World 2-19: Earthbound

Earthbound

~SNES 

Well, after about 30 hours I finally have Earthbound in my trophy room! And you know what? I'd totally do it again. Earthbound definitely earned it's place in my top 10, with it's odd sense of humour, interesting game mechanics, and totally catchy soundtrack. There were so many awesome quirks in this game that made it memorable and worth being in everybody's trophy room. 

Overall, the game was pretty straightforward, as it was never too hard to tell where you had to go next. I count that as a big plus, because I hate running around aimlessly with no idea what to do. There was also no shortage of save points either (another big plus). One of the interesting game mechanics mentioned earlier is that if you stay out too long, your character gets homesick (resulting in botched battles because your character is off in Lala land). And on the even more annoying side, staying out too long also results in your dad constantly pestering you to save and take a break (at least you don't have to listen to him). But by far the most useful game mechanic comes into play by sheer advancement: after you reach a certain power level, you can run into monsters to initiate a fight and one hit KO them, bypassing the fight screen entirely. This is a huge time saver, and a great way to power level. 

One feature I didn't like much was that you couldn't get rid of key items, even after using them. However, you can leave items with your sister. Unfortunately, I didn't find that out until the very end of the game, so it was pretty useless to me. I ended up ditching a lot of good items because I simply had no space to keep them, even with 4 characters that each had 14 spaces to hold items. 

For leveling, I found that the best places were after you finished each My Sanctuary location, as you could go back to the sanctuary and get a free full recovery as many times as you wish. Also, you could hunt down the monsters in the place you just finished, and they would run away from you. And if you were strong enough, you could also one hit KO them. Talk about power leveling!

Without going into spoilers here, the final boss had some very unexpected twists, and no matter how much power leveling you do (I maxed out all my characters to level 99 quite early) he is still challenging, which I thought was very cool. There's nothing worse than beating the final boss in one shot without putting any effort into it whatsoever because your characters were too strong. Earthbound managed to avoid that entirely, and I was very impressed by that.