(Warning, spoilers to follow.)Of the three games in the MOTHER series, it seems like Earthbound and Mother 3 receive most of the attention, and understandably so. After all, Earthbound, despite being a niche SNES title in its day, was the only game in the series to actually release in the West for over a decade, while Mother 3 had years of anticipation preceding it due to its long development history, the passion of the fanbase that Earthbound’s release had created, and Western gamers’ increasing awareness of and fondness for Japanese RPGs in general.On the other hand, we have MOTHER.

Though released in Japan at the tail end of the 80s, MOTHER only received official localization (as Earthbound Beginnings) in 2015, and on the Wii U at that. But even if its release history in the West weren't so spotty, it’s fair to wonder whether MOTHER would have received much love. It is an 8-bit RPG through and through, packed with random encounters, limited by the technology of a retrospectively maligned period in console grpahics, and sometimes obscure in its demands upon the player.

Get our Earthbound Zero ROM here. The game is a role-based game that goes by the name Earthbound beginnings outside Japan. It is fashioned like the Dragon Quest Series and is set in the 20 th Century US. The game follows the life of a young man called Ninten as uses some of his great-grandfather psychic powers to fight inanimate objects come to life and other villains. Ken’s relationship with Lloyd is a little unclear. When you first meet him in the school, you find him hiding in the trash can from the mean kids. Since Ken goes out of his way to offer to be his friend and give him a bottle rocket, it seems he is very genuine in his desire to have Lloyd for a companion.

Other pioneering NES originals such as The Legend of Zelda, and Super Mario Bros., while still culturally significant, attract less and less of a devoted audience due to similar era-specific limitations—would MOTHER really have fared any better? Probably not.It’s a shame, because MOTHER is one of the most brilliantly subversive games I’ve ever played, with a cohesive narrative vision that puts Earthbound—not to mention the vast majority of other games developed since—to shame.An Obsolete Archetype, or a Purer Experience?Anyone who has played Earthbound will have a general understanding of how MOTHER’s plot develops. Both games progress as follows: a young boy living with his mother and sister in a house just outside an unremarkable American small town is awakened one night by alien activity, which he is able to defeat. Vaguely supported by his family, including an absent father who communicates with his son solely by telephone, the boy sets out on an adventure to defeat the extraterrestrial menace.

Along the way, the boy befriends a young girl who, like him, is psychically gifted, along with a nerdy bespectacled kid who, in lieu of supernatural powers, has a knack for machines. The boy’s journey takes him to many places: a town infested with zombies, a desert, a town buried in snow, a metropolis, and—most peculiar of all—a magical realm called Magicant. Eventually, after a series of disconnected adventures, the boy and his friends locate the alien headquarters, confront the enemy leader, Giygas, in a nonstandard battle, and save the world. It is this similarity in plot development that has led many to label Earthbound a kind of remake of the original MOTHER, as many SNES-era releases were (think Super Metroid or Super Castlevania IV). In this view, the original game is relegated to little more than a janky archetype for the mature experience to follow.

But, as the more mixed reception of Super Castlevania IV’s gameplay in recent years has shown, these “remakes” can sometimes lose sight of what made their forebears truly great in the first place. Earthbound is certainly a wonderful game with numerous welcome gameplay refinements, but it too often sacrifices its predecessor’s cohesion for the sake of adding extra variety and creating a zanier and more “epic” sequel. A large part of that has to do with the two games’ settings, which are not as homogenous as they may first appear.God BlessEagleland?Earthbound has often been called a parody of American culture, as memorably represented by Ness’ home country of Eagleland. But it is easy to forget that Eagleland is but one of many countries represented in Earthbound.

