Mother 1+2 (Earthbound)

[RoastedTwinkies]

It's surprising that no one made a topic for this! My copy of Mother 1+2 (GBA) just came in the mail yesterday and I couldn't put it down.

I think these are some of the best games in Nintendo's video game history and that they are really underrated here in North America. I find it disappointing that the sales of Earthbound did so badly back in the days of SNES. Because of that, it's unlikely that Nintendo of America will ever re-release the Mother series here.

The graphics are dated and seem to suit the NES more than the SNES because the SNES was capable of 3D imaging (ala Mortal Kombat, Donkey Kong Country). But the simple graphics were something that never bothered me. My old neighbour first introduced me to the game and what attracted me to it were the characters, the music and the storylines. I think Mr Saturn has got to be one of the most loveable characters in video game history. Even his theme song is hard to forget because it sounds so strange.

we can get all the lastest Earthbound news at www.starmen.net. According to them, we should be expecting Mother 3 very soon and it's also available for pre-order at www.play-asia.com.

What do you think of the Mother/Earthbound series?

[RoastedTwinkies]

eee I apologize for double posting, but I wanted to take the opportunity to be first to announce this here.

Mother 3 will be released on April 20, 2006! That's 11 years after the release of Mother 2 (Earthbound)!

Details here.

[RoastedTwinkies]

I failed to mention it a lot earlier, but Mother 3 is now available for preorder and screenshots have been released on the official site. Starmen.net has created a translation of the site if you want to go have a look.

[AnimeGuru0]

I loved Earthbound. I rented it back in the day like 4 or 5 times and beat it. Never owned it though. I think the reason why earthbound didn't sell well was because it was released when the N64 had already come out.

The thing i love most about Earthbound is just how quirky it is. It's just......strange.....lol, but in a good way. It's very goofy and funny. I really liked it. There were also certain aspects of the gameplay I REALLY liked, like when you approach a very weak enemy, you automatically get the experience and money from it without having to fight it (since if you were brought to the battle screen you'd be able to kill them in 1 hit anyways). It really speeds things up, a wonderful mechanic if i do say so myself, many other games should use this feature.

As for Mother 1+2 coming out in america, i wouldn't rule it out. With the release of Super Smash Bros., Ness has gained a bit more popularity and awareness. Plus, re-releases are increadibly cheap to release, so it wouldn't cost that much money for Nintendo to bring those games over here. I hope they do, it's been ages since i played Earthbound and obviously i never played the first one.

I hope Mother 3 gets released here too, that'd be rad.

[RoastedTwinkies]

I also never owned the game before now. Back in the day, I used to rent it for weeks on end until I beat it. I was nine or ten years old at the time. I forget how long it took me to beat it the first time, but more recently, it took me a month to beat it twice, in english and in Japanese. I played the english version for a bit first, and then I played the Japanese version for a bit thereafter. This made playing the Japanese version a lot easier. The game is kanji free for the most part, but sometimes it was difficult to play. Keeping track of your items was the hardest aspect of playing the game in Japanese. I can read the inventory lists just fine, but sometimes I had to look up the vocabulary. starmen.net has item guides, so that was a big help, though it would have been easier if the items were listed in alphabetical order in Japanese (what would you call it? Technically they don't have an alphabet in Japanese.. ) so that I could find the english translation of items faster.

Earthbound was released here in February of 1995, so I believe that was before the release of the N64. The N64 was released sometime in 1996 if I'm not mistaken. The major problem was how Nintendo of America marketed the game. I think they did a bad job of doing it. They even came out with a print advertisement that said something like "This game stinks!" and had some scratch and sniff stickers. So my classmates thought the game would actually "stink". If they did something more to appeal to kids, such as releasing Mr Saturn plushies like they did in Japan, I think it would have made a huge difference. I also think the simple graphics of the game didn't help much either. These days in North America at least, it seems that kids don't care about the quality of storylines, they just want eye candy.

