Sacred Reviews: EarthBound: Hallow's End Review · 7:57pm Oct 22nd, 2022
A new edition of Sacred Reviews is up, and we tackle a hacked EarthBound just in time for Halloween. The thing about rom hacks is these fan programmers make it harder than the vanilla games. An example of this is from Zelda: Parallel Worlds that despite being based on A Link to the Past — a game known for its easy difficulty — is actually challenging with cheap level designs. Now, the EarthBound fan games on the other hand are programmed with fair difficulty on most instances. Except for Toby Fox’s Halloween Edition, there are often not that many riddled with cheap gameplay that tests a player’s patience rather than their skill. Another thing these change up is the theme and aspects of the story by providing us a “else-world” type plot. Think of these hacks as their version of Marvel’s What If series where things play out differently than the usual tale is told.
Now, Hallow End was developed over a decade ago at a point where the supposed armchair analysts claimed how rare the game was. In truth there is nothing rare about these cartridges especially the second one that this niche fandom made it out like during the 2000s. While it is also true for internet sellers to overcharge these games — plastic wrapping the whole package when these releases never were originally — that doesn’t necessarily mean, they were rare. Due to Nintendo taking so long to bring the series to the Virtual Console from the late 2000s to the early 2010s might be the reason so many hacks came out. The Halloween theme hack follows a vastly different story while keeping the true nature of what makes EarthBound. On one Halloween night a trio of kids named Sally, Craig and Clyde were doing their usual yearly trick or treating. Then after entering one house on the edge of town and leaving after finding no one there, the townspeople act indifferent towards them. That is when they see actual zombies and ghosts wandering around and coming from a tunnel leading out of Maysville. That causes the trio to investigate why monsters have appeared and adventure to find out why people in their town don’t recognize them.
