Strange, Funny... Heartrending?
Strange? Funny? Heartrending? Besides the (hopefully intentional) reference to the ancient slogan for Nuprin--Little. Yellow. Different.--this is a new direction for Itoi and the rest of the EarthBound folk to take. The game that I, at least, became obsessed with seemed more than anything else to lampoon those strange and heartrending RPGs it competed with on the SNES stage. There was no party member making the ultimate sacrifice, unless you count the Not-Bee; and aside from Bubble Monkey struggling to find love with... well, another monkey, there wasn't a whole lot of romantic pathos going down until the very end of the game.
But "Every line really hits you," Paid Spokesperson maintains. Now, ever since a "friend" told me J-Pop was great--"Just try it, it definitely isn't just vapid prepubescent Engrish howling to a Debbie Gibson backbeat!", they lied--I've struggled to trust the Japanese, but this part worries me. Did every line in EarthBound really hit you?
What about this one: "Last night there was a solitaire tournament...I lost my shirt..." Now, I suppose you could read it as an Ingmar Bergman character, cut to a scene of a window shattering for ten minutes in slow motion, and then have a narrator shout "WEARELOSTTOOURSELVES!" while a child cries in the corner of the frame and then hop on the pathos train, but really--a lot of EarthBound sounds like it was written by a guy who used to work on the Jack Benny show, all somewhat-dated one-liners and slapstick comedy, and that was part of the charm. If Itoi has seen fit to turn it into the last season of Friends, which consisted entirely of David Schwimmer looking sad to Enya songs, I'll--well, I'll play it and I'll like it, but it won't be the same.
Now, admittedly, there are a lot of things that are strange and funny and heartrending that do just fine; Annie Hall, one of my favorite movies, is a pretty good example. But the dynamic I think EB 2 would be best served to emulate is that of the TV show Scrubs. For those of you who don't watch it, it manages to incorporate the incredible, surreal comic fantasies of its main characters into the story--when Turk, a surgeon, tries to get ahead with his boss, he attempts to do him a favor only to be surrounded by scores of Ninja Surgeons out to do the same thing--into a comedy that, at the same time, features a significant amount of character drama. If Our Pal the pop star is exaggerating somewhat (perhaps the tears come naturally, whenever she remembers how her voice sounded before the ravages of J-Pop), maybe that's true. Maybe I'm worrying about nothing. Because there's nothing wrong with being strange, funny, and heartrending, but if you do too much of any of them you turn out a pastiche.
Strange? Funny? Heartrending? Besides the (hopefully intentional) reference to the ancient slogan for Nuprin--Little. Yellow. Different.--this is a new direction for Itoi and the rest of the EarthBound folk to take. The game that I, at least, became obsessed with seemed more than anything else to lampoon those strange and heartrending RPGs it competed with on the SNES stage. There was no party member making the ultimate sacrifice, unless you count the Not-Bee; and aside from Bubble Monkey struggling to find love with... well, another monkey, there wasn't a whole lot of romantic pathos going down until the very end of the game.
But "Every line really hits you," Paid Spokesperson maintains. Now, ever since a "friend" told me J-Pop was great--"Just try it, it definitely isn't just vapid prepubescent Engrish howling to a Debbie Gibson backbeat!", they lied--I've struggled to trust the Japanese, but this part worries me. Did every line in EarthBound really hit you?
What about this one: "Last night there was a solitaire tournament...I lost my shirt..." Now, I suppose you could read it as an Ingmar Bergman character, cut to a scene of a window shattering for ten minutes in slow motion, and then have a narrator shout "WEARELOSTTOOURSELVES!" while a child cries in the corner of the frame and then hop on the pathos train, but really--a lot of EarthBound sounds like it was written by a guy who used to work on the Jack Benny show, all somewhat-dated one-liners and slapstick comedy, and that was part of the charm. If Itoi has seen fit to turn it into the last season of Friends, which consisted entirely of David Schwimmer looking sad to Enya songs, I'll--well, I'll play it and I'll like it, but it won't be the same.
Now, admittedly, there are a lot of things that are strange and funny and heartrending that do just fine; Annie Hall, one of my favorite movies, is a pretty good example. But the dynamic I think EB 2 would be best served to emulate is that of the TV show Scrubs. For those of you who don't watch it, it manages to incorporate the incredible, surreal comic fantasies of its main characters into the story--when Turk, a surgeon, tries to get ahead with his boss, he attempts to do him a favor only to be surrounded by scores of Ninja Surgeons out to do the same thing--into a comedy that, at the same time, features a significant amount of character drama. If Our Pal the pop star is exaggerating somewhat (perhaps the tears come naturally, whenever she remembers how her voice sounded before the ravages of J-Pop), maybe that's true. Maybe I'm worrying about nothing. Because there's nothing wrong with being strange, funny, and heartrending, but if you do too much of any of them you turn out a pastiche.
