Is there another game that’s actually good but it has had a terrible effect on modern gaming?
Is there another game thats actually good but it has had a terrible effect on modern gaming?
Is there another game that’s actually good but it has had a terrible effect on modern gaming?
did it really affect gaming as a whole or do you just not like the ~5 imitation games
fpbp
as always some autistic manchild thinks his petty grievances mean something to the wider gaming scene or really anything at all (they don't)
>did it really affect gaming as a whole
Just see Undertale's success and all this western Earthbound-style games over-saturation.
I never played Undertale, but from the little I saw about it, it seems like it's a mix of many different elements that made it famous. Yes, Earthbound is one since the guy who made it did some romhacks for it, but he was also part of the fanbase of homestuck (a rabbithole I never really care enough to read much about but I know it's/was huge).
There were other games before Undertale that were influenced by Earthbound, like Yume Nikki.
Undertale is Undertale, it's not Mother. It was just influenced by it.
I've played Undertale and yeah, it's a pretty diverse mix. It's basically what happens if you put Earthbound, SMT, MGS, and Touhou into a blender. The creator actually points to MGS as his biggest influence, of all things. Makes perfect sense if one has actually played Undertale and aren't going off memes.
As for the whole "Earthbound inspired RPG" stuff, it's not really a thing. Gaming journalists made up the phrase because they're lazy and people started seriously believing it. Ironic to see on this website, considering how it makes a big deal about how stupid journalists are.
>As for the whole "Earthbound inspired RPG" stuff, it's not really a thing. Gaming journalists made up the phrase because they're lazy and people started seriously believing it. Ironic to see on this website, considering how it makes a big deal about how stupid journalists are.
Even the creators of these game advertise them as "a homage to Earthbound". Also many of them are pretty much Eartoubound reskins/romhacks.
Such as...? Certainly none of the ones in this thread. Even Undertale's influences are diverse and didn't play them up in its initial marketing.
It's silly how people claims there's "hundreds" of indie rpg that are like earthbound. The only ones I know that were inspired by it one way or another are:
>OFF!
>Yume Nikki
>Lisa
>Undertale
>some failed kickstarter where you play as the president of america
Of those, only the last one was being announced as an "rpg inspired by Earthbound" and is now forgotten.
>>OFF
Its creator literally said that he'd never played a Mother game when OFF came out
Yeah and Resident Evil was definitely not inspired by Alone In The Dark, the creator had said so
Since the game is French, it's more than possible that the creator never ran into Earthbound since it didn't originally get a PAL release.
Here some more:
>Omori
>Citizens Of Earth
>Crossing Souls
>Reverie (https://screenshots.gamerinfo.net/reverie/185543.jpg this one not the movie with the same name)
>Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass
>Why Am I Dead At Sea
>Space Funeral
>Alicemare
And that was all I could remember right now, not counting games that haven't come out yet.
I'm not going line by line here but Omori didn't advertise itself as an Earthbound homage and visually doesn't look that much like Earthbound. It's pretty obviously most influenced by Yume Nikki. I guess there's some connection in that Yume Nikki itself was probably Earthbound-influenced but you might as well call all RPGs "Wizardry clones"
I actualy personally think that most of these games have as much in common, as Doom and Contra have in common, they are games that share very superficial similarities but people insist on comparing them with Earthbound because I don't know.
there was this game that got memed hard on Ganker when it was released but I don't remember the name, I only remember that the mc was a hipster/onionsboy
YIIK: A Postmodern RPG?
==Part 1==
Homestuck was ridiculously and incredibly popular during the years 2010-2012, the webcomic was literally the second largest fandom on the entire internet only behind My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. However, during the middle of the year 2013 the fandom was rapidly reduced to a brutal level and in a completely sudden way, everyone got off the comic and jumped out of the fandom, overnight almost as sudden as its success began in the first place. There were multiple reasons why this happened, but one of the main reasons is that practically nobody liked the direction the story took during Act 6 and many simply preferred to drop the comic than to keep up the effort to continue reading it because they clearly weren't enjoying what the author (Andrew Hussie) was doing with the story. So despite a lot of people started and read Homestuck in the days that it was popular, the number of people who stayed until the end to finish and read the entire thing was ridiculously much smaller.
