Earthbound.
I was always amazed at how fervent the fandom for Earthbound was. In its day, it got absolutely pilloried in game magazines (even in Nintendo Power) as being childish-looking and clunky compared to Final Fantasy III (VI) or Chrono Trigger, while providing no clear direction on where to go. And even a friend of mine said, "there's a reason why Nintendo had to package it with a strategy guide." The infamous scratch-and-sniff ad ("This game stinks!") didn't help. The sales kinda-sorta reflected it. It sold 150,000 copies, which honestly wasn't bad for an RPG in the mid-90s, but Nintendo paid Marcus Lindblum to localize the entire game, not to mention the cost of the packaging. They didn't make a profit on it.
The critics definitely got that one wrong, judging by the response when it was released on Wii U VC. Some of it may have been the whetting of appetites of RPG-starved N64 owners over pictures of the eventually canceled N64 version of Mother 3 (Earthbound 64), not to mention Ness being a charter character in Super Smash Bros.
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