oh man i have pathos words for this, stay tuned
this is the line step to one side
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I think Mother 3 dedicates most of its resources to its thematics and its plot, and as a consequence it suffers when it comes to worldbuilding. Playing Mother 3 is a disjointed experience, where you jump forward in time and far away in location depending on the whims of the plot. Mother 2, in contrast, is a living, breathing world that you are gradually making your way through. You’re soaking in this slowly simmering psychedelic broth that has time to seep all the way into the core of you.
Mother 3 is like watching a really good stage play, but Mother 2 is like spending a year in a foreign town.
Mother 1 is like going through your elementary school scrapbook and getting confused over all of the half-memories it dredges up and the incomprehensible prose of your 1st grade writing assignments.
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Itoi’s method of enjoying a game properly, of course, lies in enjoying it the way he would enjoy it if he were playing. In an interview, he claims that his favorite memory of gaming would have to be the first time he played Dragon Quest, naturally. The circumstances under which he played Dragon Quest were kind of unique. He was bedridden with some illness that pained his breathing. Under a doctor’s orders, he had to lie on his back all day for a week. During this week, he played Dragon Quest. This was 1986, of course, and back then, videogames couldn’t display Japanese kanji characters. The games were written entirely in hiragana and katakana, the Japanese syllabic alphabets. Foreigners trying to learn Japanese will insist that kanji are a pain to learn, and maybe they are. However, the simple fact is that written Japanese is a true reader’s language. Kanji, to someone fluent in the language, actually aid in reading more quickly. What this means is that many of the people who first played Dragon Quest ended up reading the game aloud, or else mumbling the text as it scrolled by. Itoi turned the game’s text-scroll speed down so that he could keep up with the scroll during battles. When he fought battles, he’d deliver lines like “Billy deals seven damage to the Slime! The Slime is defeated!! Billy received two experience points and two gold!! What’s this? The Slime left a treasure chest?” in a sports announcer kind of voice. When the king talked to the hero, he sounded noble. The princess sounded like a princess. Itoi claims his enjoyment of the game was increased exponentially by his relentless desire to read all its dialogue out loud.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131022032055/http://www.largeprimenumbers.com/article.php?sid=mother2
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this is so perfect, how
Another thing that doesn’t get said often enough is that Mother 3’s soundtrack, while decent, is frankly completely unable to even begin to hold a candle to Mother 2’s soundtrack, and even to Mother 1’s. Keiichi Suzuki and Hip Tanaka’s work in the first two games was unbelievably good. Half beautiful, sentimental pop songs and half avant-garde electronica operating at a level that very few video game soundtracks come close to, even today.
Shogo Sakai’s work on Mother 3 is good, don’t get me wrong. The Pigmask army’s theme is fantastic, I love the hometown theme, and the Saturn Valley song is such an evocative wartime spin on the original theme. But it’s good in an above-average way, not in a life-changing way.
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I think the Mother 3 soundtrack is awesome. The gba audio holds it back a lot.
Mother 1’s soundtrack definitely doesn’t get enough credit, imo. Some of those songs made it into Earthbound, but to my ears they often sound even better in NES chiptune form. Youngtown’s theme hits me square in the heart.
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Mother 3 is one of my favorite jrpgs.
I don’t know that I even like Earthbound.
I like Earthbound a whole lot; I think it’s exceptionally charming. I’ve tried playing through Mother 3 multiple times and I always fall off somewhere in or around the Monkey chapter?
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ok i got slaughtered on this at the meetup and was waiting for a chance to articulate myself better. @VastleCania helped me suss my feelings out a bit better, so here goes
let’s get the personal stuff out of the way
Mother 3 asks me to be sympathetic and understanding to a damaged and selfish father who abandons his child in grief because his favourite son went away. My father was damaged and selfish and his favourite son went away and I am still here living with it. Do i need to explain myself further? This I will not do.
Mother 3 also asks me to treat transgender people and by extension queerness as being actually magical. I am a transgender person, i have no magic to speak of, and I am here on earth living with it. This I will not do.
Mother 3 also dresses its idea of evil up in arabic cosplay, which I hope I don’t need to explain to anybody.
