31st May 2010, 10:10 AM
The NES game is the Famicom game. If you want to hunt down the english prototype, good luck with that. It's even rarer than those copies of the World Series cartridge people pay ridiculous amounts for. Fortunatly, most collectors don't seem to realize that yet so the prototypes are relatively cheap if you ever find them (still outside my price range).
Yeah I hear that the first in the series still uses random encounters and so on.
However, let me put it this way. If you finished Skies of Arcadia in spite of youur hatred of random enouncters, consider Earthbound a major relief.
The battle system has been streamlined to be AWESOME. You know how we say Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG put all the enemy encounters in the field? That's not the half of it with Earthbound. You can force a "preemptive strike" by touching the enemies from behind (they can do the same though, so watch out). Best of all, the best feature in any game ever. You know how if you level up enough, low level enemies just become a waste of time? That's true no matter what "style" of RPG you play. It makes you wonder why idiots in those games even TRY. Yeah, nice one random Super Mutant, I just exploded 50 of you at once, what are you trying at this point? Well, in Earthbound if you get high enough that the battle is basically just reduced to you hitting A until they go away anyway, the game recognizes this and gives you an "instant win" the moment you touch the enemy on the field.
Aside from that, the game is, as you may have heard, funny. It seems to plan for every little thing you may possibly do ever and have some really funny out of the way dialog if you do that. They even have some stuff programmed in JUST for taking an item you stop using early in the game, the bicycle, to a swamp you can't get to until after you can't use it any more, IF you decide to go on a VERY out of the way trip TO that swamp during the incredibly fully explorative ending sequence.
Now ABF, I know you collect pretty much any game you find cheap. You seem to indescriminately gather really terrible games as well as good ones, so don't tell me you wouldn't pick this up for a good deal.
Yeah I hear that the first in the series still uses random encounters and so on.
However, let me put it this way. If you finished Skies of Arcadia in spite of youur hatred of random enouncters, consider Earthbound a major relief.
The battle system has been streamlined to be AWESOME. You know how we say Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG put all the enemy encounters in the field? That's not the half of it with Earthbound. You can force a "preemptive strike" by touching the enemies from behind (they can do the same though, so watch out). Best of all, the best feature in any game ever. You know how if you level up enough, low level enemies just become a waste of time? That's true no matter what "style" of RPG you play. It makes you wonder why idiots in those games even TRY. Yeah, nice one random Super Mutant, I just exploded 50 of you at once, what are you trying at this point? Well, in Earthbound if you get high enough that the battle is basically just reduced to you hitting A until they go away anyway, the game recognizes this and gives you an "instant win" the moment you touch the enemy on the field.
Aside from that, the game is, as you may have heard, funny. It seems to plan for every little thing you may possibly do ever and have some really funny out of the way dialog if you do that. They even have some stuff programmed in JUST for taking an item you stop using early in the game, the bicycle, to a swamp you can't get to until after you can't use it any more, IF you decide to go on a VERY out of the way trip TO that swamp during the incredibly fully explorative ending sequence.
Now ABF, I know you collect pretty much any game you find cheap. You seem to indescriminately gather really terrible games as well as good ones, so don't tell me you wouldn't pick this up for a good deal.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)