Developer’s Diary, 3/29/09: The Essence of Earthbound
Well, I’ve done a little bit of work with the game. I have maybe the first two minutes of the game created. Cyrus (our beloved hero) can now set out from his farmhouse, meet a couple of people in town, and interact with one shopkeeper. Not that there is any money, of course. Or any way to earn money. But it’s a start.
Obviously, there isn’t much there yet. I’m not a fan of drafts, so I don’t know exactly where I’m going with the story yet. But I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want and where I want to go with it. Essentially, I want to create a game in the same vein as Earthbound. Of course, making a game inspired by other games has been attempted before, and its usually resulted in ridiculous rehashs (“Marith sacrificed herself to save the world from Strepheroth!”), but I think I can do it well, considering the tremendous influence Earthbound had on me not only in the way I like my video games, but even in the way I think and act. I know this sounds either contrived or insane, but please bear with me.
I first played Earthbound at age 7. Obviously, this is a very impressionable age. I’m pretty sure I still told everybody that Billy Idol was my dad (since Rebel Yell is so badass it causes pregnancy, this may be true) and that my name was “Justin Donatello Leonardo Raphael Michaelangelo Strong” at that age (altered weekly depending on which Turtle was my favorite). I was always enamored with things with a “wacky”/absurd sense of humor, for example Looney Toons and Animaniacs, but I went into Earthbound for the promised fart jokes (of which there were only 2 or 3, and also Pokey shits in the desert, so I guess that kinda counts too). While I was quickly disappointed on that front, I was really impressed with a lot of things about Earthbound, and I still am. The game is one of the few things that has appealed to me for 14 years, and not just out of nostalgia, like so many other things. My appreciation of the series has even grown over the years, possibly due to maturing mentally and emotionally. I’ve really noticed how heartfelt and meaningful the game is, and as a result, I’ve decided my overall goal for the game is to capture the essence of what made Earthbound so, well, Earthboundish.
Of course much of that essence is usually attributed to the script, and for good reason. Even though the idea of a modern RPG has been done before, Earthbound’s concept and plot remain completely unique. I think what really makes it special is that Shigesato Itoi is a man who both had something to say and was tremendously capable of saying it. He wanted to tell a personal story in his own style, and he did so in a way that is easily relatable. While it would have been easy to just make a goofy little RPG full of throwaway jokes and satire of American culture, he chose to make the story funny, but full of likable characters and situtations, which, beyond just making you laugh, make you think “how would I feel in that situation?” The characters’ feelings and behavior are displayed in a way that make you genuinely care for them and feel real sympathy, or even empathy, just like you would a real person, instead of being used for gags, like in most forms of comedy today. Every joke, even little ones like “All the information is there, except for the information that isn’t there”, create (and draw you into) a cohesive and connected world and mindset for the characters, instead of eliciting a brief chuckle. Earthbound managed to do things that most other games, even recent ones, could only dream of doing, or in some cases, claim to do (i.e. Fable 2), by creating a world where you care about every inhabitant, who seem to just be going about their daily lives, albeit in a peculiar way. Just like in real life, not every person you walk up and talk to are going to respond with a comment about whatever the most important thing going on in town is, or about how happy they are you’re going to save the world. Not everyone has heard of Ness, Paula, Jeff, Poo, and their quest to save the world from Giygas. To them, you’re just a bunch of teenagers walking around town, and they respond as such. And just the same, despite the questing and psychic powers, at heart, the Chosen Four really are just a bunch of teenagers, who would be leading regular lives if not for the whole Planetary Savior thing. Unlike so many other RPGs, whose protagonists seem like they’d be going off trying to save the world from nothing in particular even if they weren’t destined to, you get the feeling they would probably just being going to school and watching TV at home if they weren’t destined for more, like they’re real people who just realize there’s something they have to do. That’s what separates Earthbound’s story apart from its peers, and why other games haven’t been able to creating something like it. Gimmicks like “karma systems” (recently bitchslapped by logic in a Penny Arcade comic and news post) only go so far because, at heart, you don’t believe everybody, every last person on the face of the planet, each person and monster and even animal, lives a life that revolves around you and your exploits as a magical hero with no life or purpose outside of saving the world this one time.
