@Wayneponeth
Maybe :D

@Red-Supernova
It’s just a lot of little annoying things. Like, just looking at Firered, every battle has like a full 10 second delay before it starts and they happen non-stop and everything has drawn-out flavor text and little animations and such. Like, you use a potion on a pokemon and it has to show the little animation of the potion blooping on the pokemon. So much of the game is just mashing the A button, you know? Even the running shoes don’t speed you up much and the bike is so cumbersome to use. I love that game, but damn it really does feel like they slowed it down just to pad its runtime :/

@Badumsquish
Even once you unlocked the Pokémon game’s running shoes and bike? If so then I don’t know how to answer that for you. I mean wild Pokémon do play a part in the slowness.

@Badumsquish
Play Pokemon Mystery Dungeon! It’s pretty damn fast and fun. :D

…Okay, maybe it’s pretty slow, but it’s worth it! :D

@Red-Supernova
For me, I just don’t like games that are just really slow for the sake of it. Like, it’s my biggest complaint with the Pokemon games, is they are dreadfully slow. Like, I play Firered on X2 speed on an emulator and it still feels kind of slow sometimes. When they use the slowness in a cool way, like when you’re doing a flawless run of Splinter Cell or Hitman than it’s super satisfying, but when all you’re doing is walking from point A to point B it shouldn’t be such a slog D:

@Badumsquish
No need to tell me. I’ve been playing Mother 3 since 2009.
Personally, I don’t mind Earthbound’s meandering walk speed. I’ve been playing it for so long that its just become a natural to me. At least the overworld isn’t one big map like Earthbound Beginnings’ is. That’s probably why the run command was added in the international release. Both the leaked rom and Wii U re-release.

@Red-Supernova
The sequel’s really good too. They made the battles much more active, like every single enemy has a beat in the music that you can tap the button to during your attack to do extra damage. Also they FINALLY added a run button. Like, I love Earthbound but the game is so bloody slow and cumbersome to get around. So much that people have made mods that add a run button XD

@Badumsquish
Well of course. Why wouldn’t they keep it in the sequel?

@Red-Supernova
I think it’s deliberate. Like, that game seemed to have too much attention to detail to have such a blatant thing be an oversight. Not to mention, it’s something they kept in the sequel too :D

@Badumsquish
Would you be surprised I never maxed out everybody’s levels until adulthood? The farthest I got was maxing out Ness’s level.
Yeah but that’s still using buffs and debuffs and tactics was something that incomprehensible to my dumb autistic mind of the past. If I knew how to comprehend strategies back then, I would have used that tactic.

Ha! It was probably an oversight on the developers’ end since Diamond Dog didn’t fade out when defeated but that’s still a display of mad tactics.
Its crazy that each boss has such a thing. I wonder if it was intentional?

@Clever Clovers
Of course. :/
Well, I hope the gameplay of the hack doesn’t effect how the original game will do for you since they’re very similar with some minor changes. Stuff like the game difficulty balance and how new maps are very choppy were a mix of intentional and a limit of what PK Hack could do. PK Hack is the software used to modifying Earthbound for hacking and it was made to be “functional” but according to Toby Fox himself, even with PK Hack, it wasn’t good enough to control Earthbound’s nightmarish code. Hearing that kinda makes since why the original game was almost cancelled until Satoru Iwata and HAL Labs jumped in to help. In Toby’s words “Earthbound was a game made by druggies.”
Today he hates the Halloween Hack most likely due to his inexperience and of course “product of my immaturity” and while the hack is very intentionally edgy, you can still see the origins of Toby’s writing and how certain elements would later be refined into Undertale’s and Deltarune’s narratives.
It would be cool to see someone make a remastered version of the Halloween Hack, fixing up all the problems Toby didn’t know how to fix at the time while still keeping the original hack’s spirit. I remember SiIvaGunner did something similar but that was just putting their high quality versions of the hack’s OST in the game.

I mean, that was the main reason,
but there were other reasons than that, like the fact that I honestly just wanted to see how good Toby’s Halloween Hack was. Presentation-wise it was astounding, but gameplay-wise it was kinda “meh” in my opinion. It wasn’t bad, but it certainly could’ve used some minor touch-ups.

