Mother

If there's one series I've always struggled to "get", it's the Mother series, but Earthbound specifically. I could acknowledge Mother 3's quality, I just never dedicated the time to play it in earnest, but I've tried to get into Earthbound several times and just kept bouncing off it. I wasn't vibing with the humor, I found the battle system boring, and the infamous early-game difficulty spike killed any remaining interest I had in the game. Despite loving games that are inspired by Earthbound like Undertale or Omori, I just didn't like Earthbound itself.

So as I was in the middle of playing a bunch of NES games both old and new, I decided to give the first Mother game, which I'll simply refer to as Mother, a try. Despite hearing mostly mixed things about it, I tried to go into it with as much of an open mind as I could. And damn it, of course this is the Mother game where everything finally clicked for me. Let's talk about it.

Heavy Metal Opening

I've played enough to have experienced at least the openings of Earthbound and Mother 3, but I still have to say Mother have my favorite opening of the trilogy. It's just so out-of-left-field that it became instantly memorable to me. Like many RPGs, you take control of your protagonist, in this case a boy named Ninten, as he wakes up at the start of the day. However, just as you leave your room, heavy metal music starts to play, and your lamp comes to life and attacks you. Once you beat the lamp fairly easily, you find that the entire house has started shaking, so you wander around taking out other sentient lamps before facing off against a doll that seemed to have been causing it. Once the doll is defeated, you learn that the house was attacked by a poltergeist. This will never be mentioned again for the rest of the game.

So yeah, that's certainly a strange way to kickstart a game, but I absolutely adore it. The Mother games always went for a pop culture-heavy urban fantasy style that was really fresh at the time, but doesn't feel quite as special nowadays. But starting off your RPG with a playable Poltergeist parody still feels incredibly fresh and unique, and served as a very effective hook. It starts the game off with a fun action setpiece, but it's also easy enough to let the player acclimate to Mother's battle system. That being said, the music definitely helped. Mother's soundtrack is absolutely one of the best I've heard on the NES, with so many incredible rock-inspired tracks that I'd say I prefer to Earthbound's more funky soundtrack. The composers were Hirokazu Tanaka, a long-time Nintendo composer who had previously made the music for games such as Wrecking Crew and Balloon Fight, and Keiichi Suzuki, an actual rock artist. Both of them were absolutely at the top of their game with the Mother soundtrack, pushing the NES's soundchip as far as it could go in 1989, so expect me to rave about the music a lot.

Let Loose In The World

Once the poltergeist incident is resolved, you discover the first of the Eight Melodies hidden by the doll you had just slain. It's at this point that you receive your mission, to go around the world and find the rest of the Eight Melodies for reasons that are currently unknown. It's at this point that you'll discover one of the coolest aspects about Mother, it's completely open world. Once you leave the house, you pretty much have free reign to go pretty much where-ever you want, with the only caveat being your current level. And this is a big map too with zero loading screens or breaks, but despite its size, there are a ton of memorable landmarks, cities, structures, and dungeons to keep you oriented. Just simply running around and exploring the world of Mother is a ton of fun, and despite the fact that I was using a guide like I tend to with RPGs, I found myself often breaking from it just to see what was behind every nook and cranny.

This nonlinear progression structure is put on full display with the game's Second Melody. Soon enough, you'll stumble upon your first town, which is filled with shops, buildings, and NPCs. If you check out the shop, you'll meet a guy who offers you a canary for $80, but will force it on you for free if you say no. Explore around a bit more and you'll stumble upon "Canary Village", a small fenced area filled with humanoid birds, one of whom is looking for that canary you're holding. Give it to her and you got the Second Melody. Granted, this isn't a very original or enthralling quest-line, but it does leave it almost entirely to the player to figure out what they need to do by talking to people and exploring. While this can certainly lead to some cryptic bits later down the line, I think the canary quest nails the satisfying feeling of exploration and player freedom that I feel the game was going for. However, while exploring the world in this game is fun, there is one thing that's kinda holding it back.