To see it, you only need to compare the next two videos, the first one is a fan video made at the peak of the webcomic's popularity. The second video is literally the credits sequence and the end of the webcomic whole story, uploaded on the official Homestuck channel, and the video was linked in the Webcomic as its last page.
>4,815,893 views
>679,056 views
The difference is TOO noticeable, especially when you take into account that the second video was only uploaded about 4 years after the first.
So by 2014 Homestuck was completely long forgotten for many many of the people that were really into it, many even just wanting to forget that they were even part of the fandom.
==Part 2==
At the same time during the year 2014 there was a generational shift in the Internet, many people who before didn't use the Internet at a very deep level, began to use it as those who were before them did, and several new fandoms began to appear that didn't exist before, which outnumbered even the level of following that Homestuck had during its peak. Part of the reason this happened is because Homestuck started in 2009 in an early internet era before massive Social Media was even a thing. By 2014 the internet was much bigger, and the vast majority of people who knew what Homestuck was, didn't want to hear about it anymore or talk about it anymore. Consequently, most people didn't know what Homestuck was.
So when Undertale came out in 2015 and the BOOM of its popularity happened, Homestuck actually didn't have much to do with it. Did Homestuck influence Undertale success? A bit yes, the vast majority (for not to said almost everybody) of people who decided to continue being fans of Homestuck to this day, are also fans of Undertale, and most of the people who decided to drop the webcomic and didn't finish it jumped fandom and became Undertale fans. This mainly helped in the initial push that Undertale had (because the game started as a Kickstarted project that received a humble level of support), but nothing more beyond just that really. 89% of people who were fans of Undertale and jumped on the game's boom in popularity during 2015 had never heard of Homestuck in their life or had any kind of interaction with the webcomic.
==Part 3==
And a good example of this is the debate that formed around the theme 'MeGaLoVania', since many Undertale fans were confused to find out that this music had been used before in a webcomic where Toby worked, and there were arguments regarding that if this was "San's theme" or "Vriska's theme", where the first side used as an argument that the music was first used in Toby's Earthbound Hackrom, therefore that music belonged to him and wasn't a 'Music from Homestuck'. For a while a lot of people had Homestuck just as this webcomic that Toby Fox worked on making music for it, before making Undertale.
Nowdays, most of the new people who hear about Homestuck and get interested in the webcomic, it is because of Undertale, so it is Undertale that ended up reviving and increasing the popularity of Homestuk, and not the other way around, and it has been this way for the entire life of Undertale since its release.
The funny thing is that the case with Earthbound is literally the opposite of Homestuck. During 2009 Earthbound, the game and its fandom, was incredibly niche, but with how passionate its fans were about the game, the Earthbound fandom grew year after year and was actually fueled by the generational shift. To the point that Earthbound became the gigantic monster that it is nowdays with a giant army of fans dedicating daily to make the game be played and known by everyone their voice can reach, because everyone wants Earthbound to be remembered as this "Hidden Gem that wasn't valued in its time", when nowdays Earthbound is more mainstream than things like Secret of Mana or Final Fantasy 4, because Earthbound has been played by more people than those other two games, hell in fact I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that more people have played Earthbound than Final Fantasy 6 to date.
==Part 4==
So, yes actually, Earthbound was the biggest factor that took off the popularity of Undertale, most people saw this game as its 'true new successor', let's not forget that literally Starmen.net made a subforum for Undertale, which was declared the official Undertale forum by Toby Fox.
The biggest irony in this whole fandom history?? It turns out that no matter what Toby Fox says about how much he loves the Mother games but, Undertale takes a gorilillions times more influence and inspiration from Homestuck than it does from Earthbound or Mother 3. The characters in Undertale speak and are written like Homestuck characters, or they seem to be fusions of some characters from the comic, even all the 'meta-commentary' that Undertale has comes from Homestuck (when in Earthbound and Mother 3 there is nothing like that, beyond a couple of Jokes where an npc breaks the fourth wall, and you can count with just one hand the times that it happens). And the reason why this is the case is because that's where Toby comes from, the first stories that Toby started posting on the internet were Homestuck fanfics and Homestuck fanadventures, according to what people who interacted with Toby back then have told me, I can't quote examples because Toby published them under other nicknames, but Toby also interacted with many of those who did Fanadventures in those years, in fact it is quite likely that Flowey is based on a Fanadventure where the character Rose from Homestuck fuses with an evil plant and then she becomes a evil flower girl with spikes. Undertale is written like a shitty Homestuck fanfic really. This whole thing is like a parody of itself. And that is the history of these Fandoms that I know of, as someone who has followed them since 2009, and everything I say is based on my personal experience and what I have watched, and heard from people I've talked to.