Of course, I didn’t realize all this when I first played Earthbound. The first thing in particular that struck me was how vivid and pretty the color scheme used in the game is. I may be the only one who thinks so, but I always loved bright colors as opposed to superlight pastels and superdark primaries, often the two extremes you see in games. Earthbound’s graphics are like nothing else. Oftentimes the game’s “poor graphics” are pointed to as a primary cause of the game’s failure, but I consider it to be one of my favorite games graphically. It’s true there’s a very simplistic art style involved, but you could still tell pretty much what everything you were looking at was, and it was attractive and distinct, with a lovely color palette and smooth, flowing animation. Even if the battle scenes weren’t particularly well animated really animated much at all, what was there was very unique and cool-looking. The visual style may not really make up the heart of the game, per se, but I think it is a major part of what makes the game stand out, at least at first glance (especially the unique character designs).
The sound, on the other hand, is vital to the game. Not only used in the traditional sense to heighten emotion, the music in Earthbound gives a texture to the game that couldn’t be achieved with the graphics. Nobuo Uematsu is probably still my favorite game composer, of course, but Keiichi Suzuki (already famous in Japan as a member of the Moonriders), Hiroshi Kanazu, and the great Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka (another revered game composer who wrote, among other things, the brilliant soundtrack for Metroid) created something truly unique and spectacular with Earthbound’s soundtrack. The game has its share of fun, quirky, catchy musical asides, but there are several tracks that hold an immense emotional depth. For example, the music played while boarding the bus with the Runaway Five sounds exactly what you would think it would sound like if you just saved a nationally popular Soul/Blues group and they were riding you into another town. It seriously feels like a cut scene from the Blues Brothers (who, by the way, the Runaway Five were obviously based on). The same goes with Onett’s main theme, which just has an overall feeling of the fresh thrill of adventure and which may be the best “setting-out-on-a-quest” tune since the main theme of Final Fantasy 2/4, and Paula’s theme, which I find perfectly encapsulates what it would feel like to meet a famous, cute psychic girl that has been having dreams about saving the world with you (before you ask, I have absolutely no clue how to explain that. Just go with me on it).
Of course, it’s all these things that make the game so much more than the sum of its parts. There is one particular scene, however, that I want to note specifically, because I think it sums up everything about the nonsense I’ve been rambling about. Take a look at this screenshot of Ness’s house.
When you just look at a picture of it, it really doesn’t hold any kind of emotional power or anything. It’s just a cute drawing of a house. But add Ness’s mom’s loving, motherly dialog and the beautiful remix of Pollyanna (a song from the first game in the series that was a key plot point, with a beautiful melody, and which is later revealed to be a song passed down through the generations by Ness’s family), and, despite the fact that the music’s full of surging, spacey synthesizers, it’s the epitome of hominess. It no longer feels like you’re just playing some goofy little video game. It makes a very distinct emotional connection with you. It creates an almost palpable feeling of being at home. It (again, bear with me here, because I’m not used to being open with my emotions, especially in public writing) makes me almost tear up and even makes me want to call my mom. It makes me feel like a safe, loved child, like I’m having my hair dried by my mom after a bath, like I can smell cookies baking, like I never learned to swear or drink or fight, like I’m not corrupted and everything is still pure and good and right. This isn’t just from nostalgia or from memories of playing the game, because I never had any experiences like that while playing the game. I know this sounds contrived and overenthusiastic, and maybe it is. But I just can’t fully explain why some 15-year-old video game that features a talking pile of vomit has touched me so deeply, and this is about as close as I’m ever going to get. This game has some incredibly emotionally resounding moments, and still, to this day, I can’t think of a single other piece of art that could ever mean so much to me, and this is exactly why. It’s that type of emotional resonance, that heartfelt, meaningful spirit, that I want my game to have at its heart. I’ve been given the best possible example I can think of; all that’s left is to see if I have the skills to actually do it.
By the way, this seems as good a time as any to mention that Starmen.net have just started selling some awesome Mother 3 books. More info can be found here, and the books can be ordered here. They get free advertising cause they’ve just been so good to me (and the community at large) in the past. >_>
And to those of you who are pissed off about the lack of humor lately (haha, I know, you don’t exist), don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten what this site is for. I’ll be back with dick jokes and old games soon enough. I’ve just got other things going on too. Suck it up and hold on. I’ve got something extra special coming up as soon as I get my hands on a camcorder. =O
Developer’s Diary, 3/23/09: The Beginning.
