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After a meteorite strikes the hilltop near his home, Ness goes to investigate and is contacted by an alien time-travelling bee. What the bee tells him will change his life forever.
I've tried playing this a few times in the past, but I always get my ass handed to me in Threed. A couple years ago at this point, I watched a VERY LONG longplay of this game from World of Longplays; the reason for its length was the player was grinding to raise his score. It didn't occur to me at the time, but in retrospect it made perfect sense: he was so buffed by the time he got to Threed that it was effortless. Not being a big fan of roleplaying games, I had always sought the quickest route to the next area, which is kind of logical for most videogames. Like I said once, I was a champion sequence-breaker when I was a kid; if there was a bit of the game that was too hard, too scary, or too time-consuming to take the developers' intended route, I would find the one bit that they didn't test for and use it to skip whatever I was trying to avoid. You can't do that in EarthBound. Well, strictly, you CAN... I mean, there is a pretty infamous glitch that you can use to clip through solid objects into much further parts of the game than you should be able to access at the time, but this game is cagey. It makes a huge number of calls to checksum routines throughout the game for anti-piracy purposes and to decide if you've broken the sequence or not, making it almost more time-consuming to do the glitch than it would be to play the game legitimately. Basically, it was designed to be a speedrunner's nightmare, in part because of the insane grinding you have to do in order to level up. Well, I say "insane"... modern games have far outpaced EarthBound in the grind department. "Insane grinding" to someone whose first RPG was Paper Mario.
What I'm doing this time around is, I'm doing like xRavenXP did— I'm grinding. I'm going back and forth and fighting the same enemies over and over so I can level up. I've been playing for 3 days at this point and I haven't left Onett. First, I went back and forth around Ness's house and fought Coil Snakes and Spiteful Crows for about 2 hours (made easier by the fact that the Spiteful Crows kept dropping Cookies so I didn't have to keep going back home and taking a nap to regain my HP). Then, I made my way into town and started fighting Runaway Dogs, then I levelled up high enough that Coil Snakes don't fight me anymore, but I still get EXP from engaging them (not much, but like Lloid says, "even 1 bell will help"). Now, I've made my way down to the hospital and the hotel and I'm fighting Pogo Punks and Yes Man Juniors (Yes Men Junior?). Pogo Punks are pretty low-hanging fruit, because they're plentiful, easy to defeat, give loads of EXP for defeating, and always drop Hamburgers, which WikiBound tells me replenish 50 HP. I wonder if there's a limit to how high my level can go in a particular area? Because I don't want to leave Onett until I look like Dwayne Johnson. Those dumbass zombies in Threed will see me coming and scramble back into their graves. Maybe I can make it as far as Fourside this time. I know there's more game beyond that, but I don't trust my interest will hold that long. We'll see.