I don’t see any of these things as malicious, really. Ignorant, sure? Maybe I’m too inclined to give Itoi the benefit of the doubt? I own a hobonichi, and a tender ventricle for the man’s past work. But the observations stand - if mother 3 is supposed to be about grief and moving on, i think not only that it treats that concept in a pretty lopsided and po-faced way, it glosses wholesale over potential expressions of the grief that is it supposedly about. It has a thing to say. It tells you everyone is fundamentally innocent. Mother 3 is preachy. It tells you what to take from it. and through critical mass of intention, it loses a chunk of its potential effect, of its audience.
This is not to say that Mother 3 is bad. It’s far from it. But, i think compared to its predecessor it is manipulative in a way that just feels wrong, given how powerful it is at times. And on a personal level, it uses impressions of many essential components of my daily experience to manipulate people, and I find that to be strange. I adore Mother 3, but on some level it just doesn’t like me back.
Every inch of text in mother 3 is important to its story - every inch of mother 2’s text is just worth reading, full stop.
Mother 2, rather than trying to tell you something important, it fills itself to the brim with an essence. It takes the implicit themes of the dragon quest format (growing up, growing wise, facing down adversity, “solving” an archaic world), adopts a 60’s psych aesthetic convenient for transposing those things into a cipher of a mundane life and then proceeds to completely fill itself up with those tiny feelings, breaking or bending whatever it needs to in order to bring more heart and richness to these essential themes. All it’s really doing is mining the mechanical heart of Dragon Quest to make obvious and honest some small truths about what that framework represents: Growing up is hard, and scary, and dangerous, and weird and funny, often arbitrary, frequently gross, and maybe insurmountable, but always, always full of something, and even if you are alone, you are never, ever alone, as long as you go outside sometimes. Earthbound’s primal irony, and its funniest joke, is that its a videogame fucking begging you to go outside.
There’s something just so Itoi about that and just so, so rich and important.
@onesecondbefore put it so well, to paraphrase: Mother 3 is a story, Mother 2 is a place. I just happen to think videogames are fundamentally better at being places than at telling stories.
It’s a yearly ritual for me to play this game, even if i don’t finish it. It’s nice to remind myself of what these weird software dimensions mean to me. It utterly broke my heart to hear somebody call Earthbound meaningless to my face, even in jest, when there’s just so, so much that i have taken from this silly vidcon in my years spent with feet on pavement.
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M2 has Aircraft Carrier-class hangoutitude imo
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Well I gotta new fucking goal.
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oh oh addendum M2 theme: all authority figures are silly, silly people
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Some of the best songs never even showed up in the later games!
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beautiful
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for what it’s worth I think I said “isn’t about anything” and I realized I touched a nerve when I heard you upset about it at like 4am!
Taking aside that I’m a person for whom examinations of childhood have never been particularly compelling (sorry! my childhood was pleasant and dumb and I didn’t get away from it a day too soon and I don’t take too much more away from it), and the obvious hottakeitude in my delivery, I don’t think that is necessarily even all that damning??? Lots of people itt seem to prefer the Itoi who wasn’t impatiently encouraging us to move on! there’s obvious reasons for that, as personal preference goes!
I am sorry if I overdid it.
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oh, it’s okay! besides the fact that
a) @rudie compelled us to draw blood
b) @anothersphere was the person who said meaningless, if we’re splitting hairs
its not terrible to be challenged or whatever, it’s totally fine. It was nice to have a bit of a challenge from you. it was also nice to get to feel all the things about videogames and feel safe no matter how it went down, so no worries :3
i mean if you hold a videogame dearly like that you gotta expect a little bit of resistance
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anyway rather than the magypsies being chalked up as a repeated, picked-scab instance of breakfast at tiffany’s mickey rooney level bad taste, I’d like to believe that they could be an honest critical engagement with a magical-negro-style stereotype, but even though I want to give Itoi that credit there’s nothing else available to me in his or his peers’ work to justify that interpretation
Fassad/Yakuba arguably does nothing but further undermine this, but it’s still an ample work of literature that we’re interpreting mostly in isolation, and I don’t think it would’ve taken a huge amount of editing or making things more literal in the English script to fix those characters
things can be good and full and problematic at the same time, right? it’s fine
it just kinda changes when those problematics involve you
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well yeah I’m mostly interested in whether those specific elements are at all redeemable, I think we’re generally of the same mind about how much they sink or don’t sink the whole work
because most readings will find them very egregious
I guess this is also why I’m more invested in the reading of mother 2 as grab bag 90s Japanese postmodernism, I’ve internalized that to a much greater degree so my mind can naturally fill in the thematic asterisks and mother 3 is for good and bad much less of a pastiche