Well, I’ve finally sat down to write about what I’m doing with this game. This is the first entry in what I hope will be a long, interesting, and most importantly, money generating diary. I never thought I’d get an opportunity to write one of these myself.
Anyway, enough bullshitting; you came here to hear about the game (or by accident while searching for “catchy name for newspaper”). I haven’t quite thought of a title yet. The (very tenative) working title is Navaratna (for some reason, things named after Indian concepts fail at least 100% of the time). The game is about the legend of the Nine Unknown Men. An ancient organization referred to in Sanskrit myths and related by 19th-century author Louis Jacolliot (or possibly just completely made up, scholars in the 19th century were careless assholes), the legend goes that, around 270 BC, the Indian emperor Asoka the Great had a change in philosophy after a horrible massacre in a battle intended to unify India, in which over 100,000 men were killed. After converting to Buddhism, Asoka took it upon himself to do everything in his power to prevent mankind from damming itself with advanced technologies (in some versions of the legend, his motivation for doing so was also influenced by the tales of the Rama Empire, a legendary Atlantis-esque Indian society with incredibly advanced technology that was ravaged by its own progress). In this spirit, the Society of the Nine was formed. For the past 2000 years, these nine men (or, presumably, their descendants, unless they live forever, which is also possible, I guess) have gathered knowledge they consider to be dangerous to mankind if allowed to reach the wrong hands. Nine books were made, each entrusted to a different master and each concerning a different topic. These topics were (direct quote from Wikipedia, for I am lazy):
- Propaganda and Psychological warfare
- Physiology
- Biology
- Alchemy
- Communication
- Gravitation
- Cosmology
- Light
- Sociology
So, now that you know the legend (or, alternatively, now that you’ve wasted 10 minutes reading about something you already knew), I can talk about what it has to do with this game. Navaratna is set in a world that isn’t intended to be any particular time period in reality, as evidenced by the fact that the skies feature both airships and planes, an impossible scenario that could never happen in reality.
The Hindenberg Disaster is an example anachronistic impossibility of airships and planes sharing the skies. As a result of this paradox, the ship simply ceased to be.
In addition to being completely original, this setting also allows me to write in whatever anachronisms I want, from swordfights with guns to riding a horse to a laser rock show. Additionally, it makes it slightly more acceptable for me to use everything in the RTP (for those of you not familiar with RPG Maker, the RTP is the set of components included with the program, and releasing a game to the RPG Maker community using only the RTP is like going to a fashion show wearing only Hefty bags). If I ever find someone who’s good at designing tilesets at the very least, then hopefully it’ll look a little bit more unique. (Anyone who feels up to the job can feel free to submit an example to me at ninjapocalypse@catchynamenews.com. All I really need are tilesets.)
I don’t have everything created yet, or even tentatively laid out (I just don’t work that way) but here’s an example map I’ve made, from the first town. Again, it’s still tenative, so don’t freak out that it doesn’t have a river running through it or whatever:
Please note that there aren’t a bunch of completely random placements of grass and flowers. Despite what the community seems to think, I think randomly laying out a bunch of flowers and tall grass to make it look less planned makes the town look like it’s filled with garbage. More realistic? Perhaps. But considering I’m making a town in a video game and not bringing up from the Earth a town created in my own image, I don’t think it’s that bad of a problem if I sacrifice a little realism for the sake of superior aesthetic value. I kept it looking a little random, but just planned enough that it doesn’t look like I just took the tile brush and waved it around randomly. So there.
I’m also not totally finished with the characters, but I have finished the Nine…
Pretty cool, no? What? You want to hear more about them? Too bad. Wait until next update. Or the one after that. I pull the strings here. ಠ_ಠ
1994 in Gaming: A Retrospective
We’re about 3 months into 2009, and as our thoughts turn to the year that’s to come, I, as always, am turned around ass-backwards looking at stuff that happened 15 years ago.
That’s right, January 1st marked the 15th anniversary of 1994, long reputed by me to be…
The Greatest Year in
Gaming History.