There is also Jeff’s distinctly British home of Winters, the Middle-Eastern-themed Scarabia, the European resort town that is Summers, and Poo’s Himalayan home of Dalaam. Playing through Earthbound is akin to viewing a rapid slideshow of vacation photos: a vivid experience to be sure, but ultimately shallow and unfulfilling. Perhaps it is no coincidence that one memorable NPC in Earthbound, appearing at random from the sky as the party travels this kaleidoscopic world, exists only to snap fleeting photographs of each new locale before vanishing as inexplicably as he appeared. MOTHER, by contrast, is for the most part an extremely grounded game, a groundedness reinforced by the limited palette of the NES. It explicitly opens in the United States and never leaves American territory.

While still containing much of the variety of its sequel, MOTHER is thus able to contextualize this variety within a single cultural framework—that of the US—rather than diffusing it haphazardly throughout a poorly realized world. As a result, MOTHER truly feels like a more layered and, ironically, down-to-earth satire of America than its sequel. Of course, that satire is still distinctively Japanese in numerous ways—most notably in the decision to name all of the game’s towns after American holidays, rather than using real-life locations—but these occasional departures from reality only tend to enhance the game’s commentary, rather than distracting from it. And MOTHER has a lot to say.Handholding, or Lack Thereof. MOTHER’s gameplay begins in the most abrupt of fashions.

You take control of the protagonist—we’ll call him Ninten—in his bedroom and, following some supernatural noises and tremors, are almost immediately accosted by your own desk lamp, which has been possessed by the aliens’ psychic powers. Moving to the next room, Ninten finds his sister, Minnie, being attacked by a similarly possessed doll and is forced to defeat it as well. The game thus immediately suggests that even our protagonist’s most familiar and intimate possessions are not as familiar as we assumed them to be, discomfiting the player from the start. In this house full of consumerism literally run amok, it is the few humans—Minnie and the Ninten’s mother—who provide actual comfort and support.But even that support is qualified.

Minnie and Ninten’s never leave the house. Ninten’s father (like his mother, significantly unnamed), never appears in person to help, either, although he does give his son occasional allowance and allows the player to save.

As a result, the player spends almost the entirety of the early game left alone as they wander through the American countryside. Of course, this is in part a parody of the typical JRPG plotline, which sees the implausibly young protagonist leave his home in order to destroy evil, but MOTHER’s relatively grounded setting makes this familiar form of game progression feel particularly artificial. Usually, when players discuss a game lacking any “handholding,” they’re merely referring to a lack of direction, but in MOTHER it’s also a more literal disconnect from human warmth. The game underscores this musically by using two completely different overworld melodies, a for when Ninten is alone, and a for when he has someone else in his party. The latter is cleverly employed early on for a temporary party member, Pippi, who leaves Ninten’s side soon after being found, resulting in a mood whiplash between the happiness of having a companion and the loneliness of being immediately abandoned again.Of course, when it comes to figurative handholding, MOTHER is pretty light as well.

The game’s map is, especially for an 8-bit game, and in fact is far bigger than it has any right to be. A player with no clue where to go or a lot of time to burn can spend hours wandering the wilds for little practical purpose.

Again, this is partially due to the precedent of excessive wandering found in other early JRPGs such as Dragon Quest, but the world map in MOTHER also serves to make its players feel lonely and insignificant in a vast world that, like most of its NPCs, seems to care little about them.We Built This City onRecklessness and Wrongdoing?The game’s first town is called Mother’s Day, a name that will make any player think of both American holidays and the warm feelings that the word “Mother” traditionally evokes. But neither civic forthrightness nor nurturing warmth are much in evidence in the town of Mother’s Day. The town’s mayor is an idiot solely distinguished by the power of his position. He is, moreover, a murderously negligent coward who sends a mere child into a graveyard overrun by zombies in order to save another child, all while taking credit for Ninten’s heroism and boosting his own political cred. But the mayor, like many odious American political figures, is only the festering symptom of a much deeper rot. At least half of the zombies overrunning the Mother’s Day Cemetery are the reanimated corpses of gang members. On one level this is an homage to classic American crime fiction and cinema, but it also points to the fact that the outwardly friendly town of Mother’s Day hides a violent and dark past, much as many of the smiling 8-bit sprites wandering the town turn out, when spoken to, to be “pseudo zombies” themselves.

