can we talk about mother 3?

Those are all good points, dudes

I think Earthbound handles some pretty heavy adult stuff with the right amount of subtlety. there are at least two or three portions of the game that look like/evoke some kind of psychedelic drug trip. MOTHER 3 has your characters literally trip out on mushrooms, and see all kinds of deep personal fears. i think Moonside and Magicant manage to be unsettling without being so direct about it.

imo there is also nothing in any of the games that really tops Poo’s initiation for being directly creepy and fucking with your perception of the mechanics, even the endgames.

at this point in my life even if i agreed with all the arguments against mother 3, it’d probably still be the only one i could actually see myself replaying anytime soon. of the three of them, 2 seems the most belabored by its format as a 90s snes jrpg. i understand that a lot of its appeal lies in its generally lax relationship with pacing; the minutiae and heart in the spaces between the explicit—but i’ve curled up and lived in that world already, i’ve seen all its wrinkles. i don’t need the grand tour anymore.

if i’m going to put myself in a mother headspace i may as well play the Greatest Hits album at this point, and mother 3’s snappiness (and format, and themes) best serves that experience i think.

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[quote=“21012, post:43, topic:644, full:true”]
at this point in my life even if i agreed with all the arguments against mother 3, it’d probably still be the only one i could actually see myself replaying anytime soon. of the three of them, 2 seems the most belabored by its format as a 90s snes jrpg. i understand that a lot of its appeal lies in its generally lax relationship with pacing; the minutiae and heart in the spaces between the explicit—but i’ve curled up and lived in that world already, i’ve seen all its wrinkles. i don’t need the grand tour anymore. [/quote]

Two feels like it ends at Fourside. My replays all stop there.

Summers has some OK parts though.

magicant tho

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Of course it’s not uncritical, but the theme of the game is to experience the corruptions of the adult world, cleanse them through faith, and return to your peaceful home. That isn’t a bad theme, but it is conservative.

3’s demand is that you must annihilate your childhood and forge society anew without help from any benign outside influence. You don’t have to like it better, but it is essentially radical.

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The best way to play 3 is with a physical cart. I played it on a flash cart through a combination of the gameboy player and the original DS with nice headphones. The game looks and sounds great either way. Clone carts exist with the game translated and ready to go. Id grab one of those. Being a larger than normal rom file I had problems running it back in the day and had to buy a cart just to play Mother 3 on,

2 just feels more innocent and fun and thats just what I want out of a long form videogame these days. …but these days are hard in a way that makes me yearn for simpler entertainment.

I am replaying 2 right now on my phone and having a blast. It has been surprisingly easy and mildly breezy. Maybe I’m just better at games now?

Today if someone I knew hadn’t played 3, but liked 2 I would insist they try it. It is still a game of high worth, its beautiful but get ready for some weight.

this is a great thread! i found these old notes abt mother3 i had lying around and they seem pretty relevant wrt its pessimism, radicalism, and conservatism:

-Mother 3 is louder than its predecessors. The traffic has picked up so the writers have to yell. THE WORLD IS BIG and FAST and LONELY. Please, PLEASE make sure you look at the flowers.

-The imperialist enemies poison the land and tear its people apart. The impossible, utopian island is so damaged by the modern that the world has to be made again.

-But mother3 only rejects capitalism because it yearns for traditional living. this is conveyed by its utopianism. pre capitalist tazmily is explicitly free of violence. everyone lived in harmony.

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It’s a good point - Mother 3 isn’t communist by any stretch of the imagination. It’s peddling a Rousseauian prepolitical utopia and is vague about the pre-Porky economy. The violence done by men in pig masks is a disingenuous depiction of social violence, possibly because the meta point of Porky Minch #1 EB fan gets in the way of a slow and boring transformation and subjugation of Tazmily by happy box manufacturers.

One of my favorite points in Mother 2 is the implication that the Mani Mani statue is just an amplifier of something that’s already there - Liar X. Aggerate, Carpainter, and Mr. Monotoli are just succumbing to avarice. There’s the cosmic threat of Giygas and the Starmen but that’s not really made extant until Stonehenge.

