A review by gengelcox
EarthBound by Ken Baumann

informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

I knew nothing about this video game before I read this book. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and my formative video game experience therefore is a bit more basic: Mattel’s Intellivision or Atari 2600 games, or even Commodore 64 games, rather than Nintendo. So why did I read this book about a game I had never played or even heard of? Because I enjoy discovery, and this book paid that back in spades. Not only does Baumann do a great job of explaining the impact of Earthbound on himself and his brother, and from that imparting how it affected a cult of followers, it also introduced me to Baumann himself, whom I had never heard of before this book. Hey, it’s impossible to keep up with every bit of entertainment being made, so forgive me if I didn’t even realize there had been a TV series called The Secret Life of the American Teenager.

Which, as Baumann notes, is an apt description of Earthbound, as it follows its main protagonist (whom you can name as you will, but is called Ness if you choose the default) and his attempt to save the world from a devouring evil name Gygas. The description of the game illustrates just how insane, and insanely hard, it is. I was able to pull up an emulation and played about 5 minutes of it, and decided it was better to read about than actually play. Baumann agrees at times, especially those points of the game where he had to repetitively kill things in a certain way to obtain a certain weapon, unsure why he’s doing so.

The point of the book is a rumination on childhood and being. What memories we keep from these things we obsess on when we were younger. And the theme of the game and Baumann’s life: how we are indebted to those we encounter along the way. 

I enjoyed the book and I’m looking forward to reading more in this Boss Fight Books series.