In that respect, the zombie crisis gripping Mother’s Day is thus not so much a supernatural aberration as a kind of reckoning with the town’s past sins, buried but still present. One especailly nice touch, is the presence of a priest in the cemetery, who briefly tries to win over the violent gang zombies through pleasant conversation and prayer before running off and forcing Ninten to end the confrontation using more effectively direct means. It’s an apropos moment and thus probably completely coincidental.Individual Comfort or Actual Progress? Mother’s Day is the first of several towns in MOTHER whose faults lie just below the surface or, more precisely, just beyond the town borders. Thanksgiving, the next major location, features a Union Station whose tracks have been blocked and unusuable for an unspecified length of time preceding Ninten’s arrival, with seemingly no one willing to destroy the large rock blocking the rails. As Ninten takes up this thankless repair job himself, he faces many random encounters against “Mad Cars” and “Devil Trucks,” which “drive recklessly” and exacerbate Ninten’s asthma as they speed around the now-useless tunnel connecting Thanksgiving with other distant towns. The implications of this scenario are clear: instead of fixing this critical piece of public infrastructure, the residents of Thanksgiving (those old enough to have a license, anyway) are content to detour around the run-down train tunnel by car, compensating for the added length of their commute via dangerous speeding.

What better symbol of how selfish individualism can work against the greater good? (It's also worth noting that, to make substantive progress at this point in the game, it is necessary to recruit Lloyd, an introvert who is so bullied by his peers that he chooses to live in a trash can rather than face the outside world.)Games Without Frontiers. The Union Station debacle is only one sign of the neglect permeating MOTHER’s America.

In the nearby woods there are two largely abandoned and decaying factories, bastions to a more familiarly American industrial decay. And while the smaller of these factories, Sweet’s Little Factory, is mostly populated with rats, a familiar indicator of desuetude, the other, Duncan’s Factory, appears to be some kind of munitions and robotics facility, overrun as it is by “Bombers,” “Fireballs,” and mad scientists. Sweet’s Little Factory contains as its ultimate reward a bottle rocket, a children’s toy; Duncan’s Factory contains a much larger and more devastating missile as its main objective, powerful enough to flatten the boulder on the Union Station tracks. While Ninten and Lloyd use this rocket for a good purpose, the presence of such a weapon practically out in the open is disconcerting, and reminds one of real-life examples of surprisingly unsecured weapons systems.

But then again, American neglect for its military past is not limited to weapons. Further outside of Thanksgiving lies the Yucca Desert, uninhabited save for a war veteran whose service is left unspecified.

Whatever his record, the veteran is in a sorry state, running a ramshackle tourist business with a highly unusual rewards program: buy ten tickets, receive a free ride in an actual tank! The fact that the veteran is quite willing to let Ninten and friends ride this tank alone is perhaps an indication of mental instability, but the repercussions of his questionable leniency with war vehicles are unfortunate: the tank is ultimately destroyed. While this isn’t a major problem for the player, since the destruction of the tank also advances the game, the veteran is not so lucky.

Deprived of his sole source of income (however tenuous it may have been), he disappears from his desert station for the rest of the game, his ultimate fate entirely unclear. Too bad, since the world of MOTHER could probably use more fighters above the age of majority.A Return to True Nature.

While the humans in MOTHER prove surprisingly unhelpful and even malicious, the game’s animals can often be surprisingly sweet and helpful. The link between Ninten and wildlife is signaled from the very start of the game, when interacting with the family dog reveals that Ninten can telepathically read animals’ thoughts. Furthermore, the starting town of Mother’s Day is bordered by two animal habitats, one a fairly ordinary zoo, the other a “Canary Village” consisting entirely of birds. Both habitats’ animals have had their lives disrupted by human activity. The unnaturalness of keeping tigers, elephants, and the like in a small-town American zoo is underscored by the arrival of an alien UFO, which drives the animals mad and causes them to break their enclosures, wreaking general havoc. The disruption of Canary Village is more personal. One of the canaries, Laura, has had her child go missing.

