SOME ANALYSIS ON EARTHBOUND'S OPENING

Hello hello!
I wanted to throw around some thoughts I had on Earthbound, and how it sets up it's unique tone and humor through the first hour or so of play. This is all just my personal take on the subject, but I think most everyone can agree that Earthbound is a game with a really unique world. So here's my thoughts on how the game sets up the world in it's opening. Also I am probably going to make some mistakes in here so please forgive me for any slip-ups.

When you first start Earthbound, you see the standard studio logos, and then the screen turns to static and you get this screen:
This is pretty important, as the first image you get of the game proper, even before you see any of the characters, is this image of aliens attacking what appears to be an American city. The game's opening image is a juxtaposition of the mundane and the fantastic, and this juxtaposition is incredibly important to how the game operates.

Then after naming your characters the game opens on some images of a normal looking town, Onett, with some basic narration. The game focuses on a house, and then into the room of a sleeping kid. The kid wakes up when something loud shakes the house. Notable is the choice of setting and the time the game takes to set up the scene. At the beginning of the game, we only see the mundane. In fact, we don't even see the meteor fall.

Then the player is given control. Ness goes through the house, changes out of his pajamas (after his mom insists), and goes out to investigate what happened. There are no enemies here, the only thing you see are some townsfolk and some policemen, who are pretty normal despite their silly dialogue. Ness eventually gets stopped by a police barricade and goes home.

This entire first scene is remarkable in how mundane it is in subject matter. Yes, you have the meteor, but you don't even see it at this point. There is no supernatural yet, just a curious child and some cops responding to a loud noise. The player is given a sense that "this is the normal way things are" as they explore.

Then the next part happens. Porky asks for your help because his brother hasn't come home yet, so you back outside. Immediately, something is different. You have enemies, spiteful crows and coil snakes and runaway dogs. You go back up to the meteorite to find Porky's brother and a time travelling psychic bug who tells you that an alien overlord conquers the future and you're the only one who can stop him. On your way home, an alien teleports in and you fight it off with psychic powers.

The takeaway imo is this: Earthbound's focus on the mundane is what allows it to use the fantastic elements so well. Part of Earthbound's signature style is the way that characters react in mundane ways to the fantastic. Without the small details of everyday life (your mom worrying about you, equipment of baseball caps and tee ball bats) then the fantastic wouldn't have been as strange, because the player would've just accepted it as part of the suspension of disbelief. Without setting the stage as a strange but identifiably "realistic" world, the addition of alien invaders and brainwashing mani mani statues wouldn't have the unique effect that it does.

If one were to try to replicate Earthbound's tone, then you must pay close attention to how you handle the mundane in your game. Without the first emphasis on the mundane, the game wouldn't have felt the same.

tl;dr I feel that Earthbound chooses to have the player experience the mundane first so that the impact of the fantastic later is more pronounced, and that the play between mundane and fantastic is a key part to it's unique personality. If you want to replicate that feeling, you need to pay attention to how you're using the mundane and fantastic story elements and how you're presenting them to the player.

I agree, the image does jar with the mundane first, fantastic later point, but I think it was important to have. You see that image as you start the game, but before you decide new game or continue or whatever, and it provides a hint to the player before they start that there's going to be fantastic elements in the story. When the fantastic elements do come into play, they're surprising, but not entirely unexpected. Thinking about it, it was kind of jarring though.

Also I totally agree with your mundane does not equal boring point. To clarify, when i say the mundane i mean that the word mundane refers to the sense of ordinary or realistic present in characters or in the setting. Creators have been creating fascinating stories using ordinary and realistic subjects for ages, and using those elements well is part of the challenge of a storyteller.

