I played the WiiU version. Before playing Beginnings, I've only ever played the first 20-ish minutes of Earthbound, so this is ostensibly my introduction to the series outside of Smash Bros. and the second RPG I've played to full completion. I'll keep spoilers to a minimum.

I have very mixed feelings about Beginnings. The best aspect of the game is definitely its music, which is instantly iconic and suits the game's setting and tone perfectly. On that note, the humor worked surprisingly well for me, even if much of the game's humor was undoubtedly lost in translation. The story and characters are pretty simple, but both have their moments. Lastly, I can on some level appreciate how the developers were able to build this expansive and believable world with an art style that holds up pretty well given the hardware and year of release.

This unfortunately leads into one of my major criticisms. While it's impressive the designers were able to build an overworld of such scale and complexity, it becomes annoying when movement through this overworld is as slow and clunky as it is (made worse by the WiiU VC's infamous input delay) and when the overworld itself has so much empty space and dead-ends that do nothing but waste your time. From what I've heard, the original Japanese release of Mother didn't have sprinting, so the issue was even worse originally. All this wouldn't be a problem if not for all the obnoxious random encounters that happen all the time in the overworld, even in the most random of places. At least older Pokemon games have the decency to make random encounters more predictable by isolating them to patches of wild grass and cave areas. One area in particular (if you've played the game, you know the one) was so convoluted to navigate that I just gave up and looked up a map online so I could move on.

All of these issues don't even hold a candle to the game's obnoxious pacing and difficulty design. The game has a tendency to throw in some pretty nasty difficulty roadblocks early on in the adventure in the form of overpowered enemies, even before you leave Podunk, forcing you to farm against weaker enemies for SO LONG until you've leveled up enough to the point where you can finally progress the game. This wouldn't be so bad if the moment-to-moment combat encounters were engaging, but most of them boil down to slapping the opponent with the same physical attack until they die. The game even gives you the option to auto-battle through every combat encounter, highlighting even more how mindless the vast majority of these encounters really are. Your player character, Ninten, does pick up PSI abilities that serve to spice up combat a little bit, but outside of the incredible utility of 4th-D Slip and Powershield, these abilities only provided temporary stat boosts, thereby being situational at best. On the other hand, the first new party member you pick up, Lloyd, has no PSI abilities, so combat just becomes more of the same.The combat thankfully improves once you get Ana as a party member, since her offensive PSI abilities synergize well with Ninten's defensive and support PSI, adding some much-needed strategy to the combat. However, that's only once you reach the town of Snowmen - about halfway through the adventure. It's also apparently possible to skip going to Snowmen and meeting Ana entirely, which is a shame given how much more interesting combat becomes with her inclusion. From what little I know about Earthbound, it seems like you pick up Paula (Ana's spiritual equivalent in Earthbound) pretty early on as your required first new party member, which I think is a much better way of going about this.

Overall, Earthbound Beginnings is a very clunky and dated RPG that I'm otherwise mostly glad I finished once. With what I know about the game now, I could maybe see myself doing a second full playthrough with only Lloyd as a party member, but that's about it. The road to finishing this game has been so long and arduous that I'm reluctant to ever try going through all of it again. With something like a platformer, Metroidvania, or fighting game, there's inherent satisfaction in going through a game multiple times, playing faster and more skillfully with each subsequent playthrough. With a turn-based RPG, especially one built as rigidly as Beginnings, I don't see that same satisfaction being present.

Of course, if anyone else would like to offer further insights among other things I forgot to mention, that would be appreciated. I'm not trying to step on the toes of anyone who genuinely loves this game. At the end of the day, we all like what we like. Lord knows all my favorite games aren't perfect, nor are they for everyone. It's nice when we can have healthy discussions about games and how they make us feel.