It turns out that her chick is being sold at the Mother’s Day department store, presumably after being abducted by one of the townspeople. As opposed to most RPGs, which depict villages as refreshing rural respites from the evils of urbanization, MOTHER sees them as just as problematically human as anywhere else.Resolving the issues at the zoo and bird village rewards the player with two ostensibly insubstantial rewards, a pair of song fragments warbled by Laura and a singing monkey at the zoo. These song fragments are actually two of eight plot tokens required to eventually beat the game. Unlike Earthbound, however, where a similar octet of sounds serve as mere MacGuffins with no other real significance, the melodies in MOTHER are an integral part of the game’s story and themes. Laura’s overjoyed motherly song upon being reunited with her chick is an early sign of the natural power of song in the game, and how intimately it is connected with family togetherness.True and False Comfort. While MOTHER is largely a grounded, if eccentric, romp through the American landscape, Magicant is a major exception. Existing solely on a psychic plane disconnected from the rest of the game world, Magicant is a bizarre but welcoming place, inhabited by magical figures who treat the player with unaccustomed humanity, generosity, and care.

Even the most common enemy type of Magicant, a variety of disembodied eyes, emphasize that, for good or bad, the player is always being watched over in this place. While reaching Magicant is initially difficult, an item found near its exit allows the player to return instantaneously whenever they wish. After a few trips, it’s like coming home, and the player is likely to feel reluctant about leaving again (it certainly doesn’t help that leaving Magicant is a much more painstaking proposition than re-entering it).

The ruler of Magicant is Queen Mary, a woman defined by her sadness at being unable to remember a certain song. At this point, with a few melodies under their belt, the player will quickly intuit that these melodies are fragments of the Queen’s lost song.

Gathering the remaining melodies and performing them before the Queen allows her to remember the song, but also reveals a shocking twist. Magicant, the player’s second home, is an illusion, being nothing more than a figment of the imagination of Queen Mary, herself an illusory projection of Ninten’s great-grandmother, Maria.

Maria, as the game’s opening text scroll informed us hours earlier, was abducted along with her husband by aliens many years before Ninten’s birth. While her husband, George, was able to use this opportunity to secretly learn the extraterrestrials’ psychic powers, Maria was forced by the aliens into raising one of their own, none other than Giygas himself, as her child. The missing song the player spends the entire game reconstructing was the lullaby she had song to him in his infancy. As Mary/Maria remember this, both she and Magicant slowly fade away (in a ). Bereft of this magical comfort zone, Ninten's only remaining option is to face Giygas.Redeeming HumanityThe confrontation with Giygas in MOTHER remains my favorite final boss encounter of any game, and is a natural culmination of the game's plot and themes. Giygas' experiences with humanity are largely negative.

Having had his race's psychic secrets stolen, Giygas views humans with distrust and contempt. Throughout the battle against Ninten and co., Giygas mocks the player and humanity in general for being too weak to withstand the inexplicable force of his attacks. Indeed, attacking Giygas normally is useless. Instead, the party must sing Maria's lullaby repeatedly while using carefully chosen moments to heal from Giygas' devastating and unrelenting party attacks.

While Giygas is quick to interrupt the singing at first, each subsequent refrain affects him more and more, until he is unable to prevent the song from ringing out fully. In the process, Giygas dissolves from an omnipotent alien into a wreck, torn between his instilled hatred for humanity and the much more intimate humanity shown towards him in his infancy by Maria. This largely non-violent conclusion is a fitting end to an emotionally wrenching and subversive story, and a thrilling final battle to boot.Summing UpCompared to its two sequels, MOTHER lacks a lot of mechanical refinements, quality-of-life changes, and visual flair, three issues that for many will represent an insurmountable obstacle to enjoying the game. But for those with the stomach to endure the challenges of an 8-bit RPG and an appetite for unusual stories, MOTHER is a can’t-miss title. Its 8-bit limitations, while perhaps initially off-putting, give the game a uniquely eerie and unsettling atmosphere. In addition, by hewing close to tropes of the genre, MOTHER makes the limitations of those tropes all the more apparent, and in doing so manages to simultaneously deliver a playful satire of the US and its culture in too many ways to list.