The Grinding Complaints... May Have Been Overblown

Yeah, I think it's time to get into the biggest complaint people have about Mother: The grinding. When you start Mother proper, you'll probably have to hang around your house a bit until you make it to Level 3 or 4, and even then you may need to take it slow for a decent chunk of the game, particularly early on. Your allies also start at Level 1 and you'll need to grind in Magicant to catch them up and yeah, I agree, that's a pain and not an RPG trope I'm particularly fond of. However, and this may sound like hollow praise, but I've experienced worst. As a matter of fact, by NES standards, Mother is one of the least grindy games on the console. I've played the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy NES games and you spend hours upon hours in the same spots doing nothing but grinding, while grinding sessions in base Mother mostly take around 15 minutes or so, aided by the fact that you can bump up the text speed to make battles fly by. Similarly, while the encounter rate can be a bit annoying especially with how big the map is, you also have a Run button to cover more distance. Keep in mind that not only was this rare by NES standards (to the point that it wasn't even in the original Famicom release), it's rare by SNES standards, not even Earthbound had a run button. Between the quick text speed and run speed, I was surprised by how well paced Mother is. Even with the grinding, you stumble onto new scenarios at a brisk pace, and the game clocks in at a pretty slim 10 hours, even shorter if you're using fast forward. Considering this is around the length of Dragon Quest 1, a game with a far smaller map and way less to do, I think that says a lot about how densely-packed Mother is.

Though, keep in mind, I'm not excusing Mother's archaic elements by saying that they weren't as bad when in the 80s, mostly putting them in the context of when the game came out. It's like how Final Fantasy V wasn't properly appreciated here because most Western audiences only got to experience it after the more dramatic games like VI and VII, when in reality it was actually massively influential in its own right. But if the grinding issues in Mother are still too much for you, we also live in a time when mods for this game are very abundant. Any issue you have with this game, there's a mod to fix it. The 25th Anniversary Edition is the big one, making a ton of QoL additions, difficulty tweaks, and visual changes. But there's also hacks that individually tweak the encounter rate or XP system, hacks that keep the QoL of the Anniversary Edition but reverse the difficulty and/or visuals, and a lot more. Personally, my favorite way to play this game is the Mother 25th Restoration Hack. It has the QoL and difficulty tweaks of the Anniversary Edition while maintaining the simple Peanuts-inspired visual style of the original, making for an easy way for anyone to experience the atmosphere and story of the game with minimal frustration. The point is, there is a version of Mother out there for pretty much anyone, and I think the game is worth playing in any form to experience the things it does well.

Running Errands

The next quest is to find a missing child named Pippi who seems to have disappeared somewhere in the nearby cemetery, which basically serves as your first "dungeon". Mother's takes on dungeons is kinda neat, since while some of them are indoors and more traditional, others kinda just take place in the overworld. You enter the cemetery and the music just abruptly shifts. It's not especially tough or long though and soon enough you'll rescue Pippi, who proceeds to become a second party member for the brief period until you decide to return her, which in turn means this is the first time you get to hear the game's wonderful second overworld theme, Bein Friends. She's shockingly powerful, boasting incredible stats right off the bat that get only better upon leveling up. Most players won't spend too much time with Pippi, but savvier players may keep her around just a bit to make grinding a bit faster, and even savvier players can find a way to cheat her into the rest of the game. I'm not one of them, but the fact that this bug exists is quite cool.

After returning Pippi, your next mission will be to investigate the nearby zoo as all the animals seem to be going wild. I found the zoo to be a noticeable difficulty spike, as it introduces an entirely new set of enemies who all deal a lot more damage. However, I think the zoo sequence is really important because it's the moment when I really started to experiment with Ninten's PSI. When I stumbled upon my first Elephant enemy, it nearly wiped the floor with me, dealing 20s of damage with a single hit. I thought I was screwed, but then I decided to check out my PSI list and found a defense spell. And using it, I was able to downgrade the elephant's attack damage from 20 to 3. It's at this point that I realized just how powerful the PSI is as well as how important it is to combat in this game. For as powerful as the enemies can be, Ninten is just as strong with clever usage of the PSI, and you amass a pretty massive list of them fairly quickly. By the time I reached the boss of the area, the Starman, I was skilled enough to be able to dispose of him pretty easily and get the Third Melody. Damn, this game's moving pretty fast.

Magicant, Even Better Than I Was Expecting

After solving the zoo issue, it's time to explore the east of the map where you discover a cave. Inside, you find a portal to a weird fantastical dream world called Magicant. Magicant is absolutely bonkers. It's all pink and made up of clouds, populated by weird species I can't pin down, and full of bizarre image like cats that swim on the ground and humanoid eagle people that you can use as temporary allies. But despite how disorienting it felt at first, Magicant quickly became the most comforting location in the game. It's quickly made clear that most if not all the NPCs here are kind and want to help, the shops sell some really powerful items that stay relevant until the end of the game, and while the few enemies that are here are scary at first, they quickly become excellent grinding fodder. You even get an item called the Onyx Hook that lets you return to Magicant whenever you want, so this really feels like it becomes your home base, and man, what an incredible home base. The serene, calming, and slighly unnerving atmosphere of Magicant is a perfect encapsulation of what I found so appealing about Mother, the whole game has this offbeat blend of charming wholesomeness and subtle eerieness that really works for me.

