Earthbound Zero (1989 Japan, no US release)
It's a great time to be alive. Okay, most of the world pretty much sucks and a lot of us don't really know what to do, but having widely available fan translations of Famicom and Super Famicom RPGs almost makes up for it.
I was there in real time when console emulation and fan translation first blew up. This was around the late 1990s, when I was spending my summers grinding (new-to-me slang for "leveling up," or taking your characters from being weaklings to supermen, which most often involved long afternoons wandering this forest or that patch of ice where the monsters that gave the most experience were programmed to appear). I had beaten the two Final Fantasies for the Super Nintendo, and was jonesing for more. A whole grassroots movement had sprung up around campaigning for Squaresoft to translate or port Final Fantasy II, III (both NES), and V (SNES) to the US, and when Square apparently didn't seem willing, the fans took it into their own hands.
In contrast to the paucity of that time, nowadays there's a glut of official translations and ports. Final Fantasy V finally saw release in the US when it was bundled with FFVI as part of the Final Fantasy Anthology for the Playstation; Final Fantasy II was bundled with FFI and released as Final Fantasy Chronicles, also for PS1; and just last year, Final Fantasy III was remade for the Nintendo DS. The FFs are also slowly seeing their way to the Game Boy Advance (FF I, II, IV, and VI have made it so far).
All of the above is slightly off my main topic, which is a review of Earthbound Zero, because E0's origins are different. This game was not a fan job, but an official Nintendo translation / port of the Famicom RPG Mother that was completed and then shelved due to market conditions and the imminent release of the Super Nintendo. Before the project was cancelled, prototype cartridges of the English translation were made; one of these found its way onto eBay, at which point it found its way into hackers' hands. Said hackers then dumped the ROM (i.e., copied the game from the cartridge onto a PC) and threw it up on the Internet to be played on an emulator.
But Earthbound Zero and the fan translation scene are related for me because, as a lapsed RPG gamer now finding myself accepting that part of me will always enjoy equipping my Paladin with a Masamune and seeing his attack power double, I am very happy to be able to play "new" RPGs that are just like the ones I used to play when I was a kid, with the added control that emulators give the player over the game -- namely, the ability to save at any moment, which is essential for on-the-go gaming. At some point I'll graduate beyond all this old stuff...maybe when the new stuff becomes old and cheap/free.
Now I'm all written out...sigh. But E0 is good. :)
I was there in real time when console emulation and fan translation first blew up. This was around the late 1990s, when I was spending my summers grinding (new-to-me slang for "leveling up," or taking your characters from being weaklings to supermen, which most often involved long afternoons wandering this forest or that patch of ice where the monsters that gave the most experience were programmed to appear). I had beaten the two Final Fantasies for the Super Nintendo, and was jonesing for more. A whole grassroots movement had sprung up around campaigning for Squaresoft to translate or port Final Fantasy II, III (both NES), and V (SNES) to the US, and when Square apparently didn't seem willing, the fans took it into their own hands.
In contrast to the paucity of that time, nowadays there's a glut of official translations and ports. Final Fantasy V finally saw release in the US when it was bundled with FFVI as part of the Final Fantasy Anthology for the Playstation; Final Fantasy II was bundled with FFI and released as Final Fantasy Chronicles, also for PS1; and just last year, Final Fantasy III was remade for the Nintendo DS. The FFs are also slowly seeing their way to the Game Boy Advance (FF I, II, IV, and VI have made it so far).
All of the above is slightly off my main topic, which is a review of Earthbound Zero, because E0's origins are different. This game was not a fan job, but an official Nintendo translation / port of the Famicom RPG Mother that was completed and then shelved due to market conditions and the imminent release of the Super Nintendo. Before the project was cancelled, prototype cartridges of the English translation were made; one of these found its way onto eBay, at which point it found its way into hackers' hands. Said hackers then dumped the ROM (i.e., copied the game from the cartridge onto a PC) and threw it up on the Internet to be played on an emulator.
But Earthbound Zero and the fan translation scene are related for me because, as a lapsed RPG gamer now finding myself accepting that part of me will always enjoy equipping my Paladin with a Masamune and seeing his attack power double, I am very happy to be able to play "new" RPGs that are just like the ones I used to play when I was a kid, with the added control that emulators give the player over the game -- namely, the ability to save at any moment, which is essential for on-the-go gaming. At some point I'll graduate beyond all this old stuff...maybe when the new stuff becomes old and cheap/free.
Now I'm all written out...sigh. But E0 is good. :)
posted by Jon @ 10:40 AM
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