EarthBound

About This Game

Gameplay

EarthBound features many traditional role-playing game elements: the player controls a party of characters who travel through the game's two-dimensional world composed of villages, cities, caves, and dungeons. Along the way, the player fights battles against enemies and the party receives experience points for victories. If enough experience points are acquired, a character's level will increase. This pseudo-randomly increases the character's attributes, such as offense, defense, and the maximum hit points "Health (game terminology)") (HP) and psychic points (PP) of each character. Rather than using an overworld map screen like most console RPGs of its era, the world is entirely seamless, with no differentiation between towns and the outside world. Another non-traditional element is the perspective used for the world. The game uses oblique projection, while most 2D RPGs use a "top-down" view on a grid or an isometric perspective. Unlike its predecessor, EarthBound Beginnings, EarthBound does not use random encounters. In EarthBound, enemies are presented similar to other non-player characters scattered around the game's overworld.

History

EarthBound Beginnings was released for the Famicom in 1989 in Japan. Its sequel, EarthBound, was developed over five years by Ape and HAL, and published through Nintendo. The game was written and designed by Japanese author, musician, and advertiser Shigesato Itoi, and produced by Satoru Iwata, who became Nintendo's president and CEO.Mother 2 was made with a development team different from that of the original game, and most of its members were unmarried and willing to work all night on the project.Mother 2's development took much longer than planned and came under repeated threats of cancellation. Itoi has said that the project's dire straits were resolved when Iwata joined the team. Ape's programming team had more members than HAL on the project.