[MarioKnight]

Yeah, the N64 was released here on September 29, 1996, I got it the day it came out as an early Christmas gift. ^^;;;

I remember Nintendo's marketing with Earthbound pretty well though. I remember (and probably still have) the scratch and sniff stickers mentioned that was from Nintendo Power. I also remember that when Earthbound was released, that the Nintendo Power guide was packed in with the game at no additional cost if I remember correctly. The box was huge, about the same size of the Mario Paint box. Sadly I never owned it, though I did come close to almost buying it off a friend but I forgot why that didn't happen, especially since I kept it for such a long time.

I loved the game itself. Sure, even for it's time the graphics were simple, but it was so odd in so many ways I got hooked. It's really too bad it didn't do well here, as it's a great game. Hopefully we get the whole trilogy over here sometime.

[RoastedTwinkies]

I remember Nintendo's marketing with Earthbound pretty well though. I remember (and probably still have) the scratch and sniff stickers mentioned that was from Nintendo Power. I also remember that when Earthbound was released, that the Nintendo Power guide was packed in with the game at no additional cost if I remember correctly. The box was huge, about the same size of the Mario Paint box. Sadly I never owned it, though I did come close to almost buying it off a friend but I forgot why that didn't happen, especially since I kept it for such a long time.

I remember this. When I rented the game, they gave me the guide along with it. Some dumb kid stole the scratch and sniff cards that came with the guide though. That kind of thing always seems to happen with rentals.

[RoastedTwinkies]

I was checking up on play-asia.com and I saw something else we can pre-order. It looks like we get a Mother 3 bundle! This includes a copy of Mother 3, a Mother 3 Game Boy Micro and a Franklin Badge (not clear what it's made out of). There are also screen caps from battle scenes on the official website now.

[RoastedTwinkies]

So I started playing Mother 1/Earthbound 0.

I'm still really early on in the game, but I think I've seen enough so far to post my opinion on it now. I'm not sure whether or not I should put spoiler tags on this, but I will just in case.

[spoiler]Mother 1 and 2 are so similar in so many ways. In Mother 1, you will recognise most of the music right away from Mother 2, except the quality isn't quite as good. You will also reach major landmarks where you can learn a melody, and the eight melodies we learn are identical to those in Mother 2. Also early on in the game we reach the magical land of Magicant. The name of the town is the same as the one in Mother 2, but it's different visually. We also can get the help of the Flying Men. I really like this aspect of the game. This is as far as I got in the game so far and to give you an idea of how early on in the game I am right now, I only have three of the eight melodies remembered so far (the main character Ninten remembers the melodies instead of recording them with a sound stone).

EDIT: Another feature I like about Mother 1 is that when you equip items, they disappear from your inventory list so that you have more room to carry more stuff.[/spoiler]

The thing i love most about Earthbound is just how quirky it is. It's just......strange.....lol, but in a good way. It's very goofy and funny. I really liked it. There were also certain aspects of the gameplay I REALLY liked, like when you approach a very weak enemy, you automatically get the experience and money from it without having to fight it (since if you were brought to the battle screen you'd be able to kill them in 1 hit anyways). It really speeds things up, a wonderful mechanic if i do say so myself, many other games should use this feature.

[spoiler]Along with the poor music quality, the quality of the graphics aren't quite as good as they were in Mother 2. But the quality of the graphics and the music doen't bother me too much. The thing about the game that really annoys me is that it doesn't have the feature that Bob was talking about earlier. Most times, you don't see your enemies approach you and you never know when you're going to be attacked. When a weak enemy attacks you, you're forced to go to the battle screen even though you can kill them in one hit. It gets INCREDIBLY annoying at times, like when you're travelling through an area, you don't get that far at all before getting stopped by a weak enemy. At times, it's just like STOP. GO. STOP. GO. STOP. GO. ><;;;

EDIT: Another feature I dislike about Mother 1 is the controls. They're a major hastle. It took me forever to figure out how to equip items. In Mother 2, we equipped items under "Equip", but in Mother 1, to equip an item, you have to go to your inventory list, highlight the item you want to equip and then hit "USE".
[/spoiler]

[YorikoAnno]

I've only played a little bit of Earthbound for the SNES, but I enjoyed what little I played. Really bizarre and quirky game. I plan on finishing it someday XD