@Red-Supernova
I know you can get through the game with just brute force, since like it’s actually not hard to hit the level 99 cap. Just, you really don’t have to. Spend a couple of turns using Offense Up as Paula and your entire party will have double attack, and then a couple of turns using Defense Down will drain their defense by a little under half. Not only will it give you enough of a power gap that you’re doing a lot more damage than you’d be if you level-ground, but it also forces a lot of enemies to waste turns trying to buff themselves back up: every turn an enemy uses Defense Up on themselves to try and undo what you did is a turn they’re not attacking you :D

Totally. Like, if you confuse him and “he bites himself”:https://youtu.be/nxi5FE3j0uE?t=77 it’s an instant kill on him. And it’s not an oversight either, pretty much every boss is at least 50% vulnerable to at least one of Flash, Brainshock, Hypnosis, and Paralysis. So if the boss has an instant-kill tactic you have a good chance of them killing themselves with it by Brainshocking them, and if they’re vulnerable to Flash you have a good chance of killing them instantly :D

@Badumsquish
Indeed it is…..in older games. I’m sure we still want this regardless as a staple feature in every kind of video game regardless of whether its cheating or not. I bet one of my friends would like that for Deltarune since I know that Chapter 2 is very stingy with save points.

I see.
What? I do not remember the Bags of Dragonite ever working against you.
And yet I’ve usually done brute force runs and rarely every touched buffs and debuffs. You sure you don’t have to do any grinding? Cause I’ve heard from people that they didn’t like how slow the game is and yet isn’t every RPG slow to some extent?
Wow really? All I remember doing with the Carbon/Diamond Dog fight is bringing one Multi Bottle Rocket to skip Carbon Dog and get to Diamond Dog right away.

@Clever Clovers
So you only played it to see Undertale’s origins? Personally I think playing the original game would be a wiser choice before going into the Halloween Hack due to how unbalanced everything is in there.

And the Halloween Hack’s version of Megalovania can be easily found on Youtube.

@Red-Supernova
One word: Megalovania. I wanted to hear how the version on the Halloween Hack sounded on actual hardware (or, at least, as close to actual hardware as I could do).

C’mon, it’s Megalovania, can you blame me?

@Red-Supernova
The biggest thing I love about save states is being able to save anywhere, anytime. Like, it’s so annoying when you’re halfway through a level, you need to put the game down and go do something else, and the game’s like “Lol no, enjoy losing all your progress!” I’m so happy that the “suspend” option is a thing in a lot of games now :D

Of course! I grew up in Texas XD

Totally, like it’s damage output is random. It can go as high as 4 digits and as low as like 100hp, and it has a chance of damaging a party member beside who used it. So like, Jeff could use it, deal a ton of damage, and then kill Paula as well. I kind of think that was the point with it too, since Earthbound is the kind of game where you basically don’t have to do any grinding or leveling up at all if you know which buffs and debuffs work. Every enemy, even the bosses, are at least decently vulnerable to one PSI attack. Like, Diamond Dog is super hard but you can confuse him with Brainshock he’ll himself with his diamondizing bite, or use Shield Beta on your party to reflect his bite back at him and kill him in one hit. Low level runs of that game are super viable thanks to how PSI and buffs work :D

@Badumsquish
Personally, my reason for using save states is because I have other games I want to play in my life along with three Gacha mobile games that update every day that I’d like to be consistent with to collect more of each game’s Gacha currency. I don’t have the time anymore to start over from the beginning of a level or a checkpoint when it comes to an older game, and I have mastered certain Modern Sonic games. It also has to do with my unhealthy addiction of wasting time by sleeping among other things and I don’t know how much time I have left in my life to play more video games.

I didn’t know you were into wild west settings to begin with.

You sure? They’ve always worked well for me.
In most of my playthroughs, I’ve always gone with running into battles without any buffs, debuffs or shields. Just pure brute strength, offensive PSI and healing items. Even though a lot of enemies can really cheap shot you during the first few hours. And if you think Earthbound was unforgiving with post-game over setbacks, then stay away from any Mystery Dungeon genre games.

@Machiavellian Mythos
Frankly, I think cheating is okay if you find something to be unfair within the rules of the game. A way to look at it, is I feel game design should be beholden to rules just like the player. When they pull stunts like that, objectives which are entirely luck-based, or forcing you to do excessive grinding, I find it to be fair to make use of bypasses, save-states, and speed-up-keys respectively. Especially when it doesn’t make the game easier, but just less frustrating; the Monkey Caves aren’t hard, like what @Red-Supernova said, they just suck.

@Red-Supernova
Wild Arms is about as close as anyone’s ever gotten to what I want :D

I actually never used the Bags of Dragonite. Since they can backfire, I think they’re too volatile a strategy. To me, Earthbound has too harsh a game-over mechanic to use all-or-nothing type tactics. I always had much more luck finding the enemy’s PSI weakness or relying on buffs and debuffs. Even the few times I wanted to go in hard and fast, I tend to go for Big Bottle Rockets from Jeff and then high-level PSI from Paula :D

@Clever Clovers
Why did you play the Halloween Hack before the original game?

