You've come far, Ness

9/20/2025

I absolutely. LOVE. How Earthbound handles those weird psychedelic drink breaks in Saturn Valley and Tenda Village.
You accept tea or coffee expecting a heal, only to be thrust into this surprisingly sincere pep talk with one of the best songs in the game and one of the game's iconic psychedelic backgrounds. Nothing else I can remember has been so successful at making me go from laughing out loud to getting actual chills. It's so absurd and ridiculous, but the actual contents are really impactful. Because especially if you're struggling in real life (which who isn't right now), it doesn't just apply to the game, but to what the player is really experiencing.
The tenda Village one is ESPECIALLY well placed. "You may have cursed this neverending journey. You have known injury and defeat, but you have struggled on to reach this place." The milage with that line may vary, but for me it REALLY hit, because it was so fucking accurate LMAO. This happened just after some of the hardest parts of the game for me. Fourside and the places around it. Deep darkness. The pyramid and scaraba. Basically every sanctuary around this point. Each of these areas KICKED. MY. ASS. I was close to quitting multiple times. But I didn't. I needed to see this through, not only because it's the inspiration to some of favorite, most important games of all time, or because of how long I'd already spent, but because this story had just started to really grow on me. No roadblock was going to make me stop by that point, so I pressed on. And seeing that, quite accurately and directly, acknowledged by the game, really did make my jaw drop.

One stupid text scroll is genuinely enough to show me exactly why this game is so important to people For me it isn't quite as impactful as deltarune, or omori, but GOSH is it still a damn great game, and stupid good for the snes

Seems fitting that my first blog post ended up being about the inspiration behind my two favorite games of all time. It was originally going to be a post about silksong, but I just got to this section and I HAD to write about it.