I like to say this when Earthbound comes up: My first videogame love was JRPGs on the SNES. I love em all, at least all the good ones - the Final Fantasies, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Evermore(another underrated gem) and Mana, etc.. And Earthbound. All the other games, subjected to replays and dying nostalgia, seem worse and worse. Earthbound somehow just keeps getting better and better.
It's The Best traditional 16-bit JRPG and one of the foremost artistic achievements of the medium so far, and in retrospect miles better than every other JRPG of that era(well, maybe only like
one mile better than FFVI). I like it better than Mother 3(Mother 3 is a little more melodramatic, and its surrealism feels slightly more calculated. Like they figured out the magic they had with Earthbound and tried to recreate it, which I'm sure is exactly what happened. It's still really good, just not quite as good. Also Earthbound is paced better.) It's profound, inventive, evocative and experimental, but never pretentious(obviously, the last thing Earthbound is is pretentious). It's full of emotion but has no melodrama. It is a work of intense passion that doesn't take itself even remotely seriously.
I think Earthbound was video games' most significant artistic achievement at the point it was made(perhaps, still, but I wouldn't try to make that argument here), because it doesn't really have an analogue in the other artistic mediums. It's not 'Our Citizen Kane', though, because its pastel-pseudo-Americana-analogue-synth-post-post-modern wonderland is not like Citizen Kane, or anything else. It is our Earthbound, though.
That music just flat out seems ahead of its time now, by like a decade at least. Shit's practically
chillwave.