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Hello everyone, and welcome back to the 80th Page of the Blisscast Journal! It’s honestly astonishing to think that I’ve managed to write a whole whopping 80 Pages and that, in only just 20 Pages time, I’ll have finally reached the fabled Page 100! I’m immensely excited about that, although I guess that I should focus on the here and now, right? 🙂
So, for now, let’s focus on something else; our more eagle-eyed readers may have already noticed, but in case you hadn’t, we’ve actually just begun implementing a series of new updates for the site, to hopefully help keep making your experience with it better than ever before! For now, we’re testing out a new bottom bar that should hopefully be ever-so-slightly visible at the bottom of your screen, which, if you click on/hover over it, should not only allow you to switch over to the Next or Previous Pages of the Journal, but should also offer you a passage to the Journal’s Index, as well as allowing you to switch over to the Italian version of this very blog!
Please keep in mind, however, that this is still technically being tested, and whilst it should be functional, whether we move forward with this will depend entirely on you all. So, for just this blog, we’ll be including both the new bottom bar, as well as the previous versions of the features that it offers, and we’ll leave a little poll at the end in order to get your thoughts on the matter. Thank you very much for your continued support, and we hope this update will make the site even better than before!
Now, as usual, before we begin, let’s cover my goings-on this last week; as I mentioned starting it last week, you’ll probably be pleased to know that I’ve been continuing with my efforts in reading Chaos;Head Noah, and I must admit that, thanks in part to not only already knowing how it ends, but also knowing why the story is so bizarre, I’ve actually been enjoying it far more than I did back during my first experience with this tale. Plus, the added ability to freely skip through some of the redundant lines has also done wonders for improving my time with the game (please Takumi, stop being so verbose), so overall, I’d say the whole thing has actually been really enjoyable! 😄
And now, with my usual retelling of weekly events out of the way, it’s time that you get what you deserve, with the long-awaited Page about…
| Mother (NES) |
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Mother, also known as “Earthbound Beginnings”, is a JRPG developed by Ape and Pax Softnica, and directed by Shigesato Itoi, which was originally released back in 1989 for NES, although only in Japan (it was supposed to be localized in 1990, but was then canceled). The game was then later re-released for Gameboy Advance alongside its sequel, “Earthbound” (known as Mother 2 in Japanese), in the compilation featuring the very creative name of “Mother 1+2” (although only for a Japanese audience). It first received an official localization in 2015 thanks to the Wii U’s Virtual Console, where it was officially renamed to “Earthbound Beginnings”; this same version is now also available to play on the Switch Online library. For anyone curious, I personally played the “Mother 1+2” version with the use of a fan-made patch.
This quirky title was incredibly unusual for its time, as it was a JRPG that lacked any fantasy elements, be it Weapons, Characters, or Setting; you see, the game is set in 1988 (mysteriously changed to 198x in the newest releases) in America, and its protagonists are regular kids, trying to save the world from a mysterious alien with whatever they can find, aided by their psychic (PSI) abilities.
At the beginning (wink) of the story we meet the main protagonist, a young kid named Ninten (although you could name him whatever you wanted, just like with the rest of the party), who gets woken up in the middle of the night by a… well, you know… that incredibly common occurrence that is a lamp coming to life and trying to attack you. After defending himself and his sister, Ninten’s Dad then reveals to him that his great-grandfather was somehow involved with paranormal events, and that, after his wife Maria’s disappearance, he began to study them in isolation. Moreover, he also reveals that the world is now being threatened by a dangerous alien, and so the young Ninten must find a way to save it. After some investigating in the nearby town, he somehow ends up in a bizarre pink world called The Magicant, where he meets Queen Mary, the ruler of that fever dream-like realm, who proceeds to task Ninten with finding the 8 Lost Melodies that she has dreamed of, before he must then return to Magicant in order to sing them to her.