In the center of Magicant is the castle of Queen Mary, who reveals that she forgot a song and needs the Eight Melodies to remember it again. So cool, we finally have our motivation. To leave Magicant, you need to find a mini-dungeon which can be pretty annoying to do. You have to find one specific well out of dozens that will take you to the dungeon, and the dungeon itself is a maze. However, making it to the end will reward you with a bunch of very helpful items, the aforementioned Onyx Hook, a sleeping dragon who you're too weak to fight, and a weird depressed dude who blocks the door for a bit. I'm still not really sure what that was about, to be honest. The Mother series is kind of known for its random humor and honestly it still doesn't really do much for me. There are plenty of witty lines that catch me off guard, but also plenty that fall flat for me because they cross the line into feeling too random.

School And Nintendo's Peanuts

After departing Magicant, you end up in an entirely new part of the world that's once again completely open for you to explore at your leisure. I think this is such a great way to pace an open world game, you can do most of the objectives in whichever order you want, but there are certain skill checks where the story is guaranteed to progress like the zoo and discovering Magicant for the first time. However, there is still an intended path and most players are probably going to visit the nearest town, whose most noteworthy landmark is an elementary school. It was upon entering this elementary school when I realized... this game reminds me a lot of Peanuts.

Shigesato Itoi, the vision behind the Mother games, has always said that Peanuts was one of his biggest inspirations, but nowhere is it more apparent than in this first game. The characters look and move exactly like Peanuts characters, the way the kids in Mother talk and interact has that same cadence, and I even stumbled upon an NPC that looks almost exactly like Pigpen. I've seen some people say that Mother doesn't look good, and I can't disagree more. I think Mother absolutely nails the Peanuts look and feel despite being an NES game, and the charmingly simple visuals give the game so much appeal.

The Infamous Factory And The New Ally

In the school, you meet a nerdy outcast named Loid who asks you to go to a nearby factory to search for a bottle rocket. This is the first of two factories you'll visit throughout the game, both of which are infamous for being annoying mazes where every room looks the same, but this one is far and away the less bad of the two. It's fairly short, the enemies are weak, and you'll be in and out in no time. After a cute scene involving a bottle rocket explosion, Loid officially joins your party as the first permanent party member. He's... honestly not very good. He doesn't use PSI, but he also lacks the raw power to compensate for it. His main selling point is that he can use specific powerful items, but with how limited your inventory is, that's still only so much. I appreciate the commitment to portraying Loid as a general weakling since that's pretty much his arc within the game, but he can feel like a bit of a burden especially early on.

Now, it's time to visit the second and much larger factory, Duncan's Factory. This is definitely one of the worst parts of the game, it's big, drab, the enemies pack a punch, and it's almost impossible to navigate without a guide. Thankfully, there's no boss at the end and you can teleport to Magicant instead of having to backtrack out of there, but it's definitely not all that fun. Actually, now that I'm on the topic, I do want to get into another issue I have with Mother (and by extension its sequel), which is how limited the inventory is. Each party member can hold up to eight items, but that includes key items, health pickups, unequipped weapons, and Loid's machines. It's already a bit annoying to manage, but when you enter a dungeon like Duncan's Factory which is filled with various health pickups and bonus items to find, I can't help but disengage because I know I'm not gonna be able to fit it all in my inventory. It just doesn't feel worth the extra time spent fighting enemies to explore these places.

The Paradise Line

Thankfully, beating Duncan's factory opens up the game even more since now you get access to the Paradise Line, a train that'll take you to three entirely new towns, each with their own little quests. Reindeer is the least important, only including a simple side quest where you can unlock the Mouthwash item, which can be used to heal colds and make endless amounts of cash through a buy/sell exploit. Spookane is fittingly the Halloween-themed town, it's haunted by ghosts and sleeping at the hotel will cause you be woken up by a Starman waiting to fight you. The town also has a creepy manor where you can find a piano that plays the Fourth Melody, freaking finally.