Mother 2 is about good humans winning out with faith whereas Mother 3 settles down to relationships and how tectonic events shake them up.

As someone completely foreign to Mother series, how come Mother 1 is not talked about as much?

because it was never localized and mother 2 / earthbound was, in most respects, a remake which was way more salient to a north american audience.

mother 3 is much more its own thing, a response to mother 2. mother 2 is as far as I know really only an expansion of mother 1.

pretty much, though mother 1 does have its own kind of extremely foreboding atmosphere that i’ve always found interesting

it’s also very much a 1980s nes rpg; a massive chore

I think the gba release of mother 1 was English patched though that’s only as good as gba dragon quest probably

Mother 1 sure is a chore yes.

Look at Mother’s kafkaesque factory dungeon:

There is no in-game map and you get random encounters every ten steps.

There’s not much dialogue, and any vaguely interesting design choice has been reused and magnified in the sequel, bar maybe the ending.

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I like MOTHER 1 a lot and could probably find some interesting things to say about it when i get a moment! It’s harder to get invested in because of the more archaic design, and essentially you have to dig deeper for less, but it’s pretty cool in its own right and more than just a prototype for 2. Probably my favorite RPG of its era.

There is a NES localization that is actually official, but it was never released and exists only in ROM form (and in one cart owned by a wealthy collector). It’s a cool story.

Mmhmm – which is why it’s so fascinating that you have to destroy a manifestation of it in Ness’s own mind. Your hero has the same capacity for evil as anyone else, and must undertake a spiritual journey to overcome it.

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what mother 1 was released in english on wii u late last year as earthbound zero, wasn’t it? did I dream that or something?

No, you’re right, it got released as Earthbound Beginnings. I completely forgot about that. Probably because it was completely unexpected! And as i recall, it was the original version with the original translation.

Glad people are actually talking about Mother 1. Was going to suggest it myself, but wasn’t sure it would be appreciated. I played through it about a year ago and it’s definitely a slog at times, but it has a number of little moments that I’m glad I experienced. The final boss is a much more relatable and sympathetic version of Earthbound’s final boss. The soundtrack in general bounces back and forth between sing-a-long to terrifying industrial, and that sort of amplification of those atmospheres seemed to fit the concept of being a child, and often out of your element.

Also a grown man who stabs enemies with a knife joins your team and that’s some hilarious whiplash.

Mother was the first game I played in the series, and I think it set the tone of the next two games for me. Was the Earthbound Zero ROM, not the difficulty hack.

Going through Mt. Itoi gives you some perspective.

I played through Mother (as Earthbound Beginnings) when it was released on the Wii U. It’s not that bad if you use maps and a guide in certain spots. I would agree that it has its own themes and vibe and content independent of Earthbound, even if they share a lot of similarities. I think there’s a patch that halves the enemy encounters and doubles experience from them, which is probably the most sensible way to play the game.

I will say that in terms of tone, style, and overarching themes, it’s much in the same vein as Earthbound. But I actually much prefer the vibe of the overworld and the way it’s designed. It’s the most open and free flowing of the bunch. Has a sense of place and atmosphere all its own in comparison the Earthbound. The music is wonderful, as well.

Mother is definitely more open to being a tongue-in-cheek video game than the later games seem to be in my opinion. Instead of being a vehicle for whimsy and sage advice, it’s very much a video game populated by goofy characters. The themes are definitely similar to Earthbound, but it paints them with a much less cynical stoke as everyone’s said 2 seems to do. I kind of enjoy that it makes the adventure less of an arduous metaphor for adolescence, and let’s whatever comes as you approach dungeon X be a product of whatever the writer(s?) thought kids would do in a situation like that. (Hiding in garbage cans, getting in fights with gangsters, dancing in an abandoned cabin, etc.) It’s pretty contrary to the demands of taking it seriously that the series gives you as time goes on. I like it much better for that.

I agree with a lot of what toups says about 3 though. Itoi’s killing wives/moms and using trans-coded mystics to comment on how unnatural and fucked up things are was so heavy handed that I also had to stop well before the end.

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