==5 and last==
I would say that the biggest problem isn't the influence that Earthbound had on the modern indie game scene, but rather the number of people who seriously didn't understand Earthbound and what it was about, as is the case with Toby Fox.
If you ask me my opinion of these 3 things:
Undertale: A fricking piece of trash, written like a shitty Homestuck fafic eww, and if you were impressed by its 'decision system', I just say that you have never played Fallout 1 in your life, overrated as frick, 2/10.
Earthbound: There are several great things about the game, but at the writing level it feels extremely incomplete, and at the gameplay/desing level it is filled with unnecessary things, who the hell play this game and doesn't think that the part about the 'No.3 moles' isn't filler?? Overrated, 5/10.
Homestuck: Unironically better than the previous two, and it's still trash. It has good characters and a lot of interesting concepts, but the way the story unfolds is a fricking mess. And it's filled with unnecessary stuff too, 5/10.
Moral of the story, why checking this stupid shit??, play Planescape: Torment instead, that is a game with a story with a lot of feelings and deep readings, thing which Earthbound doesn't do very well.
this was a very long advertising campaign for Planetscape: Torment; I assume a remaster is coming.
I fricking wish EB wannabes were actually good and captured the spirit of the original. They always feel like they are made by people who either played 5 mins on an emulator once to fit in or watched some sickly looking eShill go on a 3 hour gush about how its Jesus in game form.
Its a fricking monkeys paw wish, bunch of copies of the thing you liked, but they are all ass.
>I fricking wish EB wannabes were actually good and captured the spirit of the original
It's impossible to see that with Western games, since most Western story-focused games are cringe fest.
>Western story-focused games are cringe
>unlike my self-insert eroge VN with no subtlety at any point
Who are you quoting?
me 🙂
I don't know a single Earthboundlike aside from Undertale
Undertale doesn't even play like Earthbound. It's just move your little heart around, avoid getting hit. It's only associated because of the memes.
Frick odd and leave Op alone. He's not autistic for just saying what everyone is thinking. They churn out these earthbound Inspirations
Undertale certainly isn’t any worse than the 301st brown FPS
pong
Uh I don't think Earthbound had the kind of influence you think it does.
Serious question, what modern games did it influence besides Undertail? Most of the games like OneShot and Omori were inspired by Yume Nikki
You're dumb as hell
Half-Life
Also with Eartbound-style games being so popular, how games Japanese indie developers don't make any?
Random theory, but japan had a bunch of these quirky style rpgs, so it probably was successful but not a huge impact on gamers minds like it did for those in the US.
Good point. Still I was talking about modern Japanese indie games that follow Earthbound's formula.
there has been a good amount, but obviously you never see them in English. Like AN EARTH or saihate no hospital
Not really indie per se but Moon RPG or really any Love-de-lic games.
modern refers to the 20th century
Go back to class freshman
GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas
Dark Souls (not retro, oops)
Don't blame popular games, blame stupid developers for blindly copying what's popular without understanding why people liked it in the first place.
RE4
baseball cards
How is Yume Nikki earthbound inspired? Isn't more like LSD dream simulator?
>that one anon spamming all that pasta
didn't read lol
desperate for attention today aren't we? Out of pity, here's a (You), don't eat it up all that once. You see, fishing for (You)s is the equivalent of a fat girl bingeing on comfort food when she gets moody
Sonic 1
GTA's early 3D titles, which were undoubtedly revolutionary for their time, eventually led to the popularization of games focused on volume of content rather than its value.
I'm a proponent of the idea that developers, in an attempt to impress audiences with each new generation, slowly but surely began to artificially increase the length of their games.
This has gotten worse with each generation, but games like GTA3 and San Andreas are unique in the sense that, in large part thanks to them, dodgy producers and lazy developers have realized that throwing in a location that is grand in scope but with virtually no interactivity or purpose is enough to impress players.
For all its novel innovations, the GTA series has scarred the open-world genre with being mostly populated by criminally lengthy, mechanically dull and conceptually purposeless games.