But the most important city you get to visit now is Snowman, a peaceful winter town with some of the best music in the game. It's here that you get to meet your third party member, Ana, and she is a big improvement over Loid. Ana is fairly weak and brittle, but she has an incredible roster of PSI spells that accumulate very quickly and can deal massive amounts of damage. It's actually kinda funny how Ninten's PSI is mostly focused around stat effects and defensive options, while Ana's PSI spells are mostly focused around completely wiping the floor with people. It's also in Snowman that you start to learn about this town called Easter which seems to be blocked off from the rest of the world, with Ana herself wanting to find her missing mother there, laying the groundwork for one of Mother's darkest story beats.

Desert Weirdness

But before we get to Easter, we need to pass through the Yucca Desert. This is a surprisingly fun area with a lot of neat little setpieces, like that one landmine that Shigesato Itoi himself thanks you for stepping on. In the middle of the desert, you can find an oasis where a war veteran offers to give you tours on his plane. There are several different tours, one of which circles the desert and highlights a strange-looking cactus where you can get the Fifth Melody (this is probably the most cryptic puzzle in the entire game) along with a much larger tour that really shows you the grand scope of Mother's world. Get enough ticket stubs from flights and you can also choose to ride his tank, which lets you skip over all random battles and listen to some banging heavy metal music. Eventually, you discover some ruins being guarded by a giant robot, but you can easily shoot it down with your tank which feels very satisfying.

The ruins are a small maze populated by monkeys. There's no random encounters here, so it serves as a nice breather amidst all the chaos in the desert and as a new conduit back to Magicant. At this point, you should probably be leveled-up enough to finally fight that sleeping dragon, but with just how many options you have at your disposal, he should be pretty easy to manage. You could use one of Ana's many PSI spells like PSI Block, you could have Loid toss in Super Bomb and end the fight in one hit. Either way, you'll now get the Sixth Melody. It's at this point that Mother's endgame will start to kick in, along with the game's pretty sudden tone shift.

The Horrifying Implications Of Youngtown

Easter aka Youngtown is the next town you visit, but it has a different vibe from the other towns. It's a town entirely run by children, whose parents suddenly disappeared. You'd think that this would be a fun and whimsical bit of wish fulfillment, but it's not. All the NPCs you meet in Youngtown are terrified! They don't know how to run a town, nor how to support themselves without their parents, and with the train tracks broken, they have no outside help. It's an existential nightmare scenario and the more downbeat music doesn't help either. And if you haven't pieced it together yet, the visit to Youngtown should make things abundantly clear. The opening narration, Ana's missing mother, the entirety of Youngtown, there's an alien invasion going on right now.

After Youngtown, you get to my least favorite part of the game: The Swamp. Similarly to Duncan's Factory, it's a complicated maze, only even more constricting with even more brutal enemies that you're just not equipped to deal with yet. However, it's not too long and if you can slog through it, you'll reach one of the biggest cities in the game, Ellay. Ellay is a dingy crime-ridden town, but you can recruit your fourth and final party member, Teddy, by performing a cute Peanuts-inspired musical number. Getting Teddy does mean you'll have to leave Loid behind since the game only supports three party members, but Teddy is so freakishly powerful that I don't care. Remember Pippi from early in the game? Well, it turns out that she shares Teddy's stats, meaning that he similarly gets massively high attack damage. When trained enough, he can one-shot most enemies in the desert and swamp areas which makes him perfect for if you want to grind out Ninten and Ana a bit for the final dungeon, and you're gonna need it.

Mt Itoi And How To Deal With It

Mt Itoi is arguably the most infamous part of Mother, a brutally hard difficulty spike of a final dungeon known for not having been properly tested. However, I think Mt Itoi actually marks a pretty strong finale for the game and its rough edges can be sanded off with enough preparation, so let me walk you through it. The first area of Mt Itoi is a complex network of tunnels populated by Starmen, though they can easily be taken out by Teddy if leveled enough. The tunnels also contain a lot of really powerful weapons, so getting them is a must. If you're in a bad spot, it's not too hard to simply flee from battles at this point inthe game, and this applies to the whole dungeon. When outside, the enemies are a lot easier and you get access to a free healing cabin with a save point, which gives you a fantastic opportunity to use Teddy to do a bit more grinding.