It's not as wacky as Earthbound or Mother 3, but some might find that makes it all the better.In any case, I highly recommend anyone with a Wii U to give the game a shot. Who knows: it might even lead to an official release for Mother 3!(.although if you can read at least some Japanese, you'll probably get more out of the original script. The translation is impressive for the era, but a little bland in comparison). Reading this as someone who has played EarthBound Beginnings multiple times, initially, this felt like a bit of overanalyzing the game. But the more I think about it, the more it contextualizes the themes that the rest of series follows of just what the difference is between those that have human warmth accessible to them (see the fundamental difference between the protagonists of EarthBound and Porky, or between Lucas and the Masked Man in Mother 3) as opposed to cold and distant figures that provide no emotional support whatsoever. Giygas being a representation of what most human beings cannot provide him as an alien entity outside of the one that raised him displays a shockingly realistic psychosis of someone being exposed to something inconceivable and being unable to react with any sort of rationality to it.It also makes the concept of 'absolute safety' being cold and distant make even more sense.

The Absolutely Safe Capsule depriving whoever is in it of any and all ability to interact with others for all of eternity can symbolize that, despite humanity being an inherently chaotic species that can show both warmth and coldness, it is better to interact with the outside world and take a chance on being friends with others than isolating oneself from everything. Hell, this is reflected throughout multiple official lyrics from the underappreciated EarthBound Beginnings original soundtrack vocal arrangements.Excellent write-up! Reading this as someone who has played EarthBound Beginnings multiple times, initially, this felt like a bit of overanalyzing the game. But the more I think about it, the more it contextualizes the themes that the rest of series follows of just what the difference is between those that have human warmth accessible to them (see the fundamental difference between the protagonists of EarthBound and Porky, or between Lucas and the Masked Man in Mother 3) as opposed to cold and distant figures that provide no emotional support whatsoever. Giygas being a representation of what most human beings cannot provide him as an alien entity outside of the one that raised him displays a shockingly realistic psychosis of someone being exposed to something inconceivable and being unable to react with any sort of rationality to it.It also makes the concept of 'absolute safety' being cold and distant make even more sense. The Absolutely Safe Capsule depriving whoever is in it of any and all ability to interact with others for all of eternity can symbolize that, despite humanity being an inherently chaotic species that can show both warmth and coldness, it is better to interact with the outside world and take a chance on being friends with others than isolating oneself from everything.

Hell, this is reflected throughout multiple official lyrics from the underappreciated EarthBound Beginnings original soundtrack vocal arrangements.Excellent write-up! I also love that companion album. It adds a nice wrinkle to analyses of the game and its soundtrack. The fact that the album exists at all is also pretty bizarre.As for these games' interlocking themes, I agree that these games really benefit from comparative readings, as it were. All of the games approach the same basic themes in really different ways. I personally prefer how the first game handles it, but the development in Itoi's treatment of these subjects is fascinating to follow. Oh man, that was a treat to read, awesome thread OP!

