Who doesn’t remember Earthbound? It was wacky, it was weird, it was witty, it was pretty much every adjective that starts with the letter “w.” It truly showcased what the SNES system was capable of achieving with those meager 16 bits of data. The game was so involved, actually, that unless you had the strategy guide the game was meant to be played with, chances are you had no real idea what you were doing a good chunk of the time. That’s why this speedrun you’re about to see is commentated because of glitches. Glitches everywhere.
Okay, seriously, it does not help matters that Propellerboy named Ness “Jeff.” This is an any% run in two-and-a-half hours. It’s actually possible to beat the game in just over ten minutes using a skip sandwich, a cliff, not having a problem, and 69. I’m not kidding. But where’s the fun in that? We came to see Earthbound wrangled by the throat, so here we are. The world record for Earthbound any% glitched is about an hour, far less than the time in this video. If you’d prefer to get through the run quicker and don’t care about knowing how it’s all done, here’s the video for you.
Strategies have changed between the two videos, as they often do over the years. Other categories for Earthbound runs include glitchless, no out-of-bounds, all photos, pajama% (stay in your pajamas the whole game), and the SoK (Sword of Kings) %, which sees the player obtaining a gratuitously rare item drop from a certain enemy at Stonehenge. There’s no official 100% category for this game, for obvious reasons.
Who knew ordering a pizza had the potential to break down the fabric of reality? And speaking of broken, check out this speedrun of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. It’s also commentated, and you’ll be thankful for that.