I’d like to say that this is a nostalgic reminder of times long forgotten for me, but it just isn’t so; I think back about 1994 all the time. I was 6 and impressionable, so practically everything about that year made a huge impression on me. Here are some things that were important to me, and also to you, unless you mongle cock:
The Zenith of the Genesis
Although it’s never really noted by anyone other than EA Sports enthusiasts, Sega was kicking ass ninja-style in ‘94. Some highlights:
Nintendo’s Year of the Cartridge
Yeah, yeah, I know, it was an advertising concept to deter people from thinking the CD was superior. Whatever, doesn’t matter. The SNES raped its competitors in ‘94. Raped them to death. This brief list showcases just part of what is essentially the cornerstone for my love of 1994…
- Blackthorne and The Death and Return of Superman became 2 of the last games Blizzard would make before they discovered a secret knothole in the forest that led to the World of Warcraft. They made a couple of games about it. You may have heard of them in obscured forums and such.
- Final Fantasy III (VI Japan) was released in October, and is still my go-to game for people who doubt the Final Fantasy series. There are many cliches and problems associated with the series (which I personally don’t mind, but see complained about all the time), but this game managed to transcend all of them. Notably, it is missing the following things:
- A main character with giant ridiculous hair
- A miserable, sullen main character who hates everything
- A main character of any kind, for that matter
- A ridiculous sword of some kind
- An obvious love story (!!!)
- A battle system marked by 3-4 menu options and tedious repetition
So as you can see, that removes a great deal of the things that people stereotype the series for. Instead, FF6 boasts an original story, an incredible soundtrack, uniquely beautiful graphics, one of the best fictional villains ever, and what is likely the best script of the series. Before I get into a bitchy rant about how much I hate the modern games press’s handling of the Final Fantasy series, let’s move on to a game which is basically the polar opposite of Final Fantasy in every possible way except quality…
- Home Improvement: The Game.
- No, seriously though, it’s Super Punch-Out!!. Just like the first game in the series, anytime I fire up an emulator without any specific intentions, I’m probably starting this game. I can literally be entertained by simply making up a story for the game. For example, when I beat Gabby Jay by a regular KO without taking any hits (which is most of the time), I like to think that, rather than a regular knockout, Little Mac had simply beaten him to death with his bare hands. A TKO with Bear Hugger? No, I simply punched him so hard it caused his rectum to prolapse. This ability to create my own story is all thanks to a combination of some very well-drawn characters and some of the most bone-crushing hits I’ve ever seen in a game. I love the first game, but this is the game that makes me consider the Punch-Out!! series to be the most deserving of a new entry. Hopefully, the new Wii game will be just as violent as the storylines I made up about Little Mac’s brutality and ferocity.
- Mega Man X came out in January. I would say that it restarted the series and breathed new life into, but that’s not exactly true, because that series was still running like a freight train as far as I’m concerned. That doesn’t change the fact that Mega Man X still rocked faces with it’s awesomeness. Still my favorite by far in the X sub-series, Mega Man X brought an unheard of smoothness and speed to SNES platforming. A deeper storyline and some new characters really brought the entire Mega Man series into the new age of gaming, when stories really started becoming the core of games. Also, it had Mega Man doing a hadoken. And that’s awesome.
- Donkey Kong Country was released and made people wonder why they were even thinking about 32-bit systems. It looks great even now, and is an absolutely immaculate platformer, easily one of the best ever. I can’t think of anything else interesting to say about it, so here’s this: Donkey Kong rhymes with MONKEY DONG.
- Super Metroid was released in April. This is actually a pretty unique memory for me, because to be honest, I didn’t completely understand Super Metroid, or its predecessor, for that matter. I knew the gameplay was fun, and there was something to do, but I just couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t from a lack of trying, though. I played the original Metroid for hours at a time, and rented Super Metroid all the time (it wasn’t until much later that I bought it). I mostly just ran around in circles, killing things, finding hidden passages, and getting pissed off at the absurd amounts of damage some enemies did. I even had a walkthrough for Super Metroid and I still couldn’t figure it out. It didn’t keep me from loving it though. It wasn’t until years later that I found how incredibly deep the gameplay in the game was. It’s now one of my favorite SNES games, and I didn’t even really grow up with it, at least not in the way most people did. That alone makes it deserving of inclusion in this list.