Interesting take, but is it really GTA's fault? It seems like an empty open world is a pitfall for game design simply because it's hard to fill up and keep it interesting at the same time. Maybe GTA was just better at designing open worlds where others failed (Ass Creed comes to mind as a huge open world with almost nothing to really do)
It kinda set a bar on how much content a game needs in order to be considered worth buying on release. Excluding certain factors, people aren't going to buy a $60 game on launch if it lasts 8 hours and has no multiplayer over one that has "rich and open full world" that takes 40 hours to complete (even if they don't finish it or play for more than 2 hours) or that has co-op/competitive multiplayer.
Problem is that this didn't hold well on the streaming era. Back then people didn't had smartphones or as a many mainstream options to entertain themselves, so they could actually sit down and play a long game without issues.
What are you on about, GTA peaked with 4. GTA 3 was dull, got better with every game until 4 and then fell back.
Talking about 3D GTAs*
Thief: The Dark Project
Earthbound's influence on modern gaming is negligible. The game didn't sell well in America at all and was never released in Europe. Only recently has MOTHER developed a cult following in the West partially thanks to Smash, but Earthbound is still largely unknown to most people. Only game that really comes to mind is Undertale and like the anon above me explained, Homestuck was a bigger influence for Undertale than EB.
System Shock 2
Earthbound was only ever released in two regions one of which it bombed hard in. I'd be willing to bet the American indie devs who crib from Earthbound first played it via emulators.
Even then, the influence is for the most part just Wizardry run through a fishhead filter. The first-person menu combat? That isn't from Earthbound.
>Even then, the influence is for the most part just Wizardry run through a fishhead filter. The first-person menu combat? That isn't from Earthbound.
yeah, all these j-rpgs copied a lot from Wizardry and Ultima
Half-Life.
Great FPS and story, but everyone who tried to copy it got it wrong.
The thing with Earthbound is it had great storytelling and atmosphere, because it was written by a genius copywriter. And the quirkiness came naturally to Itoi. Earthbound imitators are pretending to be quirky and when they try to copy the darkness of Earthbound it gets especially forced.
i fricking hate indie developers trying to make 2D Sprites based Platform games, like that shitty shovel knight, frick nostalgia
Sprites are good. It's just that modern spritework is nowhere nearly as good as when it was the standard because that whole art form died out.
Modern spritework is inherently contradictory in its goals. It wants to look "authentically old", but the goal of the spritework they're trying to imitate was to look as modern as they could get away with.
yeah back in the day people didn't make sprites for them to look like "authentic sprites" from some bygone era but for them too look appealing
>Modern spritework is inherently contradictory in its goals.
Oh come on, it's an aesthetic choice. It's comparable with contemporary black and white movies
At this point its kinda like film grain in movies. It really only existed in home releases of older movies due to poor preservation, but it's gone on to be digitally inserted in modern movies as an aesthetic choice. There's a quote somewhere about the flaws of the old being embraced by the young.
You need to grow the frick up. Undertale has its own style that looks nothing like an NES game.
Did you respond to the right person? I didn't say anything about Undertale in that post, in fact I think it looks nice for what's largely a two-man budget game.
I like modern pixelshit, but none of them have a style on to their own, or rather the style they have is shit. You could tell a Natsume, Konami, Capcom, Hudson and Nintendo 8bit title apart because each company had its own feel or style to its games. Most modern ones dont feel like anything beyond just trying to use blocky characters or have some kind of vague modern artsy fartsy goal behind them. None of them, or very few, have a real personality to them and i feel thats the biggest flaw of modern retro wannabes.
I think it's more like
>Yume Nikki inspired by Mother
>Everything else is inspired by Yume Nikki
Amusingly and since both Undertale and Homestuck were talked about in this thread. Earthbound inspired Homestuck, and Undertale is inspired by Homestuck, lol.
What happened to that Mother 4 fan game?
This was good, but because everyone loved the opening Midgar section so much it gave Motomu Toriyama the leverage to drag the entire JRPG genre into a shithole of overly linear environments and unnecessarily convoluted storylines and whatever other shit ideas he has ever had.
Super Metroid is awesome, but is a huge part of the speedrunning cancer and the "you're not playing the game right" homosexuals that have become intolerable in modern times. People taking gameplay WAY to goddamn srs.
RE4 is fun but makes QTEs popular
RE2 is good too but starts the trend of horror games being more action and less spooky
Spelunkey
https://archive.is/7rc8J