It really says a lot about the game that you went into so much detail and I still feel like you barely scratched the surface. To some it may seem like you're reaching with some points, but after seeing some of the stuff Mother 3 more directly addresses, I'm sure you're not.If there's one thing about Nintendo localizations that frustrates me more than the lack of an official western release if Mother 3, is the fact that they never released the already finished Mother one (up until a couple od years ago). I feel like its and Earthboun's statuses in the gaming sphere would be soooo different. I enjoy all three games almost equally, but I gotta admit I've always been a tad bitter about how much credit Earthbound gets for essentially retreading stuff Mother did first and so much better at that.I fondly remember playing this with my sister shortly after it was released as rom online. I always had a fascination for fan translations and unreleased games, so the idea of playing this Nintendo-localized but never released RPG was so exciting. I held off on playing Earthbound just to play this first and man, I'm so glad I did. People treat Mother as the weird, lesser sibling in the trilogy, but honestly, I'd argue EB is that, Mother and M3 are distinctively touching and meaningful in most of the things they do, no matter how funny or weird they may seem at first, whereas I feel EB is wacky and bizarre to a fault just for the sake of it.There's so much hidden meaning in almost every corner of this game, and the atmosphere, tone and soundtrack is so on point.

I love how it starts as a seemingly disjointed sequence of weird adventures, only to reveal that there's been a purpose to everything you've done and how all of it is related to the first paragraph you're greeted with starting the game. I adore how the game shifts from endearing to sad and scary constantly, but never in an unnatural way. Mother is so damn genuine in everything it does.You touch on it a bit, but I think the best example to show how shallow EB can be in comparison is how it uses melodies and Magicant as plot points just because, even though they were pretty much the core elements of the original story and they end up part of one of the most striking moments in the game.Hell, the battle with Giygas in EB gains an entirely new emotional context if you've played Mother prior. It's weird and creepy, yes, but it's also very sad because you know that abomination is hurting and a victim of circumstances rather than just some bizarre cosmic horror.Seriously, this has to be one of the most clever games I've ever played and I'll never not be impressed that it came out on the NES of all things, but so few people care about it because 'It's just Earthbound, but worse and grindy' apparently. A damn shame, but I plan to replay the whole trilogy soon and see if my opinion of the EB improves a bit, maybe I'll find a new appreciation for it now that I'm older.Anyway thanks a ton for posting this, OP.

It's one weird coincidence, but I was talking about cool RPGs we've played with my sister today and we both agreed that this Mother left some of the biggest impressions on us, so finding this thread hours later made my day.Edit: Jesus, that's a long-ass reply, oops. Actually it's the opposite. I've seen the game get criticized for grinding not being able to save you from getting wiped out by critical hits randomly, regardless of how high level you are.To progress or beat the game, you don't need to be at a particularly high level. Case in point: I beat the game with lv. 39 protag and lv. 34 party members, three member party.Bread crumbs are your friend. Simple appliance: if you're deep into a dungeon and want to create a restart point, use a bread.

If you wipe, you can use the crumbs to return to where you started dropping them. (You would assume the trail is cut off by dying but actually, no. Only using trains will cut the trail and make it start from the station where you get off.)Advanced appliance: Use bread with one character in the town before the next dungeon. Bring more bread in the inventories of other characters. When you run out of items and PP, use a second bread.

Use the crumbs to return to town, stay at a hotel, stock up, use bread again, use the crumbs from the dungeon to return. Repeat when necessary. Yeah I was wondering the same, I don't remember those names at all, haha (haven't played the Wii U release despite buying it day 1).And I agree on the grinding, it's way overblown. My Ninten was level 35 when I beat the game last time, so clearly levels aren't that important, but smart item usage and buffs are instead.

Case in point I remember a friend struggled against the final boss so he grinded for hours to be high enough level to endure his attacks. I just buffed my defense instead (PSI Shield Beta) and it worked like a charm. The game gives you all the tools you need.

I tried the game once, the GBA version with the English patch that also gives you an item to get double EXP.Battles were quite easy, but the game gives you very little direction and screen estate makes just finding a way forward quite hard. I don't know if the NES version shows you more of the screen and makes navigation a little better. Anyway, I quickly dropped the game because I had no idea what to do and where to go when I found Magicant. The blur on the GBA version was also quite egregious, and tiring after a while.I do want to retry the game some time. I also have it on WiiU, and I guess reading the manual could help me get around a bit more easily. What I did play of Mother was very charming, and the OST is a classic. Actually it's the opposite.

