EarthBound Player's Guide

The EarthBound Player's Guide is a massive guidebook that was packaged with EarthBound as a set. It contains 128 pages, detailing many maps and shops, along with fake newspaper articles. It contains artwork of some of the items in the game, as well as detailed information and clay models of nearly every enemy that appears in the game (though they do leave out some enemies and even bosses). Its size was one of the factors that increased the size of EarthBound's box. The back of the guidebook also includes scratch-and-sniff cards--this is what gave the the game the slogan, "This game stinks". The screenshots depicted in the game appear to be from an earlier version of the English translation of the game, showing many things that were changed for the English release, as well as some subtle text differences.

The Player's Guide was made available online at the release EarthBound on the Wii U Virtual Console. It has been optimized for viewing on the Wii U Gamepad.