Plus, you can have mundane treatments of fantastic subjects. Say you had a story about Space Truckers. Including details about buying gas, showing dashboard ornaments, an air freshener- all those elements are mundane things that people are familiar with, but can produce a neat effect when placed into a fantastic context. There's this game named Lisa which pulls off an earthboundian feel by giving the characters a very realistically depicted backstory while the game proper takes place in a fantastic setting. Its all about how the creators handle it.

author=Marrend
While some games may want to give that sense of "normalcy" before the "real game" picks up, it doesn't always pay off. Shin Megami Tensai - Persona 4, as much as I love that game, has a really huge set-up of setting, characters, and what-not, and I didn't get the sense that I was playing the game until about the time Yukiko was kidnapped. Which is a few hours into the game, if I recall.

oh i definitely agree. Persona 4 takes a really uncomfortable amount of time to set up, primarily because it's trying to make sure the player understands the story reasons why they're going to the dungeon and doing what theyre doing. As amazing as persona 4 was, it's not good pacing to make your player wait through like three hours of worldbuilding and setup before they can actually start playing the game proper.

Also i think the persona games could pull off a more earthboundian feel if they treated the fantastic with some more mundane reactions. If Yosuke uses Jiraya to open a stubborn jar, or if your non-active party members like brought a picnic into the tv that they'd eat while waiting for your party- more mundane reactions would make the game sillier but feel more earthbound-y. I don't think that'd be a good idea, especially for the story they want to tell, but it'd feel more like earthbound.

author=Crystalgate
author=unity
I agree with your conclusion, to a degree. The mundane opening certainly adds something to the feel of Earthbound's opening. Just as long as "mudane" doesn't immediately equate with "boring," I think it's all good.
Very much yes. While I liked Earthbound's opening, I can not say the same about Twilight Princess.

Anyway, starting with the mundane may not always be the most efficient method to enhance the fantastic.

Imagine following; you start with the hero experiencing something clearly out of the ordinary. Something goes seriously shit. End of day. The next day everyone else in town goes about with their lives as usual. They have no idea something bad and out of ordinary even transpired, nobody else witnessed it.


I feel like there's a reason that Earthbound deals with a huge world-changing event as part of it's plot. It forces everyone to react to it, and you can get some good milage with that.

I think one of the reasons Twilight Princess' opening is underwhelming is because youre in a fantasy world, youve established the fantastic already, and yet we're stuck with mundane things happening when the player wants to get to the cool fantastic stuff.

author=bulmabriefs144
That said, there are a number of weird things woven into the fabric of the game. Why just the open? Let's talk about the entire game!

sure! ^-^ It's an amazing game, and we can learn stuff about making other games from it.

First off, we should probably come up with a list of systems in the game. Like the turn based battles and the rolling health and magic meters. Then we can see how the systems help the plot or hinder it.

the ones that come to mind (and this is just a list of systems) are

top down pov
battles on contact, with preemptive attacks or ambushes based on how the enemy interacts with the character sprite
menu and turn based battles
scrolling health and mana meters
individual character inventories, with very limited capacity
no world map

and... that's all the systems i can think of, at least for just Earthbound. I guess the next step is how these systems help the player interact with the game world and how they hinder it, and also how the game world maintains it's aesthetic throughout the game.

I think one of the biggest ways that Earthbound creates its mood is through its visual design. There are a surprisingly large amount of unique npc sprites, the enemies are similarly unique, and almost everything in the game is very vibrant and cute. The characters have large heads so we can get some expressions from them. The towns are laid out more like real towns than other rpgs, with the shops and hotel often far away from each other, and having quite a few specialized shops, each with an interior design that changes depending on what shop it is.

Everything is bright, cute, and takes cues in layout from real life towns.

audio-wise the game is usually very upbeat, with bright themes. However, when the darker things happen, there's quite a few very effective mysterious and spooky tracks, which are fantastic.

author=Sailerius
And I think Earthbound definitely failed in that regard. I've tried to play Earthbound so many times but the beginning is so boring that I've never gotten past it.

Have you tried Mother 3? The plot is much more involved than Earthbound's but it has similar themes and settings. Imo it starts out quicker and is better than Earthbound mechanically in many ways.

Using Mother 3's start, you begin with the twins playing peacefully with some dinosaurs and they get attacked by a mole cricket. The world is definitely started as strange, but the twins interact in a very realistic way. Then you change perspective to Flint, who is asked to help out with a fire. The prologue is much much shorter than earthbound and it's mundane/fantastic comparison is more in the characters interactions and in the way the characters treat the world around them. There's more fantastic present in the "mundane" portion, but the mundane part is the most important part of the plot.