How The Critics Looked At EarthBound Circa 1995
Perhaps no other video game has such a devoted cult following as EarthBound. People love the quirky RPG from Japanese humorist Shigesato Itoi, itself the second of three games released in Japan. To this day, there are still loud cries for an official translated release of the final game in the trilogy, known as Mother 3.
The thing about objects with cult followings, however, is that they usually weren’t appreciated in their time. Game historian Frank Cifaldi has proven this by gathering every magazine review he could for the original release of EarthBound and scanning them all in. While they generally liked the game, they gave it a large stomach-punch for its “bad graphics.”
The biggest takeaway I get, slapping all these magazines on my desk and reading them back-to-back, is just how completely offended the critics were by the game’s art direction. The “infantile graphics” made VIdeoGames’ Geoff Higgins “want to gag,” apparently. EGM’s John Gurka “laughed out loud” when he first saw the game, while GameFan capsule reviewer Skid’s initial impression was “no way! These graphics are just to [sic] fruity.” Not one reviewer seemed to like the art direction, though some – particularly at GameFan – were able to power through it and enjoy the game underneath.
At the time, the graphical capabilities of your average video game were advancing incredibly fast. Polygons were finally influencing gaming in significant ways, from the real thing on Sega Saturn to the pre-rendered version in Donkey Kong Country. Cifaldi notes that when Nintendo was showing EarthBound to investors at CES, it was overshadowed by Super FX games like StarFox 2 and Comanche, both of which were cancelled for having graphics that didn’t compare to the PlayStation’s.
Cifaldi says he “can’t imagine a scenario where the game could have been a hit in this environment. Aggregating EarthBound’s contemporary review scores gives a figure of about 72%. If this was on Metacritic, that number would be in a yellow box.”
You can read all Cifaldi’s scans here.