Inspired by the video I saw of the 2017 meetup, I’ve created this thread for us to barf up our hot takes on the Mother Trilogy!
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mother 2 is the second best dragon quest game of all time
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Stepmother is Shigesato Itoi Forever.
I like Mother 2’s combat fine and I don’t think the random encounters are that bad.
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What’s the first best?
If you say Mother 3, I’m gonna…
I never finished Mother 3 because I lost my save games on the emulator I was using somehow. I wanna say I was about 80% of the way through the game. I watched the remaining stuff on Youtube though.
It tore my heart out and I kind of resent it for that. I remember it as being somewhat mean spirited. But my memory of it is kind of fuzzy. I’ve definitely forgotten more than I remember.
Oh yeah it’s also transphobic and racist, let’s not forget that.
Mother 2 is an incredible game and I love it more with each passing year. It ages like a fine wine. The bittersweet humor, the sincerity, the childishness, it’s wonderful. You can say it’s a game about nothing, but you’d be wrong. It’s a game about how fucking weird it is to be a kid. Being a kid is weird y’all and Earthbound gets that.
Never played Mother 1.
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I vividly remember the weirdness of being a child, especially at night.
I had a painting of a clown in my room, he was holding a whistle about an inch from his mouth, ready to blow it. Every night I would look at that clown and it would be moving the whistle back and forth, blowing on it. I knew it wasn’t real, but I could see it every night.
One time I had a fever. While I was trying to sleep I hallucinated a great machine made of bone. It was in my room, over my bed, crushing everything to my left and right, constantly whirring. I knew if I moved that I would be crushed as well.
The first person who I knew who died was my great grandfather. It happened at the same time as some party at school, which I was going to miss because of the funeral. I was in first grade at the time. That night I couldn’t sleep, I kept thinking about what it would be like to be dead. Would you remember your life? Would you just sit under the ground, waiting for someone to come along and dig you up? How does an infinity of nothing feel? I went upstairs to tell my mom about this and she told me I was just sad that I was missing the party and sent me back to bed.
This is Earthbound to me
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this is fucking rad as hell and justifies this thread
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gonna be honest i think it was because of Castlevania IV
video games are bad
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i can physically feel this
e: while im here i remember waking up at 3am once when i was 13, and getting out of bed, up the front of the house, and seeing my mum and dog looking out the front window watching the house directly across the street burning down, and then going back to bed
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man no way. just because it’s an actively critical work compared to (most of) earthbound doesn’t make it remotely mean-spirited
Large swaths of Mother 2 feel challenging while still permitting you to build up momentum. It’s a tug of war between feeling like you’re biting off more than you can chew and feeling like you’re totally getting away with something. Several segments are too punishing for this, and you have to actually be careful and deliberate, and as much as these parts are probably necessary for the wingsuiting-down-a-mountain feeling that the rest of the game provides, they always feel like a slog. Peaceful Rest Valley is the most pronounced example of this, and I can’t help but still resent it years after I last played through it.
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nah, probably something in dqs 4 thru 6, can’t be bothered to decide which though
(crashes through window) HEY you should all read this post i made about Mother 1 in this other thread
some of my finest work
(also it’s the 69th post. nice)
There are some other good posts in there too i guess, especially the other ones i made
i think the only hot take i have in me right now is that Mother 2 is mechanically a good game. Not “good if you can tolerate jrpgs”, not “cool world/story/characters but the gameplay is bad”. No actually it’s a good, well-designed game (with some obvious flaws), get better at talking about jrpgs.
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Peaceful rest / grateful dead valley is the most brutal area of the game. And before it, they bait you into buyng condiments, a waste of inventory space.
Nothing else in the game demands you to grind.
I like mother 2 and 3 about equally. They both have flaws and they both have strengths. The games complement each other pretty well
I can’t step to one side of the line.
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been meaning to ask this for a while - can anyone recommend some Earthbound hacks? I’d really like to see what’s been done in the engine, especially combat-wise.
also, has Itoi or anyone else involved with the series talked at length about Dragon Quest? (besides what the games themselves say)
to my knowledge, there are extremely few, largely due to EB and M3 being kind of a mess of coding. None of the EB hacks I ever saw seemed appealing to me, either. There’s always Toby Fox’s halloween hack, but even he suggests not playing that because he was young and it’s extremely edgy.
I decided after playing 2 again recently, and reading what other people have to say about the games, that 1 & 2 are as good as you want them to be, depending on what you’re bringing to the table as a player, and that 3 is exactly as good as it means to be. So 3 is “better” but 1 & 2 are infinitely good.
Who knows though, playing them again in the future might change my opinion (again).
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