EarthBound: A Modern-Day Storybook - Part 1

Today is a day of two firsts for Binary Narrative.  For one, today's article is the first of many future articles that perform a literary analysis of a specific work of interactive fiction.  I hope to do many of these from time to time, maintaining my anti-spoiler policy as much as possible, of course.  Secondly, for the first time we have a guest writer.  My colleague Wesley Rea has written a two-part, spoiler-free analysis of a classic RPG. I hope you enjoy it!

A Modern-Day Storybook (Part #1 – Art and Music)

If you were like me as a child, you adored spending indeterminate amounts of time wallowing in the adventures contained within children’s books.  As kids, we could not help but dream of that life that we thought was possible; that life of super heroism, intrigue, mystery, action, etc., where we were the commanders of our destiny and the writers of our lives.  As we grow older and realize that our childhood dreams were the stuff of mere fancy and impossible thinking, we still cannot help but hold out that sliver of hope that all of those fantastic adventures we read about as children could actually happen in our grown-up lives.  This has certainly been the case for me, and undoubtedly is the same for many of you readers.

EarthBound is the game that I personally feel captures this spirit of our childhood that no other game since then has been able to do.  In it, one will find a modern-day storybook written for both children and adults to enjoy.  I feel that the game accomplishes this through the use of its unique child-like art style, the musical choices made that invokes nostalgia, and a story that manages to take every trope of our childhood dreams and weave them together into a masterpiece understandable to any generation. For the purpose of this blog post, I will only be covering the art style and music, and will leave the story portion for a future post.

The Art Style

When one first glances at the artwork in EarthBound, they might think of it as childish and amateur.  While this may be true to an extent, it does not automatically follow that this is actually a bad thing.  I feel that this was a specific design choice made on the part of the artists’ in order to evoke a particular child-likeness and simplicity, not unlike how the Peanuts comic strips had a simple art style in order for the reader to understand what life looked like through the eyes of a child.

Considering that the game itself was marketed towards children and/or those coming out of childhood in the first place, it makes sense that the graphical style might mirror, in some way, the types of things they were used to: namely, children’s books and comic strips.  It is an easily accessible art style to them because it is what they have become accustomed to seeing.  In this way, it is something that is uniquely childlike, but that does not mean it is necessarily childish.

As one plays through the game, it is clear to see that these “simple graphics” are not as simple as they first appear.  As you start from your house in Onett and make your way through the many other locales featured in the game (not the least of which being a sprawling seaport), the graphical style gets increasingly more intricately detailed, differentiating between blades of grass, types of flowers, tree roots, the slight cracks in stone walls, and on and on it goes.  It is plain to see that the art style in EarthBound is not merely one of simplicity, but is one that finds the beauty of simplicity amidst the complex.  On the whole, it seems simplistic, but the deeper you dig into it, the more complex parts start becoming more apparent, to the point where everything starts becoming more… alive.

Which, incidentally, is exactly how a child views the world. Anybody who has been around a small, talking child for more than a few minutes knows the type of curiosity they possess, and their incessant way of asking, “Why?” to every explanation only reinforces their view that the world is alive and full of things to discover.  This is what I felt when playing EarthBound, that this sprawling world is alive and full of things for me to go and discover.  I feel that the art was designed so masterfully and purposefully in order to achieve this desired effect within people, which goes to show just how ingrained this childlike sense of wonder and discovery is in our minds, even as we grow older.

The Music

Personally speaking, if there was one single soundtrack that I could have playing throughout my life, the one for EarthBound would be it.  I cannot recall any other soundtrack to anything being so simple, yet so multi-faceted to encompass any particular feeling one has.  While there are not many songs that one could describe as “epic” in the game, I feel that the beauty of the soundtrack has to do with, strangely enough, its lack of desire to be truly monumental and earth shattering.  It finds its functionality within the limited framework of the Super Nintendo sound chip and does what it does pragmatically, but not without invoking that sense of nostalgia within the listener.

It is always hard to describe the sensation one gets when listening to a particular piece of music.  From my own standpoint, I can maintain that the emotions that well up within me when I hear particular instrument sounds or melodic patterns are subjectively beautiful.  To others, that same music may sound like incessant noise with no beauty present at all.  I cannot fault others for not sharing the same musical tastes as myself, so I can only invite others to try to enter into my shoes and hear what I hear and see if they agree or not.

From the very beginning of the game, the sounds of the surrounding environment are important to the atmosphere.  While there are pieces of battle music present within the prologue, it is mostly the noise of the outside environment that sets the mood for the player.  After the prologue, the first piece of music that we hear as Ness walks outside into the sunlight is “Let the Adventure Begin” (also known as the theme song of Onett, Ness’ home town).

This sets the stage for all of the music that comes afterwards.  This is the first piece that truly has to grab you and pull you into the story, and from my standpoint, I think it does an amazing job.  The title alone indicates that this is going to be the start of the adventure of a lifetime, and what an adventure it turns out to be.

I could go on and on for many, many pages worth of my thoughts and opinions on the music of EarthBound, but I will leave off with only one more song for the reader’s listening pleasure.  It is entitled “Smiles and Tears,” and is one of the end-game songs.  Without getting into spoilers, I can definitely assure you that the story to this game has its fair share of both smiles and tears for the player to experience and enjoy, and this song perfectly captures the bittersweet nature of the themes present in the plot of this game.

The very nature of this song is designed for you to feel nostalgic and make you remember everything you have experienced in the game thus far.  Your hopes. Your dreams. Your friends. Your family. Everything.

I have gone on long enough for now, so I will leave the discussion of the story of EarthBound for an upcoming second part of this series.  Big thanks to Thaius for giving me this chance to write about something that is near and dear to my heart.

Until next time… keep smilin’.

[All images came from starmen.net, one of the largest EarthBound fan websites on the internet today. The YouTube videos are not mine, so credit and thanks go to the uploaders and, most importantly, the composers of the music and designers of the games.]