- You are Ness, a kid sleeping in his home when a alien comes to you and tells you that you along with three other kids are the only ones who can save the future of Earth. Your mission: find the other three chosen ones and then stop the horrible Gigayas who are going to invade Earth.
- Themed around an idiosyncratic portrayal of Americana and Western culture, EarthBound subverted popular role-playing game traditions by featuring a modern setting while parodying numerous staples of the genre. Itoi wanted the game to reach non-gamers with its intentionally goofy tone; for example, the player uses items such as the Pencil Eraser to remove pencil statues, experiences in-game hallucinations, and battles piles of vomit, taxi cabs, and walking nooses.
- For its American release, the game was marketed with a $2 million promotional campaign that sardonically proclaimed "This game stinks". Since the original Mother had not yet been released outside Japan, Mother 2 was called EarthBound to avoid confusion about what it was a sequel to.
- "When EarthBound came West in 1995, it carried a higher price tag than most other games on the console. For $70, buyers received not just the cartridge, but a full-sized player’s guide — a book that ran 135 pages-long. Even cooler was that this guidebook included some scratch-and-sniff stickers in the back, another special piece of memorabilia for Nintendo fans."
