Mother (EarthBound Beginnings)

[JaySevenZero]

Here's where you can contribute your thoughts and opinions for Mother (EarthBound Beginnings) for potential inclusion in the forthcoming podcast.

A friendly reminder that where the feedback for the podcast is concerned, we love it - but keeping it brief is appreciated. We do want to include a breadth of opinions where appropriate, but no-one wants a discussion podcast that’s mostly reading out essays. Better to save yourself time and cut to the chase if you can.

[DaMonth]

Earthbound's older estranged brother that the family doesn't like inviting to Thanksgiving dinner. Played this in college after its sequel released on the Wii U so its age really showed. I mean honestly, I don't even have much to say about it specifically beyond most everything it does having been done better down the line. Pretty certain I played with an easy ring modded in to avoid the infamous grind of monotonously vicious enemies. Even now, I'm doing my best to try and pick out anything in it that I prefer over its successor and uh....

Uh....

Oh! That old Japanese commercial with the kids blowing up the robot and looking over Mt. Itoi. I used to think that they just obliterated it into a mushroom cloud and thought that was pretty hilarious, so points there I suppose.

[Jobobonobo]

This was the oldest RPG I have ever played and in many ways it shows. I first tried this out back in the late 2000s on an emulator and I died a lot, and I had not yet left the starting area. I thought Mother was not for me and left it at that for quite some time. However, when I knew there was a mod that includes an item called the easy ring which gives more experience and lessens the encounter rate I thought I would give it another shot. It certainly makes the game a bit more welcoming, but the encounter rate could still be quite obnoxious with battles happening two seconds after finishing one off. The dungeons are usually way too big which makes navigating them tiresome and are usually labyrinthine slogs which always made me resort to a walkthrough as they were so confusingly laid out. With RPGs you will often find the one dungeon that can be a slog. Here it was the opposite; I can’t think of a dungeon that I liked. The tiny inventory space ensures you must constantly go back and forth to areas where you can store your items. Many of these items are completely useless and just serve to fill up space such as the love words and curse words. The Mother series is known for its humour so I suppose this sort of thing is expected but man there is way too much stuff that just does not do anything that the joke wears thin. Even talking to NPCs was a chore, as they would often walk away from you right as I was about to hit the Talk button which often resulted in me chasing them for a few seconds. The game never explains exactly what your PSI attacks do to such a degree that each Healing spell will cure different ailments but without a walkthrough you are just stumbling in the dark trying to figure out if Heal gamma cures blindness or poison. All these little annoyances add up and remind me why I rarely if ever go back to games before the 16-bit era.

I know I am being overly negative but there are parts I liked. The Peanuts style aesthetic of this series shine through even in the NES entry and the modern setting was of course a major departure from RPGS at the time. With the easy ring grinding can become a lot more tolerable and I found it quite relaxing to just pop on a podcast and watch my child protagonist get stronger. Doing this in the beginning ensured that for the most part, battles were never too much of a challenge despite their high rate of encounter. I liked the final moments where you are defeating the final boss using the song his adoptive parents sang to him. And the music is bouncy and whimsical for the most part.

The issue is that even with these positives the other games in this series do all these things so much better it is not even funny. Not a single positive I mentioned here is something Mother 2 or 3 do worse on. I think underneath all the baffling design choices, relentless random battles and frustrating dungeons a potentially good game lies here. If any game could do with an honest to God from the ground up remake it would be this one. Include the visual presentation and QOL improvements from the other two games and you could have a game that is worthy of the title that kickstarted one of the most bizarre and unique RPG series out there. As it is, I think if anyone wants to get into this series go for Earthbound instead. The original Mother is just not that great of a time and I think can only be recommended to those that want to be a completionist of the series or those that want to approach it from a historical lens.

TWR: Badly needs remake

[psychohype]

One of the first things I did after I got ahold of a Wii U system back in 2020 was to download a digital copy of Earthbound Beginnings. Having not played the SNES sequel up to that point, I went into the game with very few expectations. All I knew is that many people absolutely loved those sequels, and here was an opportunity to discover the origins of the series thanks to a long-awaited official English translation.

I didn't realize until I started the game that it was actually set within a fictionalized version of the United States of America, with the opening text describing some kind of alien abduction that took place 80 years prior to the events of the game. My interest was further piqued when I noticed that two of the town names appeared to be subtle parody versions of different cities in my home state of Washington. First there was the town of Merrysville, which looked like a simple re-spelling of the Washington town of the same name (in which Mary is spelled M-A-R-Y instead of M-E-R-R-Y). It also appears in roughly the same place on the game world map as the real-life town of Marysville appears on a Washington map. Then there's the town of Spookane, which seemed like an obvious play on the Eastern Washington city of Spokane. Was this game world supposed to be modeled after Washington State, I wondered?

After doing a little bit of research, I realized this was probably not the case, since in the original Japanese version, all the towns are simply named after American holidays, which is also amusing in and of itself. The similarities to Washington town names was likely the result of the translation being done by someone who was probably based at Nintendo of America's Redmond, Washington, headquarters at the time, and he used some nearby city names as the basis for creating the 'punny' variations.

Nevertheless, I still found the game to be a fascinating take on American culture through a Japanese lens. I love the way the towns look with their cute little houses and tall boxy buildings just plopped down onto fields of grass. I also find it hilarious how the towns are separated by these dangerous roads and open expanses where you're constantly being accosted by crows, hippies, bigfoots, centipedes, and flying saucers, which I have to say is not entirely inaccurate to what it's like out there in rural U.S.A. So that's one aspect of the game that drew me in, but I also really liked the even more fantastical elements of the game, such as when you unexpectedly discover the mysterious world of Magicant and receive your strange quest from Queen Mary to retrieve the scattered melodies of a song. It's a strange game, this one, but so charming.

I think the issues that prevent more people from embracing this game are likely twofold. First, there's the difficulty, which might seem at odds with the cute, whimsical nature of the story and art direction. There are indeed some rough stretches in this game, including some lengthy dungeons that can catch you off guard if you're not prepared for a long stretch of random encounters. Overall, I'd say the difficult is roughly comparable to the original NES version of Final Fantasy in that regard. And while I managed to get through the game without too many headaches, I can understand people getting bored or frustrated fairly quickly.

I'd say the other major hurdle is specifically for people who have already played Earthbound (or Mother 2). After you've experienced and enjoyed the more polished and evolved experience of the sequel, it's probably hard to go from that to this, which is why I'm glad I decided to start here.

If you have a Nintendo Switch Online account and you're curious about this game, I'd say give it a quick try. It might not hook you, and that's OK. But I'm sure there must be more people out there like me who will find a lot to love. I, for one, will happily go to bat for this game any day.

[Alvinellers]

A charming and quirky start to the series—rough around the edges, but full of heart.