Was it bad marketing? Many RPGs saw success in the West, Sega even had a "problem" where their RPGs were so successful but they never had enough copies due to deliberate internal sabotage. Earthbound however, I think the tagline is on point - it's not very fun. Maybe that's why it sold so poorly.
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It's easy to emulate.
>2022
>earthbound is now a troony reddit game
I fricking hate these freaks so much
Which is funny since Mother 3 makes fun of trannies
No, it normalizes them. Itoi said in an interview this was the point.
I don't care what he says, I care what he portrayed
He successfully normalized them to you.
what the frick are you talking about
>the troony is in the bath with a naked boy
Kek you can't make this stuff up
>>2022
Eearthbound has been a troony reddit game for at LEAST 10 years
The game would have flopped no matter what.
their gross approach was a gamble that didnt pay off
if it did this same shithead would be praising it
Earthbound wasn't even a flop. It sold just about as well as any other 16-bit RPG in America. The whole narrative of nobody appreciating Earthbound when it came out is fiction to stop you from questioning why a relatively common game commands such outrageous prices on the secondhand market.
I guess west simply wasn't ready for a quirky rpg on snes in 1994, plus, Itoi was a completely literally who outside of Japan.
Maybe Earthbound just isn't a very good game, and all the "good" marketing in the world wouldn't of changed that
objectively terrible games can find success with good marketing
see undertale
Game quality matters not
I got a physical copy for my birthday. There was advertising in Nintendo Power and I asked my parents for it because it looked cool. I think it was more expensive than a normal game because of the included strategy guide.
people don't really mention this but pokemon was a game heavily inspired by Earthbound and became a worldwide mega hit only a few years after Earthbound was released
Earthbound looked like shit compared to the competition. Sure, now there's a market for quirky, simplistic looking RPGs, but Final Fantasy VI had already been released in the US a year prior. Comparatively, Chrono Trigger came out in the US two months after Earthbound, and looked spectacular with its sprites. Why the hell wouldn't you wait for that, if you were saving up for a game?
Earthbound would not have done any better with good marketing I don't think. The idea was a very hard sell even for the few RPG fans at the time. Most of those RPG games weren't localized, and the few that were werne't big sellers, so a game that is something of a parody of those games falls flat. "What if JRPG... was set in 1950s America?" is a good concept you could market it with, but most people didn't know what JRPGs were! Earthbound needed to wait until that genre was established in western markets before it could actually be understood properly.
JRPG isn't a real genre, stop saying it. Use TrueRPG and CYOARPG. TrueRPG's harken to the genres origins in Ultima and Wizardry, titles such as phantasy star, motherbound and dragon quest. CYOARPGs started in the 90s and are notable for prioritizing choice and consequence in game play.
Okay idk if you're doing a joke or not, but uh.. what you're saying isn't going to help people in the mid 90s understand what Earthbound is and why they should play it any better.
People should probably skip the mother games in general, they're not good.
I remember seeing ads for it all the time as a kid. It just looked weird to a kid growing up in the rural midwest.
there wasn't a big enough audience for RPGs in the US at the time for a quirky deconstruction of that already niche genre to succeed. putting the cart before the horse