 1-dimensional comic relief characters (this game has nearly as many playable characters as FFVI's huge cast, you just get them taken away from you frequently instead of having them be able to be swapped out all the time). Basically no one in the game has any kind of character arc, as even Cecil, whose story is supposed to be this big internal moral battle of realizing the empire he's worked all his life for is actually evil, is just a facade. The game opens with Cecil coming to this realization, and we the audience never get any view of him before he was a good guy. Even him becoming a Paladin and throwing away his being a Dark Knight is entirely mechanical, as his actual character doesn't change. It's not like when he's a Dark Knight, Cecil is more cruel, short-sighted, or vindictive in achieving his goals and then becoming a Paladin changes all that. The game simply tells him that shadow can't beat light so he has to be a Paladin, and that's really all there is to it. From a narrative perspective, he is exactly the same generic hero as a Dark Knight as he is as a Paladin. And this is every character with only slight exceptions. Yang is a captain of the guard and is valorus. Cid is an airship fanatic who is silly. Palom is an immature comic relief of a teenager and Porom is his more prim and proper older sibling who yells at him a lot. Edward is a bard mournful for his lady love. Tellah is angry at the world for killing his daughter. Rosa is super in love with Cecil and she's his shoulder to cry on and his reason for fighting. Edge is a silly, somewhat lady's man prince out for revenge on the main bad guy. Their characterizations are consistent, sure but they're completely flat for the whole game, and it makes a lot of the story just tedious because characters really never have anything interesting to say other than just plot exposition. Even the character who has something closest to an arc, Tellah, has his story compromised and reigned in. His story is pretty explicitly about how his quest for revenge bound in his hatred of the enemy for killing his daughter will only lead to his destruction, and it does. He casts Meteo on Golbez and it overwhelms him, making Tellah die and Golbez only retreat. But This Meteo spell saves the party from Golbez, and also breaks the mind control spell holding Kain in their power. So while it may've brought about his death, it still saved the party and Kain, so it hardly ruined everything. On top of that, the whole party spends the entire game effectively just on a quest for revenge because they hate the bad guy, since they barely have any idea what his collecting the crystals will even DO for like 90% of the game's narrative. They set up Tellah to be this big flawed character with this big cinematic death, then do absolutely nothing with the lesson he's supposed to teach the player/audience, and if anything outright ignore that whole lesson entirely. Verdict: Not Recommended. At the very least, the original SFC port of FFIV is not the way to experience this game. Beyond that, it largely feels like an inferior version, mechanically and narratively, of everything that FFVI would later do. I do feel I was a little harsh on it due to how much I was expecting of the story and was then disappointed by it, but at the same time the story is so frequently a vapid waste of time I still believe a lot of that criticism is well deserved. If you're gonna play this game, make it the American SNES port for a more palatable difficulty, or make it the DS port which adds a lot more story and deeper battle mechanics. Otherwise just avoid it, because it's honestly nothing that special aside from a footstep of FF for what it would later become as a series. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
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