Earthbound – Day 30

–Day 30–

Before we head back out on our adventure, I thought it would be a good idea to talk to Ness’ little sister and organize some of the items she’s been holding onto for us. You know, sell off all the cookies that are now mostly useless, drop off a few actually important things for her to hold on to, that kind of stuff. Having that for sale sign really helped too. All I had to do was step outside and people were there to buy my useless junk. It was like a garage sale or something.

Enough of that though, we have an adventure to go on. So we travel all the way from Ness’s house back to Threek and then further on into the Desert. The bus drops us off right in front of a small little shack which seems to be the only building around. It acts as basically a combined store and hotel which means we’ll probably be back here often.

We soon start exploring the vastness of the desert, and it isn’t long before we come across something interesting. Just north of the shack is a monkey guarding a hole in the ground. This look suspicious, so naturally we investigate. Apparently it is the entrance to some paradise for the monkeys set up by someone named Talah Rama. He apparently knows all, but we find out that he’s currently fasting and meditating. He’s also blocking the only entrance to the monkey paradise, so he’s doubly useless to us right now. We’ll just have to make a mental note and remember to come back later.

Next up on our desert tour, we find one of the few mini quests in the game that I had prior knowledge of, the romantic tale of the Black and White Sesame Seeds of the desert. We happen to find the Black Sesame Seed first and he tells us about how he wants to apologize to the White Sesame Seed, if he could just see her again. This is just the perfect example of the brilliantly absurd humor of the game and I love it. It’s one of the reasons I’ve wanted to play this game for so long.

Surprisingly, this little event is enough to trigger yet another appearance of the photographer. I’m still mad about last time when he photographed our terrible house. But I think I’ll forgive him if he’s going to preserve this memory instead.

Anyway, back to speaking of absurd humor, we can’t ignore the other examples we find in the desert. Things like being able to talk to the decayed cow skeletons littered across the desert. Or running into a pair of sun bathers joking about how they are often mistaken for corpses laying in middle of the desert.

However, we can’t overlook the dangers of the desert either, and the worst offender has to be the Smilin’ Sphere. Don’t misunderstand, the Smilin’ Sphere isn’t any stronger than any of the other monsters, and from my encounters, it doesn’t seem to cause any status effects like the mushrooms did. Instead it’s much more annoying by exploding into bits and causing massive damage to the party after it dies. He would probably cause instead death to the party during most encounters if it weren’t for the game’s unique damage counters.

It doesn’t take many encounters like that before we’re ready to call it a day. Join us next time as we continue our exploration of the desert as we search for the While Sesame Seed.