Caltrops - Reviews - Just for you! Review: The Greatest SNES RPG Of All Time

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by bink 03/06/2005, 1:35pm PST

When it comes to "greatest SNES RPG of all time," there are generally two camps: the Square fanboys who consider that title to go to Final Fantasy 3 (because it's so *BEAUTIFUL* and *EPIC*, you see) and some "hardcore" fag who only plays games in Japanese and would recommend Shin Megami Whatever version MCMLXVIII where you bind demons into your soul in order to create ten thousand useless items or something you'll never use. However, both of these camps are wrong. The greatest of all time is Earthbound. Although extremely simple (no customizable items, spells are linearly distributed based on level), with bad graphics and no plot to speak of, it featured a quirky sense of humour and extremely wild, funkidelic swirling graphics in enemy battles that made it massively fun to play totally baked out of your gourd. At several instances in the game you are encouraged to drink LSD-laced tea with Mr. Saturn (D@ING!) to commune with the Exposition Master who summarizes your plight while encouraging you to valiantly continue, and one of the status ailments is being "mushroomed" which randomly reassigns your D-Pad directions. The final levels were reasonably difficult what with the uber spellcasting Starmen who just happened to be supported by bots that auto-healed and exploded when you killed them. Also, the Cthulhoid final boss was genuinely creepy, after the fat kid receded into the background, that is. I'm still up in the air as to whether or not the bloated, annoying kid with a megalomanical complex manipulating a blind idiot god to wreak havoc on the popular kids' rejection of him was a stroke of blind chance or pure intentional genius on APE's part. I have a feeling that were this game being honest, the player would have been cast in the role of Pokey.