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 box art (US)

“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:

EarthBound OST — Frank’s Battle Theme

This is unmistakably Johnny B Good, isn’t it?