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"When the Nerd finds a copy of Nintendo Power exuding a belief that EarthBound was a rotten game, he later finds reviews that show how glamorous the game was and reveals a fanbase for a title he now has to play. So he does – via the Super NES Classic Edition – and provides an insight about the game's various flaws but well-thought out gameplay. This is Angry Videogame Nerd episode 156"
(Copy/pasted, with some modifications, from a Facebook post and comments I just wrote a few minutes ago, which I have merged into a single post here.)
He's not wrong, even with his nitpicks.
Well, maybe his theory about Giygas at the end is pretty out there, though if you're basing it just on what is presented in EarthBound alone, it's not bad. It's just that Gigyas was already established as "merely" an alien in the first Mother game. Of course, most Americans didn't get to play that game until many years later.
Also, a bit of trivia: I worked with Phil Sandhop for several years at a software testing company in WA. This is the same Phil Sandhop who had previously worked for Nintendo on, among other things, the English version of Mother (now known as EarthBound Beginnings). I asked him one day about Mother/EarthBound, and one of the things he said was that he thought that whole "This game stinks" advertising campaign was actually pretty detrimental to the success of EarthBound, and I could see that being the case. I'm glad I got to talk to Phil about it. I'd had no idea he'd had anything to do with EarthBound Zero/Beginnings until I just happened to see his name and picture in an article about the game. Here's an interview that Phil did with a guy from Starmen.net a few years ago.
What sold me on EarthBound back when I was a kid, though, was not the advertising, but a response I got to a letter I wrote to Nintendo of America asking them about upcoming games for the SNES, and they mentioned EarthBound, talking about how it was a RPG but set in modern times, with items like ATM cards and such.
EarthBound is my favorite game on the SNES, bar none. It may not be the best game, but it is my favorite, for all of its flaws.
(And, yeah, I started watching AVGN again, after previously deciding I was going to stop doing that. Or, at least, I watched this particular episode, anyway. I may get back into it in general though [unlike Channel Awesome/Nostalgia Critic, which is dead as shit to me now].)
