The Story of Earthbound but also not the Story of Earthbound. A Review of Earthbound from Boss Fight Books
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Welcome to Burning Books. I’m Caleb, and I want to help you love video games even more. Today I’m doing that by telling you the tale of the actor who almost died of crohn’s disease. See, already you love video games even more. Video games would never inflame your bowels enough to tear a hole in your small intestine. Unless you just don’t know how video games should be used.
Ken Baumann, the aforementioned almost dead actor wrote the first book in the Boss Fight Books collection, this one titled and about Earthbound. I’m reviewing all of the Boss Fights Books releases, so go ahead and subscribe and click the bell icon to make sure you don’t miss any of the reviews.
Have you read this book? What do you think? Let me know in the comments at the YouTube video page.
Full transcript
I expected this book to be just a collection of self-important memories artificially strung together to capitalize on shared nostalgia to satisfy the author’s ego. An “I’m so smart and my life so interesting that I can bring 200 pages of life to a single 16 bit cartridge” proclamation that would be hell to slog through. But that’s not all all what I got.
Instead I get an articulate, poignant, and incredibly enjoyable homage to the cult classic Super Nintendo game Earthbound with plenty of factoids and nerdy stories of the game’s development. In short, Ken Baumann’s book about Earthbound is exactly what a game like Earthbound deserves: a respectful exploration of the game, stories of a personal connection with the game, and the literary chops to package it all together into something wholly remarkable.
And rather than write with a specific agenda in mind, Baumann’s book is unapologetically explorative. In the early pages Baumann sets up that he hasn’t spoken to his brother in years. It’s never clear why, but the reader is lead to assume the siblings had a falling out. Baumann then sets up his hope that by he and his brother together playing and reminiscing about Earthbound dialog between them could reopen. Like the good novelist and actor that Baumann is, he leads with character and establishes the trajectory of a narrative. This isn’t a book full of interviews or a document of the game’s creation. It’s a personal story that, for better or worse, I feel could be about any video game. Earthbound just happens to be the catalyst. This is both a strength, and perhaps the book’s only weakness. But I’ll get to that in a bit.
As Baumann describes Earthbound and its insane cast of characters he pulls in seeming non-sequiturs about current events (current to the time, of course) to make associations that he himself acknowledges are surely not directly influential. The 1992 Los Angeles riots, the Rodney King beating in 1991, the kidnapping of a nine year old girl just 190 miles from the offices of Earthbound’s developers. All of this is part scene dressing and part simple attempts to contextualize and understand Earthbound…again, the book is self-aware of its explorative nature. Because the author is transparent with his own journey those seeming non-sequiturs are allowed to not be tangential to the narrative but integral to it.
At one point the author asks: “Does this game reflect my childhood, my relationship with my brother, the state of the world, the way I perceive pop culture?” and with that one question is revealed the one possible weakness of the book that I mentioned earlier. I feel like the author could have been given any artifact of his youth, not specifically Earthbound, and a similar book would have emerged. Now, this is very telling of the author’s ability to intellectualize his youth–and I respect the poop out of that– but as a fan of Earthbound part of me wants access to the perfect author for the job, the perfect voice with the perfect insight into the game that no other person could have. But then, just as quickly, I realize 1) that’s impossible and 2) this book isn’t really about Earthbound, and that’s actually great. If I wanted to read about the development of Earthbound I could read the starman.net archives. In fact, Baumann references those archives constantly as if to give overt direction to people who may be looking for a more Earthbound-y Earthbound story. No one can say that Baumann hasn’t given the reader plenty of exit ramps.
This is a story more about Baumann than it is about Earthbound, and as bait-and-switchy (click) as that may sound, please know that it works really, really well. And don’t get me wrong, the book definitely isn’t devoid of Earthbound goodness. I learned a lot about the creator (I had no idea he was in advertising and hadn’t developed a game before the Mother/Earthbound series). I learned that the English localization was done in such a vacuum that much of the spastic charm of the game wasn’t intentional; the writers only had bits and pieces of the dialog to work with at any given time.
At one point Ken Baumann ponders of his analytical approach what the reader must certainly be pondering as well: “I hope this project won’t exorcise my ability to enjoy Earthbound, but I suspect it will.”
I don’t know if it did do that for Baumann, but I can assure that reading this book only strengthened my love for the game. I’m sure it will do the same for you.
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Thank you for watching.
Research/Sources/Credits/Inspirations (this is not a comprehensive list, as that would be impossible, especially the “inspirations” items)
- By unknown, US Army Field Artillery School – http://sill-www.army.mil, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4409362
The following are YouTube videos licensed under CC BY 3.0
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJY3UQZwES4 (and others from this user)
Music Credits
8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