I've seen the game get criticized for grinding not being able to save you from getting wiped out by critical hits randomly, regardless of how high level you are.To progress or beat the game, you don't need to be at a particularly high level. Case in point: I beat the game with lv.

39 protag and lv. 34 party members, three member party.Bread crumbs are your friend. Simple appliance: if you're deep into a dungeon and want to create a restart point, use a bread. If you wipe, you can use the crumbs to return to where you started dropping them. (You would assume the trail is cut off by dying but actually, no. Only using trains will cut the trail and make it start from the station where you get off.).

Yeah I was wondering the same, I don't remember those names at all, haha (haven't played the Wii U release despite buying it day 1).And I agree on the grinding, it's way overblown. My Ninten was level 35 when I beat the game last time, so clearly levels aren't that important, but smart item usage and buffs are instead. Case in point I remember a friend struggled against the final boss so he grinded for hours to be high enough level to endure his attacks. I just buffed my defense instead (PSI Shield Beta) and it worked like a charm.

The game gives you all the tools you need. It's not really the end game that is tiring, but the beginning, you don't have enough things to help you survive so the grind is pretty much mandatory at that point! By the end of the game with everything, i had no problem using my buff/debuff and the bread, and i didn't grind to beat the final boss EDIT: checked my save, i was 37 with nintenI finished way harder imo, like all the installments of the shin megami tensei serie, and i simply didn't had to grind. I dunno maybe i'm missing something crucial. But i love all these olds schools rpg, the harder the better, and never had the need to grind like i did in mother 1maybe i was lucky and found my way easily in the big map so i didn't had enough random encounter? I dunno, but it wasn't fun that's for sure lol. I replayed Mother 1/Earthbound Beginnings last month.

To me it feels empty and especially limited by the technology of the time and I'm assuming the inexperience of the team. There's nothing like Fourside in Mother 1, where you can sense the scale of a large city despite it being actually quite small. Ellay/Velentine's Day, for example, looks basically the same as every other town in the game, despite being based on the massive, sprawling real world Los Angeles. But again, there's only so much they could have done with the NES (or SNES for that matter). I will agree with the final battle being superior to Earthbound's, 'Singing' to the defeat the boss is the culmination of your efforts of your journey and makes perfect sense in slowly, eventually stopping Giegue/Giygas's assault.

Praying, though it makes sense as borrowing strength, will, hope, whatever from the people you've met along the way, isn't as established in the game itself previously.Also, I've been drawing the enemies from this in alphabetical order for a few months now everyday on Twitter, if anybody is interested. Yes, a lot of 2's music actually originated in the first game!Story is actually quite different.

Just check out the OP. To avoid massive spoilers, stop reading when he begins to discuss what happens after you get all melodies. 2 is actually a direct sequel to 1 and you will miss out on that nuance unless you are aware of 1's story. Even the gameplay flow is quite different. Towns can seem massive as there aren't really clear town lines and there's surburbs of the downtown areas. Most 'dungeons' are totally outside like the graveyard and zoo. Magicant is a major part of the game you're always returning to as opposed to a short, one-time area in 2.

I just finally completed my first playthrough of this 2 weeks ago. It took me about 25 hours I think, and I ended at level 33. Fuck the instant kills. Game was so wonderfully paced though, and the exploration felt pretty rewarding. I'm glad I was able to make my way through it.Something I thought I'd touch on from the OP though:You actually meet up with the veteran later on in the game.

He demands compensation and will sit in front of the live house where you get Teddy until you pay him.I thought that was a cool touch.It has a bit of a rough start but the game picks up relatively quick. I played the prototype cart on my SNES classic.

I had gotten about 8 hours on Wii U and gave up for no reason (I do that a lot on every game), but I'm glad I went back and finished it up. Good read and a lot of interesting observations. I think there's a little over-analysis, but it's also warranted.

