A lot of people have played EarthBound for SNES at this point but the first time I played the game was on a used cartridge some friend at school got at a pawn shop, which I managed to trade for before he could delete the save files on it.
The first time I played EarthBound was trapped in an area you can only access at the end of the game, likely using items and strategies that the enemies in the area would require. There were no NPCs, no shops and as I recall only a few items to find, but the save file came well equipped and the characters were all at their max level.
After a bit of a riddle in the final boss fight you are warped back to the main map of the game and given the opportunity to walk some of your companions back to where you found them. You can visit most if not all of the game that was available before you fought the final boss, and you have some access to your inventory as it was available in the normal game, but you can't fight in battles without resorting to game genie type exploiting of the game's functionality which I obviously didn't know at the time. And you don't really need your items, they just help with fast travel. But there's a bike you haven't been able to use since you met your first companion...
So for me my first experience of EarthBound was a game where you fought a few endgame creatures in a bleak, foreign landscape, played the boss fight as one does, then got released into an open world with no constraints and no need to solve puzzles or defeat enemies. In 199X on a Super Nintendo. The villains were already reformed or licked. The bystander NPCs were right where you last left them. You could just take a walk home, which I did. Many times.
(Really liked Proteus, Ed. Got the boxed set. Only found this little game all these years later. Watch your step out there.)