EarthBound

EarthBound features many traditional role-playing game elements: the player controls a party of 4 characters who travel through the game's two-dimensional world composed of villages, cities, caves, and dungeons. Along the way, the player fights battles against enemies and the party receives experience points for victories. If enough experience points are acquired, a character's level will increase. This pseudo-randomly increases the character's attributes, such as offense, defense, and the maximum hit points (HP) and psychic points (PP) of each character.

Rather than using an overworld map screen like most console RPGs of its era, the world is entirely seamless, with no differentiation between towns and the outside world. Another non-traditional element is the perspective used for the world. The game uses oblique projection, while most 2D RPGs use a "top-down" view on a grid or an isometric perspective.

In an unknown year of the 1990s, a meteorite crashes in Eagleland. In the nearby neighborhood of the crash, Ness and Pokey investigate the meteorite, where they encounter a small creature called Buzz-Buzz who came from the future. Buzz-Buzz reveals that in ten years the world will be engulfed in hatred by an alien force named Giygas, transforming humans, animals, and objects into malicious creatures. Buzz-Buzz enlists Ness to save the world by using a "Sound Stone" to collect eight melodies kept in sanctuaries scattered around the world. However, Buzz-Buzz is accidentally killed, forcing Ness to begin alone.

Travelling through Eagleland and other places to collect the melodies, Ness comes across many events and characters. In the Happy Happy Village, Ness rescues a young girl named Paula from cultists who abuse her psychic abilities after being influenced by a Mani Mani statue created by Giygas. After falling into a trap in Threed, Paula summons child scientist Jeff, who travels from Winters with his father's flying saucer. Reaching the seaside resort Summers, Ness gains a vision of Poo, the prince of Dalaam, who joins the party after completing his "Mu Training". With his three companions, Ness successfully fills the Sound Stone.

EarthBound Beginnings was released for the Famicom in 1989 in Japan. Its sequel, EarthBound, was developed over five years by Ape and HAL, and published through Nintendo. The game was written and designed by Japanese author, musician, and advertiser Shigesato Itoi, and produced by Satoru Iwata, who became Nintendo's president and CEO. Mother 2 was made with a development team different from that of the original game, and most of its members were unmarried and willing to work all night on the project.

Mother 2's development took much longer than planned and came under repeated threats of cancellation. Itoi has said that the project's dire straits were resolved when Iwata joined the team. Ape's programming team had more members than HAL on the project. The HAL team (led by lead programmer Iwata) worked on the game programming, while the Ape team (led by lead programmer Kouji Malta) worked on specific data, such as the text and maps.

In Japan, Mother 2 sold 518,000 units, becoming the tenth best-selling game of 1994 within the country. EarthBound was released on June 5, 1995, in North America. The game sold about 140,000 units in the United States, for a total of approximately 658,000 units sold worldwide.

Though Nintendo spent about $2 million on marketing, the American release was ultimately viewed as unsuccessful within Nintendo. The game's atypical marketing campaign was derived from the game's unusual humor. As part of Nintendo's larger "Play It Loud!" campaign, EarthBound's "this game stinks" campaign included foul-smelling scratch and sniff advertisements. GamePro reported that they received more reader complaints about the game's scratch and sniff ad than about any other 1995 advertisement.

EarthBound was listed in 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die, where Christian Donlan wrote that the game is "name-checked by the video gaming cognoscenti more often than it's actually been played". He called the game "utterly brilliant" and praised its overworld and battle system. Similarly, Eurogamer's Simon Parkin described it as a "sacred cow amongst gaming's cognoscenti". Game journalists have ranked EarthBound among the best Super NES games and most essential Japanese role-playing games, and at least three reader polls ranked the game among the best of all time. For a piece about the "top worlds" in video games, IGN rated EarthBound's setting among the best, indelible between its unconventional environments, 1960s music, and portrayal of Americanism.

Kotaku described the game "as one of the weirdest, most surreal role-playing games in RPG history". Examples include using items such as the Pencil Eraser to remove pencil statues, experiencing in-game hallucinations, meeting "a man who turned himself into a dungeon", and battling piles of vomit, taxi cabs, and walking nooses. David Sanchez of GameZone wrote that EarthBound "went places no other game would" in the 1990s or even in the present day, including "trolling" the player "before trolling was cool". Localization reviewer Clyde Mandelin described the Japanese-to-English conversion as "top-notch for its time".