This hack has a LOT going for it. There’s a lot of really neat ASM and QoL changes. Making Jeff’s tools a second inventory basically completely fixes inventory management issues once you have him. Some small things like text displaying stat changes when equipping weapons are also very nice. I appreciate the attempt to make the game more difficult, and *some* of the attempts at improving your tools work out.

However, the early game balance is so legitimately terrible me and my friend, both people who have played Earthbound 10+ times, could not bear to continue playing. Onett is legitimately miserable, and Twoson and related areas aren’t all that much better. Once you get Paula things feel a lot more natural (though I really wish she started at level 10 or so, just to cut down on grinding), but before that is a mess of grinding, enemies with WAY too much HP and damage output, and WAY too many enemies that steal your items and use PSI Magnet.

Some of these issues are persistent even with Paula. The constant item theft is asinine and makes grinding even worse as you constantly have to go buy new items, which makes you gain money much slower. Fights are way too long, with many singular enemies taking 5+ turns to defeat even after a decent amount of grinding in an area, grinding you simply didn’t have to do in the original. Dying doesn’t cause you to lose half your money, which is a welcome QoL change so you don’t have to back and forth with the ATM as much, but it doesn’t offset how much you have to grind and how obnoxious battles are. Many of your options feel like traps because they aren’t powerful enough to keep up with the sheer HP and damage output enemies have.

PSI abilities are still all over the place. Flash still feels useless, as crying enemies still hit the majority of their attacks and bosses all have PSI Healing. Life-Up is nerfed, which is deserved, but food items are still just as needlessly expensive and enemies almost never drop them. Many PSI abilities have their costs considerably increased, which would be fine if PP restoration was like, a thing that existed at all. PSI Caramels are still extremely rare, and PSI Magnet is still useless (except when enemies use it on you).

In addition to these balance issues, this hack has a lot of needless text edits and localization changes, as well as strange palette changes and sprite edits, like making the Your Sanctuary (now called “Your Place”) bosses have bloody parts to them. Many QoL features from Maternalbound Redux, like the run button and improved button layout, are also missing.

On top of all this, there’s a pseudo-softlock in Jeff’s section. If you don’t grind on the dogs and crows (either because none spawn or because you dodge them) you get locked into the Brick Road area which has enemies that are *far* too strong for you to fight reliably. You have no healing or combat items, except for the small few you start with. It took us almost 30 minutes of trying these fights over and over until we were able to just barely win enough of them to level up a couple times and get through the area.

Overall, I really struggle to recommend this hack in its current state. It’s possible that it will improve in the future, but the balance in its current state is far too frustrating in the early game. It’s possible it gets better after you’re done with the single-character sections, but we could not bring ourselves to play long enough to get past them.