EarthBound — A Quirky Artistic Synergy of Story, Art and Music
In fact, there’s many ways how the three elements writing, artwork and sound can play together. There’s AAA titles with cinematic writing, photorealistic graphics and epic orchestral music on the one hand. Another good example is the “Super Mario Odyssey” world “Steam Gardens” with its funky vibes due to a coherent artistic feel of character design, graphics and audio. But today, we’ll go back to the Super Nintendo era to have a look at one of the strangest games Nintendo ever created: “Earthbound”.
“Earthbound’ — or “Mother 2” as it is called in Japan — is a bizarre and goofy RPG game set in a modern time environment heavily influenced by Western pop culture. It was produced by Japanese actor and writer Shigesato Itoi and was released in the US by Nintendo in 1995.
The game starts with main protagonist Ness waking up in the night because of a strange loud noise. He gets outside to find out a meteorite has crashed on a hill nearby. A bee-like creature from the future explains Ness he has to stop the evil Gigas by finding 8 melodies and save them in a so-called Sound Stone. Ness meets three other characters on his quest and they experience a very quirky story on their way to stop the thread from outer space.
The graphics are quite colourful and I really like the playful art-style which has aged pretty well in my opinion. There are very interesting but strange aspects to the graphics such as a psychedelic background animation in battle encounters just to name one.
The music is where EarthBound shines, too. It is full of quotes from Western pop music and also relies heavily on sampling with things likely taken form records of The Beatles, John Lennon and the Beach Boys. These artists were main influences for the soundtrack according to composers Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka. But the most striking example of a musical reference can be found here:
This is unmistakably Johnny B Good, isn’t it?
But how about diving into the first example from the game’s beginning? Here you are, just woken up from a noise of a crash. The background music consists only of the sampled sound of crickets and police sirens in the distance.We can hear added effects of opening and closing doors or the footstep sounds when exploring your house. This gives the scene a very urgent and unsettling feeling. It also complements the setting nicely as it is very late at night.
But once you got outside a synthesiser which sound like directly taken from an old B-movie and percussive sounds are replacing the police sirens playing out before. This complements the quirkiness of the game and emphasises that you might find a thread from outer space on top of that hill:
Let’s turn over to one area where EarthBound has found a clever solution to a thing most other RPGs struggle with up to this day: The Battle music. Remember the battle music from Final Fantasy VI? It is a great composition on it’s own but after playing the game for some time it gets repetitive.
EarthBound tries to solve this issue by playing a different battle music based on the enemy type you are fighting against. These tracks are generally pretty goofy and quite short as they restart with every enemy encounter anew anyway. A psychedelic background animation changes together with the music based on the given enemy type: Here’s the battle scene for a weak opponent:
This is the battle music for weird enemies you’ll meet a lot in this game :
And you can also find one tune for flying enemies just to name a few battle music versions. The quirkiness of these battles is perfectly reflected in the various compositions which fit together nicely with the hypnotic background art and the loads of weird enemy sprites found in EarthBound.
I also absolutely love the themes for the cities in this game. As you usually are in a safe environment here, the music of the city areas nicely complements the playful style of the game. It is usually not as goofy as other music we can find but it’s very catchy instead. Let’s have a listen to the theme from the 4thtown called “Fourside”:
Let us sum up what we looked at: EarthBound is a quirky and pretty special RPG taking place in a modern-day environment with clever and funny writing all throughout, very strange enemies, playful graphics and music which mirrors this bizarre game very nicely.
The game sometimes uses ambient sounds instead of music. Earthbound invented a clever take on RPG battle themes with individual compositions based on the enemy type you are fighting and it has very catchy town themes that will stick inside your head for days.