Itoi approached the game development and design from an extremely different way than traditional game designers. He put a lot more emphasis on things like theme, mood, and feeling then other developers were doing at the time, and arguably even to this day.As for my own thoughts, it is my favorite game that I never want to play again. The difficulty spikes and the opportunities for one-hit kills are just too frequent. I'm not sure I ever could have completed the game without liberally using save states. However I did enjoy my playthrough.

It's sparked the oddest feeling of nostalgia, despite the fact that I had never touched it before. There is something about that game that just nails the feeling of a childhood adventure.In some ways, it was a fulfillment of a promise that Nintendo made 25 years earlier when they gave the game a small preview in Nintendo Power. Their description of a game like Final Fantasy featuring kids with psychic powers fighting aliens grab my attention and never let it go. So yeah, I'm really happy to have finally gotten to play the game.Oh, and the soundtrack was outstanding. I liked it so much I tracked down the vinyl copy that was put out a couple years ago, and it's really the one and only video game collectible that I have.

Very wrong actually. Magicant in Mother 1 has much more substance, although OP spoiled its mystery. They couldn't repeat the mystery and probably didn't want to repeat that part of the story so it just is in Mother 2 but without being central to the plot.It's like assuming every James Bond movie is the same and you only need to see one, just because they're all spy stories and all have a villain. Or all crime stories are the same because they always solve a murder case. You can have a common framework with the details still varying greatly.

This is a stellar post OP, the type that keep me coming back here. I played this game before playing Earthbound and didn't really have a positive impression of it. I even switched to a romhack with double exp and money and lowered encounters.

What I did like was how the whole game managed to feel strange and dreamy. The music is perma burned into my brain and makes me feel nostalgic for my childhood even though I only played it recently. Magicant was very special, I can remember it even more clearly than the Earthbound one. Definitely recommended for fans of strange games. Looping death with birth in its ending, making that game also an analogy for life.Very wrong actually.

Magicant in Mother 1 has much more substance, although OP spoiled its mystery. They couldn't repeat the mystery and probably didn't want to repeat that part of the story so it just is in Mother 2 but without being central to the plot.It's like assuming every James Bond movie is the same and you only need to see one, just because they're all spy stories and all have a villain. Or all crime stories are the same because they always solve a murder case. You can have a common framework with the details still varying greatly. Funnily enough, I just got finished playing through this a few days back, having never played through any of the Earthbound/Mother games before. It was odd because I wasn't really enjoying the game that much (it's definitely an RPG of it's time, which means cumbersome menu/item management, not very clear objectives, and way too frequent random battles at times), yet I felt compelled to see the whole game through.

I can't say I would really recommend it to people outside of Mother/Earthbound fans, but it was an interesting side trip after being accustomed to modern RPGs and QoL features. Also you can really see how RPGs got so bloated since then with cutscenes, side quests, story set pieces, etc. Because it didn't take that long to finish. I was using a guide though to cut some of the time spent with the more obtuse points these games tend to have.I think the best part about it for me was the music.

I dug hearing Bein' Friends while I was traversing through the map and cursing the game out for putting me in yet another random battle after walking two steps. On the filpside, you will be leveled up very well. Funnily enough, I just got finished playing through this a few days back, having never played through any of the Earthbound/Mother games before.

It was odd because I wasn't really enjoying the game that much (it's definitely an RPG of it's time, which means cumbersome menu/item management, not very clear objectives, and way too frequent random battles at times), yet I felt compelled to see the whole game through. I can't say I would really recommend it to people outside of Mother/Earthbound fans, but it was an interesting side trip after being accustomed to modern RPGs and QoL features.

Also you can really see how RPGs got so bloated since then with cutscenes, side quests, story set pieces, etc. Because it didn't take that long to finish.

I was using a guide though to cut some of the time spent with the more obtuse points these games tend to have.I think the best part about it for me was the music. I dug hearing Bein' Friends while I was traversing through the map and cursing the game out for putting me in yet another random battle after walking two steps.

On the filpside, you will be leveled up very well.