I would not be half the gamer I am today if it were not for the early-to-mid 90s. I love the whole 8-bit generation, I really do, but I don’t see how anyone could consider any generation to be the golden era of video games but the 16-bit generation. Of course, we don’t have to define eras so narrowly. I think the golden era lasted a few years before and a few years after that generation, and in 1994, that generation was at its brink.
IMNOTe
In perhaps a fitting way to end the year, Sony’s Playstation was released in Japan on December 3rd, 1994. It would be another 8 months before it reached American shores, but the message was clear: 1994 was the swan song of the 16-bit era. It was also in some ways the end of gaming’s innocence; in the years to come, games would become more mature, flashier, and based almost entirely on space marines. Simple, childlike games would (for the most part) be on their way out, leading to retarded 13-year-olds talking about how they don’t want to play anything colorful because it was “too kiddie”. Even at the time, at 6 and 7 years old (and in the years to come, and even now), I realized how fucking stupid this argument is. If you don’t want to play a game because it looks like it’s for kids than you are a fucking tool. There’s no way around it, no exception to the rule. You are insecure with your mental state. It’s kind of like the guys who beat women, work out all the time, and relax with a hot shower in the community male-only bathrooms at the gym. They’re obviously gay, and you obviously have trouble with people thinking you’re immature. Now, thanks to these asshats, we have brown, boring environments that are hailed as “beautiful enough to make a grown man cry”.
1994 may have been the apex of 16-bit gaming, but Nintendo and Sega still had some tricks up their sleeves. Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, Comix Zone, Super Mario World 2, Ristar and many others were still waiting to be released. 1994 may be gone, but it left an indelible mark on myself and many other members of my generation, and the aftereffects will be seen for years.
Oh, apparently games were also released in the arcades and for PCs in 1994. I’ll, uh… get to those later.
On Earthbound: A Precursor to a Developer’s Diary.
Well, I’ve mentioned it to some people already, but on the off chance that the site is being read by someone other than a few of my close friends, I’ll say it again: I’m making a game. I’m making it in RPG Maker VX. Yes, I know of the stigma associated with RPG Maker. I’ve worked with RPG Maker for somewhere around 10 years now, beginning with RPG Maker 95, and I can honestly say that, if you’re looking to just write a game, like I am, it’s phenomenal, because someone of my limited programming knowledge can make the game just about as complex or simple as they want. I still have trouble doing what I want here and there, but for the most part I can get just about whatever I want out of the system.
At the core, my feelings on game design are that it doesn’t matter how complex the game is, you can still make valid, even exceptional art out of it. Case in point? Earthbound.
A quick history, for those disturbed individuals who are somehow uninformed:
Known as Mother 2 in Japan, Earthbound is an RPG centering around a boy and his friends saving the world, just like pretty much every other RPG of the era. However, that’s where the similarities end. Instead of the same boring-ass fantasy setting every other game has (An aside: Final Fantasy is different. It’s usually a steampunk environment. Steampunk rules.), Earthbound was set in a modern environment, a skewed interpretation of America called Eagleland. The main character, Ness, is a 13-year-old boy who has to fight furious cups of coffee and deranged mummies to defeat the personification of evil and his right-hand man, Ness’s fat, cowardly neighbor, Pokey. The world of Earthbound is one in which you’ll encounter aliens, ghosts, demons, zombies, possessed statues, and monsters, right alongside the more “mundane” aspects of life, such as deranged cops, angry old women, exorbitant resort town prices, demented hippies, cultists, and pizza delivery.
The Mother series is quite popular in Japan. In America? Not so much. The original game in the series was originally set to be released in America (also under the name Earthbound), but was cancelled at the last minute. Literally. As in, the game was fully translated, localized, put through Nintendo of America’s censorship process, and even had a manual/strategy guide written. All that was left was to manufacture and ship the game. Then they decided, with the launch of the SNES in the same year, gamers would be too distracted to buy NES games, which is a valid concern, I guess, but considering that at the time Nintendo was sitting on top of a pile of money tall enough to be a hazard to aircraft, I don’t think releasing a game that likely would have been at least a minor hit would be a huge hit to the Big N’s profit margins, especially since most of the work was already done. For whatever reason, it wasn’t to be, but in 1995, Nintendo decided to give the game’s sequel a chance, and released it in America as Earthbound.
