I originally wrote my review for EarthBound 2015 and at the time, there were a number of video games that were "inspired" by EarthBound. (Undertale being one, and that's considered a BETTER game by these standards) and yet, it's well-known that the game was a failure released in the United States, commonly blamed on its marketing campaign (with stuff like "This Game Stinks" and scratch-and-sniff cards). Here's my take...I entirely disagree with that premise and will offer an alternate take instead...it's just bad; rather, just mediocre.
Background--with the early days of the SNES locked head-to-head with the Sega Genesis, as the 1990s wore on, Nintendo switched marketing for the Super Nintendo with a new campaign..."Play It Loud", combining newer SNES games (like Donkey Kong Country, which started it) with budget re-releases. This included MTV-style commercials and...really gross marketing. As a whole. Print ads for Nintendo Power included the infamous "toenail clippings" ad and a leaking barf bag with the logo of Star Fox; possibly others as well.
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island revolved around carrying Baby Mario and marketed with one of the most revolting video game commercials ever made and despite the questionable premise of Yoshi being the hero carrying Baby Mario on his back, it did well.
EarthBound was released in the U.S. in June 1995. While "Play It Loud" and a consistent stream of games ensured the SNES' survival in the market, EarthBound wasn't quite able to capitalize on that. It wasn't like the games of today—video games were a growing market in 1995 and more and more were coming out every year, each one pushing the envelope. A few months earlier, Chrono Trigger came out, and was a hit, with battle screens integrated into the game's maps, character designs by Akira Toriyama, and overall with fantastic music and art. But EarthBound barely felt like a major push in anything. The battle screens were simplistic (albeit with pulsing backgrounds and interesting effects) with static enemy sprites. The flat colors didn't do the SNES justice and above all, it was a slog. Ness and his friends all followed each other and when other enemies and characters were on the screen, it ground to a halt. The spinning HP bar was one of the few real innovations. The idea of buying hamburgers as health items was not really what the genre needed, and while having interconnected maps rather than an overworld might've been an interesting concept as well, that didn't apply around the halfway point of the game anyway.
So what happens when you have a game that doesn't look good, is remarkably average as a title, and with a marketing budget that doesn't meet expectations? It flops. Remember—by this time, the next generation of consoles was already rolling out. Sega Saturn was out, and its botched early release still sold units, and the Sony PlayStation was around the corner.
The late release of the game meant that the game couldn't enjoy any budget re-releases later down the line, because by summer 1997 SNES games were already a shrinking market. Reportedly, Harvest Moon, released in June 1997 and the last notable game for the Super NES (1998's Frogger was the actual last one) released in the U.S., sold "a decent amount for that time", probably less than half of EarthBound's sales domestically but without the huge marketing cost associated with it...but was still enough for Natsume to continue making sequels for the next decade or so.
Despite that, it never did deter Nintendo from EarthBound. The Wii's Virtual Console and demos of games from Super Smash Bros. Brawl was a curious exclusion, but Nintendo Power still ran previews of what was to be localized as EarthBound 64 with a notably different group of characters and setting than the original game. How was this Western-themed town and this cowboy supposed to play into a game that would conclude EarthBound's story? Answer: it didn't. Not in the released game anyway.
The "revitalization" of EarthBoundon the Internet never did amount to anything in Nintendo of America's eyes except a few re-releases for more modern consoles. Mother 3, released back in 2006, was unlikely to reach the West anyway, partly due to its late release on the Game Boy Advance...and with lackluster sales in Japan as well, it meant that a re-release on the Nintendo DS would be unlikely as well, and it didn't. The fan translation reached a lot of people and was hailed as a masterpiece, but there wasn't a "legitimate" way to play it. Some people used flashcarts and a few even bought pirated copies, but most people just used an emulator.
It baffles me why EarthBound is adored today and has "inspired" a legion of even more abysmal titles, but I suppose that's just another mystery of life...
- 5/20/25