At this point in the dungeon, you get a very cute cutscene where Ninten and Ana express their feelings to each other through dance, before you all get blown up by a giant robot and carted back down by Loid. Teddy's down for the count, so Loid offers to help you climb back up the mountain. This is probably the most BS part of the dungeon, Mt Itoi isn't super huge, but having to backtrack is never fun especially if it's with a weaker ally. However, just playing around with the PSI can help trivialize certain fights, particularly Ana's PK Beams, and as mentioned above, you can always flee or grind at the healing house. Mt Itoi is a tough dungeon, but Mother is very generous with options, there's always a dozen ways to get past every roadblock.

When you make it to the lake halfway up the mountain, you'll discover a hidden lab containing a robot companion built by Ninten's great grandfather to defend him called EVE, who will proceed to accompany you for the rest of the climb. At this point, the hardest part is completely over. EVE can deal around 1000 damage, and attacks first, so you can steamroll past most enemies. However, right near the top of the mountain, you meet another giant robot who proceeds to destroy EVE. While this didn't completely destroy me like some of the later emotional gut punches this game has to offer, it is a sad fate for the character. You get your seventh melody from a wrecked EVE, but it felt hollow considering how we got it. And not too shortly after, you reach the top of the mountain where you get the eighth and final melody.

The Moment Where This Game Broke Me

This game reminds me a lot of Link's Awakening, it's got a very similar premise of collecting eight parts of a melody, and the Eight Melodies is just as rewarding of a final track as the Ballad Of The Wind Fish was. And just like in Link's Awakening, showing the Eight Melodies to Queen Mary reveals that Magicant was in fact a dream. Not Ninten's dream, though, but the dream of his great grandmother Maria. Now that she can rest in piece, the weird and surreal place you spent the game falling in love with has completely vanished. It's not quite as game-recontextualizing as the Link's Awakening twist nor as utterly heart-shattering, but it does feel like the final piece of the mystery you spent the game piecing together, and it's still a somber moment in its own right.

Back on top of Mt Itoi, there's only one thing left to do: Stop the alien and save the town from his invasion. The alien in question is Giygas, who I only knew as that creepy final boss from Earthbound, but his fight in the first game is one of the most harrowing final bosses I've ever fought. Giygas can't be defeated by traditional means, no matter how much you level, you can't hurt him. Instead, he'll launch brutal attacks on all three of your party members as he monologues about his backstory and asks Ninten to join him. All you can do is to try to defend as much as you can. At the end of the monologue, you'll get the option to try to sing the Eight Melodies, but Giygas will cut you off, not wanting to be reminded of his connection to Maria. It becomes a desperate back and forth as you keep trying to sing, while Giygas keeps launching ridiculously powerful attacks on you. The music is basically just white noise, the background goes completely dark, it's just so bleak. This may not be the incomprehensible eldtrich horror that Earthbound Gigyas was, but this fight feels uniquely personal and anguished.

However, when I was playing, something spectacular happened that only enhanced the fight for me. Just a few singing attempts in, Ninten got taken out. Only Ana and Loid were left, and they didn't have much health left. So in a last ditch effort, I had Ana keep using the best possible healing spell on the two, meaning Loid was the only one who could sing. Ana was losing PP fast, I was on the edge of my seat hoping that this next song would be enough to take out Giygas... and finally, it happened. I defeated Giygas, and got to see the game's very heartwarming cutscene as all the party members get a satisfying, happy ending. But even more, the party member that I spent the entire game and review ragging on was the one who managed to defeat the final boss. What an awesome twist.

The End

Throughout this deep dive, I've been trying to piece together what made Mother land so effectively for me right off the bat and not its sequels, and I really think it's just down to the atmosphere. The dreamlike environments, the Peanuts-inspired art direction, the blend of quirky and eerie, the somber conclusion, the heavier soundtrack, it all struck an effective chord with me. I compared this game to Link's Awakening earlier, but the connections lie even deeper than just the plot. Both games start unassuming enough, but they enraptured me with their world and tone, and punched in the gut with their final acts.

And while the gameplay has certainly shown its age, between the improvements it made over other RPGs of the time, the strong pacing and densely-packed world, the fun experimental PSI system, and the abundance of mods, there's still a lot to appreciate about the game even now. So yeah, I actually really enjoyed Mother, despite its flaws. I'm not sure my newfound love for this game will translate to its sequels, but I do now want to come back to Earthbound and especially Mother 3 someday to give them another shot. But regardless of how I end up feeling about those two, I can definitely say that Mother finally helped me appreciate the series as a whole and gain an understanding of why it's so beloved.