Before i start this, I'm using Mother 3, or Earthbound 2 as a benchmark for this game.
First of all, the start of the game is very slow and boring, the battles have no strategy, and the rolling health mechanic is too fast to work at the amount of HP you have. Compare this to Mother 3, where you can run, which makes the whole game faster, on top of having more HP, and special skills you can use. A good comparison is the first bosses, Earthbound's is Franky + Frankystein Mark II, where it's basically just hit, hit, heal, repeat, but Mother 3's first boss is the Reconstructed Caribou, which encourages the use of skills, as it's much easier with Duster's wall staples.
Along with that, at the Franky fight, you have about 60 HP and only Ness, who doesn't know much PSI at that point, but at the Reconstructed Caribou fight, you have 3 party members, each with 100-ish HP, and everyone has unique skills.
Earthbound isn't that great with characters either, Paula, Jeff, and Poo are all characters that, in a nutshell, go and help ness because they were told too, and Ness himself doesn't have too much more depth, either, his character only develops at the 7th sanctuary and magicant, and not much at that, however, in Mother 3, Flint has a lot of character development in only the first chapter. I won't spoil it, because this is a review on Earthbound and not Mother 3.
The story is also nothing to write home about, in a short summary, and skipping details, the story is basically "Ness and friends go to 8 power spots to gain enough power to defeat a big and scary entity". Once again, I won't touch on Mother 3 for this segment.
In a nutshell, Earthbound doesn't start getting fun until you get the 3rd party member, The story isn't very complex, and the characters are shallow.
Review of EarthBound