I so agree with that method of how to approach each game. Personally Mother 1/Earthbound Beginnings can be considered optional if you aren’t willing to put up with how clunky 8-Bit JRPGs worked back in the day, but starting with Earthbound and then going to Mother 3 next is something I can’t stress enough of. I really hated when SomeCallmeJohnny said that you don’t have to even play Earthbound to appreciate Mother 3 and just go by Mother 3 alone and for that I say NO. HELL. NO. I don’t care if Earthbound isn’t as complex as any of Square’s offerings on the SNES and I like some of Square’s SNES RPGs, it is still approachable, not super hard and is still interesting even if it is weak story-wise. And as you said, it sets the tone for the series quite well so newcomers can understand how this series rolls and once they finish, can see how it evolves in Mother 3. Earthbound and Mother 3 are two of my favorite games of all time and I can’t help but feel that to fully appreciate them, you can’t skip either one as I feel they both hold up and are worth anybody’s time.
Also the last thing I want to add even though its cringe for people after they have experienced the Mother Trilogy is “then go after Undertale and its follow up Deltarune since they’re the closest things we have to getting spiritual successors to the Mother games.

@Badumsquish
Well the closest thing we’ve gotten is Wild Arms for PS1. Will that do?

Pfft! Come on man, skipping any part of Earthbound is…….no! Plus all the items you need to trade with in the Monkey Cave can all be found once you get the first two items out of the way. Plus you can get a Bag of Dragonite in the cave which is always good for making any boss fight of your choice go by faster. Also, just mute the game if the music annoys you. :P

@Badumsquish
Since I wasn’t going in blind, I made sure to nab everything I could get that the monkeys needed before going in.

Slightly cheating, but, eh.

@Badumsquish
Yeah, that does sound like it would grate on the ears after a while…

@Background Pony #2DBC
I appreciate how well they combined a conventional normal world, with modern-day towns and hotels and shopping malls with JRPG weirdness. I’ve always wanted to see more games do that. Like, Live-A-Live, a Japan-only RPG sort of does that but not quite. Like, it has a Wild West chapter where a gunman and a bounty hunter team up to defend a town from a group of outlaws, but the whole chapter is short and just like a puzzle: there’s no random encounters or real exploration beyond wandering around a tiny town and crafting traps to take out some of the outlaws to make the final battle easier. It’s cool, and it has ; like, I would kill a man for a full-length western-themed SNES-era game that was akin to Final Fantasy, with cowboys and indians and like horse-riding and oh man it’d be bad-ass :D

@Wayneponeth
@Clever Clovers
AVGN barely scratches the surface, too. There is just so-much amazing shit in that game. So much so, that there is only one single part that I hate: the godforsaken Monkey Caves. Like, I skip it with Gameshark when I play that game. Imagine a frustrating half-hour-long (at least) fetch-quest inventory-management puzzle where you have to listen to this the whole time D,:>

I shouldn’t eat that Treehugger’s brownies

@Wayneponeth
I watched that one too. It was an amazing episode!

@Badumsquish
You’re right, maybe I should take her out first…I know this great coffee place XD

@Badumsquish
I watch the AVGN video of it. I know how weird this game is. :P

@Badumsquish
Like Yatzhee said in Zero Punctuation: it’s like the story was made by a child rather than for one, and yet it’s condensed in it’s own universe.
In a moment you are fighting hooligans and hippies and annoying mothers who come back from shopping, then you are fighting aliens, robots, and dinosaurs, and by the time you realize the story went bonkers, you are fighting existencial entities, gods, and basically the equivalent of Yogh-Sottooh inside a mechanical womb.
And suddenly, it’s over. You are happy, you say your friends go back, and return home, where mommy is waiting to serve you dinner, tuck you into bed, and kiss you goodnight as she resumes her naked dancing with weird uncle Peter

And if you want more Earthbound (Mother in Japan), go play 3 and then 0 (or Mother 1, localization joke).
I actually recomend to all new Earthbound players to go to Earthbound - Mother 3 - Mother/Earthbound 0/begginings.

Earthbound so you can get the tone
Mother 3 so you can get more Earthbound
And finally 0/beginnings so you can appreciate how it all started
Then join the angry group of people who are still waiting for Odissey/Mother 4; but that is a story for another day