Game

Game

Game

Game

This is one of my favorite games of all time, and I’ll start this review off by telling a story. I got into emulation in like, 2000. My brother showed me Nesticle when I was around 8 or 9, and introduced me to the reason HE got into emulation, which was to play Dragon Warrior, a game he played once at a friend’s house in the early 90s and had never forgotten. I got REALLY into Dragon Warrior, and then got into lots of NES RPGs. It was my big gaming obsession for a while in the early 2000s.

I was also on some forums around that time, and I remember someone on a forum, prolly Acmlm Boards, suggesting I play Earthbound. I hadn’t really heard much about Earthbound before, but I DID know at least one thing! I had Smash Bros on the N64, and I knew about Ness! Oh, he’s the main character? That’s cool, I should check that game out. So I went on my usual websites for searching for ROMs… and I searched in the NES section, because I was hyper focusing on NES games at that time. And I found it. Earthbound for the NES.

Oh this has to be it! It’s called Earthbound. And there’s Ness, right there, the psychic boy in a red cap! And I played it. And I fell in love with it. The vibe, the energy, the little story beats, it was PERFECT. Hard as nails for a dumb 9 year old, but I loved it.

And then I found out many years later I was completely wrong, and people didn’t actually like this game very much. No, you need to play EARTHBOUND, the ACTUAL Earthbound, not that dumb grindy unfinished mess of a prequel. See, in Japan, Earthbound is called Mother 2. I played the first game, which DID get translated, but was never released, prolly cause Americans were stupid about RPGs in the early 90s. That’s fair. Anyways Earthbound, the REAL one, is WAY better. Play that instead!

And I did! And I didn’t like it NEARLY as much!! I still don’t, even today! I’ve played a LOT of Mother 1, but every time I play Mother 2… yeah it’s probably a BETTER game, but I just don’t love it nearly as much. There’s something really, truly special and magical to me about Mother 1. So let’s talk about it.

In Mother, you play as a young boy in a cap with a baseball cap named Ninten. NOT Ness. He wakes up one day to find that some WACKY shit is going down in his home of America. Poltergeists are ruining people’s houses. Zombies are rising from graves and kidnapping children. Animals are going wild and attacking people! And people are disappearing, being abducted… and seemingly replaced. Ninten has to get to the bottom of this. First by just trying to help the people around him, but then he finds that there’s something strange about all this, that his family’s history is tied into this somehow.

You see, in the early 1900s, there was a couple named George and Maria. They disappeared one day, seemingly abducted by aliens, and were missing for two years. Then George returned one day, and never spoke of what happened. But his wife never returned… George secluded himself in his house, studying psychic powers, and left his notes behind in a diary. This is all connected somehow…

The game sets a good mystery and tone. It’s kind of dark and spooky, while also being a hopeful story about childhood innocence, wonder, and friendship. The main goal of the game is to explore the world, finding and making friends, and collecting eight musical refrains, which are all over the place. In places like a music box in your sister’s doll, a singing monkey, a sleeping dragon, etc.

Along the way, you’ll make three friends. There’s Lloyd, the wimpy nerd. Ana, the psychic child who’s mother was abducted. And Teddy, a tough gang leader who’s a nice guy deep down, and wants to avenge his parents, who were killed by the rampaging monsters.

Okay, now, it’s really, REALLY hard to talk about this game without talking about its sequel Earthbound. Everyone always says Mother 1 is not nearly as good as Earthbound. It feels unfinished, almost boring. It’s a slog fest of grinding, and while it has SOME good ideas, Earthbound executes all of them better, right? Well, actually, in Japan, most people don’t look at Mother 2 as favorably as they do here. Prolly for the same reasons I do.

Earthbound has so few original ideas. It’s more than just building off of the building blocks of Mother 1. It’s basically a remake, but it has a completely different tone and vibe, which is good in its own right, but that childhood wonder and love aspect is just… not there.

Here’s a list of things off the top of my head that are in Mother 1 that are just redone in Mother 2, and there are some VERY specific things.

Psychic boy who’s the tank and healer support. He wears a baseball cap and uses a bat. His friends are a nerdy boy in glasses who uses support items and is weak otherwise, and a young psychic girl with really powerful abilities (Poo and Teddy are actually unique and separate). They both take place in America, though in Earthbound it’s “Eagleland”. Okay. You go around collecting eight melodies. Monsters are running amok, animals are going wild, and abductions are happening. You fight gang members. To get through the dangerous tunnels you need to take transportation, which you need to get moving first. There is a desert cave filled with monkeys. There is a single pixel in the middle of the desert which you get an easteregg for finding. There’s Magicant. There’s a musical number in a club. And of course there’s Giygas, who’s the villain of both games, though he’s COMPLETELY changed for Mother 2, being more of a force of nature than the poor child who’s basically forced by his people to attack Earth, and then is driven by away grief and sadness and the power of love for his adopted mother.

This isn’t to say Earthbound 2 has NO original ideas, obviously, and you can prolly chock it up to “hey, it’s all references to the previous game”, but it doesn’t QUITE feel that way to me, as someone who played Mother 1 first, and like I said, the vibe and energy just isn’t the same. I dunno. I’ll EVENTUALLY play and beat Earthbound, I never have. I keep getting kinda bored and falling out of it after a while. I just kinda feel a little worried this review of Mother 1 is just me yelling about Mother 2 a lot, which is bad lol

Mother 1 isn’t perfect. It IS rather slow paced, but it’s an NES style RPG, very Dragon Warrior-y, and it has a lot of rude bullshit. It’s hard to get into, especially if you’re going back to it. Maybe I was lucky I searched for Earthbound in the NES section by accident 24 years ago.

Either way, I love this game to death.