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"Earthbound might be the most personal game from the 16-bit era. It's a game that feel like its aware of you, testing you - you specifically - for the trials ahead."
(Spoilers ahead.)
Right from the start of the video (and peppered throughout the rest of it, too), I learned a lot more about Shigesato Itoi than I ever knew before. Granted, I didn't really know much about him before now other than that he was the Earthbound guy (that and the whole "he walked into the wrong theater as a child and was traumatized by what he saw, which resulted in Giygas" thing).
And yeah, Phil Sandhop (a guy I knew IRL and who worked on the original Mother English prototype that was later released as Earthbound Beginnings, as I've mentioned several times in the past) agreed that the whole "This game stinks" marketing campaign was pretty silly and kind of counterproductive as far as making people want to buy the game. I mean, I bought it, on the day it was released, but that was because I was told about it in a response to a letter I sent to Nintendo when I was somewhere in the 13-15 years old range, as I've also mentioned before. I didn't even see the dumb ad campaign for it until after I had already finished the game itself.
As for the rest, the video goes into a spoiler-filled essay about how Earthbound increasingly starts to crack the fourth wall until, at the end, it just shatters it completely. For me, to this day, it is still one of the most fascinating endings to a video game that I've ever seen. And, as I know I've said before, while Earthbound may not necessarily be the best game, or even just the best RPG, on the Super Nintendo[1], it was and still is absolutely my favorite. I'd say Earthbound is without a doubt in my top three
[1] - Chrono Trigger, for one, was probably a "better" game over all, and make no mistake about it, I, Kane Magus, love me some Chrono Trigger... but I still consider Earthbound to be above it on my "favorites of all time" list.
