Yes this is a topnotch MOTHER thread
here’s my sketchy, overlong post about interesting stuff in MOTHER1.
I guess if MOTHER2 is about the Hero’s Journey through adolescence and MOTHER3 is about having to accept the end of childhood then MOTHER is just embracing the experience of being a child and finding the wonder in the world around you. There is a mundanity to the environments and most of the enemies that’s markedly different from the subsequent games. More of the things you fight are wild animals gone berserk or inanimate objects brought to life. The weirder stuff consists mostly of the alien invaders and magical fantasy creatures that are explicitly from an imaginary land. (Oh, and some zombies.)
The world you explore is rural and low-key. There are no Saturn Valleys or hallucinatory alterworlds or factories full of talking puke. No floating Asian mashup kingdom in the clouds, no lost underworld full of dinosaurs. The people you meet say funny things and there’s a smile to everything (literally – just look at your characters in profile!), but nothing is as jokey as MOTHER2. Instead, you find the fantastic in the normal places you go. The fragments of a song, lingering about – in a cactus with a face, in a music box hidden in a doll, in the chords of a singing monkey. You’re not going on a journey outside the known world, so much as uncovering the liminal spaces between the mundane and the fantastic.
The one glaring exception is Magicant. Magicant is a kingdom of spiral-shell spires and fluffy pink clouds, a dreamland right down to the music. You’re safe in Magicant, and everyone there loves you. Their benevolent queen is a kind old lady who cries out at night for a lost child, and can’t remember the lullaby she used to sing to him. You later learn she’s your great-grandmother. That’s why the series is called MOTHER in the first place – you begin in the comfort of your home (until the peace is momentarily shattered by a poltergeist, of course), where your mother will cook your favorite food and your sisters will watch over your stuff and your dad calls you on the phone to give you words of encouragement – and Magicant, the hub to which you return time and time again, imitates all these kindnesses for you. It’s a child’s dream of a mother’s love, personified.
Then you help the old lady sing her song, and the dream shatters, and can be returned to no more. You face down the alien who has created so many problems for you, only to realize that he’s an angry, frightened child. More than that, a fetus, suspended in an artificial womb. You “defeat” him by singing to him that same lullaby, taking the role of the MOTHER and using it to remind him of the kindness he was once shown. The last bosses of MOTHER3 seem almost to mirror it.
As far as how it connects to the later games: notice how the early areas of M2/EB are suburban towns with dirt roads and grassy cliffs. The same exact environment that composes the entirety of MOTHER. Now notice how M2/EB abandons this similarity after Fourside, and gradually spins out into more and more openly foreign places – first in the sense of leaving behind western culture for Asian and Mediterranean influenced places, then into the darkest jungles, then into a world lost to time, then… to the dreamworld from the first game, recontextualized as the center of your hero’s mind. And then the fantastic invades your hometown and you’re forced to travel to the most alien, frightening place of all in order to stop it at its source.
I don’t know where i’m going with this, really. Just think that MOTHER2 is a more thoughtful follow-up/foil to the original than it is a mere rewrite. I would even say that the familiar two-boys-and-a-girl party is supposed to parallel the party from the first game, and that it’s Poo’s arrival (in the form of a hippie’s spacecake vision) that marks the game shaking things up and getting weirder than ever before.