Nintendo has a reputation for snubbing Earthbound fans, but to be fair, they seemed to really try hard with the game’s release in America, giving it a gigantic, attention-grabbing box, including a free strategy guide with every purchase, and using a novel print advertising method, including a scratch-and-sniff page and a $10 off coupon. Unfortunetly, this kind of backfired, and honestly, I can see why. They went for a gross-out angle, using the tagline “This Game Stinks”, and the ads contained phrases like “not only does the game of Earthbound stink like some foul creature of the sewers…” and “burping, belching, gaseous monsters”. I understand the gross-out angle, it probably seemed like it would work pretty well, if the target audience was the under-12 crowd (and also idiots), but mother of Christ, they made it sound like someone just shit in a box and included a strategy guide. I, however, was 7 at the time, so I unashamedly enjoyed the advertising.
Anyhow, the game didn’t perform as expected, so NOA callously threw its hands up and said the game was dead to them forever. So far, across nearly 15 years of begging, pleading, and incredible displays of devotion, they haven’t reversed their position. In the meantime, a remake of the first two games and a sequel, Mother 3, have been produced for the Game Boy Advance. Part of the leadup to both involved the tireless work of the ever-optimistic, incredibly dedicated Earthbound fanbase, centered around what is quite simply the most amazing fansite in video game history: Starmen.net.
Founded in 1999 (as earthbound.net) by Clyde Mandelin (Tomato) and Reid Young (Reidman), Starmen.net is more than just the regular Geocities fansite that you still see sometimes from that era, with dizzying parallax backgrounds and content stolen from various places. In fact, it has a tremendous amount more content than even any video game website I’ve ever seen, official or unofficial. Enormous collections of fanart, animations, music, comics, fanfics, and even entire fangames. Most interesting to me, however, is the enormous collection of articles. Themed around any number of things from the state of the community to theories about mysteries in the game to comedic essays concerning character relationships. (The article section, dear readers, is what inspired me as a kid to become a writer. In fact, were it not for this article section, it’s possible that none of you would be forced to read this article as a polite favor to me right now.)
Perhaps most remarkable about Starmen.net, however, is the extraordinary work put into making the world (and NOA, especially) acknowledge Earthbound’s greatness. Several letter writing, envelope art, and call-in campaigns (The newest iterations of which are still ongoing, and I suggest you participate), 3 petitions (1 with 1850 signatures, one with 10,013, and one with an amazing 31,338, including 1200 that were handwritten), interviews in several major media outlets, and, perhaps most representative of the what this community can do that others can’t, the Earthbound Anthology, a gorgeous 268-page collection of fanart and information about the series and its seemingly cursed history in America. In addition to about 750 pages of art, it includes 6 CDs of fan-created music (SM.net’s own Rock Candy series and the Bound Together project) and 2 DVDs of various clips (one featuring xfixjmg6’s /earthbound live action prank series and one featuring a select group videos from SM.net’s fan videos section). This staggering collection, meant to represent the dedication, loyalty, and talent of the community, was sent to various media outlets, including EGM, Nintendo, Kotaku, Destructoid, and Gamespot, with the intent of creating an acute awareness of the series in the media which, hopefully, would lead to stories creating a big buzz around Earthbound’s then-pending Virtual Console release (which is now, sadly, a lost hope).
I would like to take this time to mention that, as a member of the press, I have not yet received my copy of the Earthbound Anthology. As a long time member of the Earthbound community, I feel that this wrong should be righted. I don’t think the book should be withheld from me just because I’m not an “important” press outlet with a “large readership” or any “influence”, or just because I have a “drinking problem” or “unpaid child support”. I’m still a member of the press, dammit! I will have my book! Or, alternatively, I won’t. It could go either way.
Now that you’re essentially caught up on Earthbound’s history, you might as well read the rest of developer’s diary, assuming I ever finish it. It’s related to Earthbound, because that is my primary influence in the game I’m making. If there’s one thing I can draw on for inspiration, it’s Earthbound. Case in point: all of the information in this article was drawn from memory. I’ve been fanatical over the series for nearly 14 years, so hopefully I’ll be able to figure out what it is that makes the game so magical. Next entry we’ll examine the game’s essence. Ok desu ka?
