Retro Corner: EarthBound: Beginnings (NES) Review · 3:14am Jun 6th, 2022
A new edition of Retro Corner Reviews is up, and we take a look at the Original Earthbound game on NES. After nearly two years Nintendo finally brought the Earthbound series to the NSO. Originally, both games were released on WiiU in 2015 after being absent for years on the Virtual Console. While the second title got a US release in 1995, the first one however was in a weird situation. It turns out the first game was already translated and ready to hit store shelves in 1991. Unfortunately, Earthbound NES — its original title before being renamed Beginnings as a subtitle — was never giving a reason as to why this was canceled. We can only assume Nintendo was worried about low sales considering RPGs weren’t as popular as they were in the later generations. I mean, it is the only conclusion that makes sense when the series is one of the company’s niche games.
For the game itself, like most RPGs from the 8-bit era, never age well compared to those on the 16-bit and 32-bit systems. Beginnings falls under this as time has not been nice to it with outdated mechanics. Now, that also could’ve been the reason for Nintendo to not release Beginnings when they thought it was probably too hard for American gamers. I mean, Nintendo did the same thing to the Famicom Super Mario Bros 2 only to replace this with an easier non-Mario title. Of course, EEB also had controversial visuals for the time as they removed some features and dialogue. An example being gore and cigarette smoking was present in the Japanese version from the enemies. Yet, the US port has removed these features altogether due to censorship laws. Sometimes censorship is used to remove things that shouldn’t be in a kid’s game as this was used properly here. Then there’s censoring games like Doom despite the M rating to appease angry pearl clutchers in the 90s.
