Interactions are made through the menu system, and unfortunately there's no one-hit shortcut for actions or communicating as there is in EarthBound. New party members will also have to be babied while they gain their footing in levels. Dying will be common while grinding up to better levels and equipment, but the system doesn't punish defeat too severely as long as money is kept stored in a handy ATM instead of on your person. There's little to no hand-holding, and enemies are quite capable of taking your character out as soon as he takes the first steps out of his idyllic rural home. Patience is absolutely necessary to make progress in this game. Beginnings plainly shows its colours as an '80s era RPG, with its sequel refining or improving upon many of its elements. That's not to say the playing experiences of both are an exact match, however. The overall plots are different, but both are interesting and even surprisingly emotional at times, joined to the same quirky heart of creator Shigesato Itoi. There's the psychic, bat-wielding boy and his three companions, the consumption of burgers and other foods to restore HP, the collecting of a melody, and an alien threat. Similarities between Beginnings and the SNES EarthBound are many, with a number of concepts and themes transferred from the first to the second. Given the order most have played these titles, Beginnings can feel like a loving demake of the SNES game at times, as much as the parent it truly is. Its official Virtual Console appearance on Wii U eShop back in 2015 marked a victory for EarthBound lovers who had maintained a persistent current of petitioning and support for many years, but it's also somewhat of an anachronism. It's pretty surreal, yet the fact the game took so long to appear officially on an honest-to-goodness western Nintendo console somehow feels even more so.ĮarthBound Beginnings is the localized version of the original Mother for the Famicom. And yet, like from some urban legend, a group of fans managed to buy a beta cartridge of the RPG off eBay in 1998 and released the ROM onto the Internet as "EarthBound Zero." Translated into English and perfectly playable, it oddly never made it to retail release on the NES. If you were an early adopter of EarthBound fanaticism in the West, you likely caught wind of a previous title made for the Famicom. This review originally went live in 2015, and we're updating and republishing it to mark the arrival of EarthBound Beginnings in the Nintendo Switch Online NES library.
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