MOTHER (EarthBound Beginnings) - Part 1/4 - NES - マザー ~ Shigesato Itoi's Beginnings
13If I were to ask you to describe an NES RPG, what would you say? Very high random encounter rate? Lots of grinding? Difficult game? Ding! ding! ding! Welcome to MOTHER. It checks all the boxes of the good little and brutal NES RPG.
However, what sets it apart, right off the bat, is that the setting is not medieval high fantasy. No, you're in the "modern" world, you live with your family in a cute (?) little house, and your dad deposits money in your bank account as you go adventuring around. A normal life! Except, an evil alien wants to take over the world (or destroy it?), so you've got to work on that.
The enemies you fight in MOTHER are extremely random. Sure, you'll fight cute little animals (erm..), but also pairs of eyes, hippies, cars and trucks, vomit (yes!), angry ladies, robots, UFOs, farmers, a dragon, samurai armor, other indescribable enemies, and the quintessential MOTHER enemy: the Starman. The story is mostly just about finding parts of a melody and your friends to defeat that evil entity, but the dialogues are really funky and different from a usual RPG. In a way, it's both funny and tragic. The final boss battle is truly unique, too -- although the same idea would be brought back for the sequel. Shigesato Itoi will be responsible for all three games in the series.
The first game in this franchise is pretty short, and yet it will require you to grind in a few places. It was later ported to the GBA along with the second game, and that version was made easier by letting you equip an item that gives you 4x the experience points from battles to make the game less grindy. I am playing the NES version here through the Nintendo Switch Online service. In the final part of the playthrough, I've edited out a few grinding sessions. The GBA version never saw an English release, obviously, so no easy mode for you!
I almost skipped this game, because I had given up on it back in the day for being too grindy -- but I am stubborn and always want to play all games in a franchise in order, so I forced myself to go back to it and in the end, I'm glad I did. It truly was a unique experience and I really enjoyed my time with it!
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There are 1,593 views in 11 videos for Earthbound. The game makes up over 1 day of published video on his channel, or 3.12% of the total watchable video for Earthbound on Retro Zen's YouTube channel.