Throughout his adventures, Ninten meets various kids and allies who will join him on his adventure, although they are not your usual brand of heroes (or, at least, they weren’t at the time this game was made); for example, one such girl he meets used to live in a church, and is known as Ana (she is also capable of using PSI), whilst another person he meets is a young nerd, called Lloyd, who isn’t able to use PSI, but most certainly knows a lot about weird machinery. Moreover, Ninten will also find himself visiting many normal-looking towns, caves, and other locations that, at the time, you most certainly wouldn’t have found in a JRPG, but then why go there? Isn’t the point of a game to experience something that you can’t in real life? Well, whilst these places may not seem to be out of the ordinary, they’re all actually named after festivities (at least in Japanese), and each of them have several paranormal events that take place there, which, in turn, leads them to becoming quite bizarre as a result.
What doesn’t sound out of the ordinary, however, is the Gameplay, as it was inspired by the Dragon Quest NES games (I’ll maybe get to them eventually, especially since it’s yet another series that EmeraldDM8 has tried and seems to think highly of), and it involves running around in the Overworld, Battling Enemies, Leveling Up, and buying Equipment; these are, as you could probably expect, things that we take for granted in a JRPG, although here, they come with a somewhat unusual weird twist, such as the heroes being Elementary Schoolers (and I mean actual Elementary Schoolers, not like when an anime claims that a character is in elementary school, but then acts as though the character is actually an adult), the gear that you equip onto your characters being commonly found items such as Baseball Bats, and the enemies that you fight being anything from lamps to zombies, to even aliens. Then, in yet another unusual twist (at least for the NES), the map itself is actually a single humongous-sized one, with almost no loading zones (apart from the entrances to houses and dungeons, although even those places are stored somewhere unreachable on the same map), which is really quite an impressive feat, especially for the time. Let’s just ignore the fact that the world is, honestly, a bit empty in the end.
Sadly, what wasn’t so out of the ordinary for the time was that the game requires an excessive amount of grinding and backtracking; this is, without a doubt, intended to be padding, as without the grinding, you’d be able to complete this game significantly faster, yet instead you’re forced to grind so many levels and, to add insult to injury, every new party member you get will be at level 1 and will, understandably, die pretty much the second after you obtain them! Ugh… The grinding… I know we usually try not to be negative on this site (because rather than hate on something we didn’t enjoy, we usually just wouldn’t write about it), but the mixture of the grinding and backtracking in this game honestly really ate away at me, and was really detrimental to my enjoyment of this game. The Train that you unlock later does help to mitigate the backtracking issue a little, although it takes you quite a while to actually unlock it, so you’ll still have grown old and turned to dust to do a lot of wandering around before you even get close to getting access to it. If there were any game that desperately needed a modern remake, it’s this one, because it’s really the gameplay that holds back what I genuinely think is a really engaging and well-written story.
Speaking of the story, this game is a good example of one of those titles with an interesting plot (can’t reveal it because of spoilers, but even so), filled with quirky details and unique themes, that ultimately end up ruining everything in the gameplay department; even the brightest of stories would start to grow dim if no one is able to even experience them, and if to uncover the next plot point, you need to spend hours grinding and then backtracking somewhere, then only the most patient or crazy people would actually be able to experience the entire thing. On top of that, the game also offers little-to-no guidance on what to do or where to go, which, whilst certainly not unusual for the time period, is honestly a bit of a serious problem when you’re trying to traverse such a big map filled with so many possibilities, as it becomes incredibly easy to get lost. As a result, this makes the game hard to recommend to JRPG fans. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it would be hard to recommend to anyone other than just the most die-hard Mother fans, and so, for the first time ever on this site, I must say that I cannot recommend that you play this game…
… But then, why hasn’t this blog come to an end? We’ve reached the finale, the tale has ended, yet the blog continues? Well now, intrepid reader, whilst it may sound like the story is over, we’ve only just begun the third act! For you see, whilst the gameplay may hamper and bring down the story of the game, the story itself has actually managed to live on, so please stick around for just a little bit longer as we take a little time to glance over toward this game’s outstanding novelization!
And so, we must first begin this section with an admission; I didn’t finish the game. I just couldn’t bring myself to willingly slog through anymore of that excruciating gameplay, but my interest in the story had already been peaked, and so, following up on the rumors and whispers I had heard of regarding a novelization of the game, I searched the internet and soon came across the official novelization, which had been kindly translated by Nyaasu. And so, I started reading it, and I enjoyed it. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I was engrossed by it, as the novelization manages to brilliantly expand upon the original plot; you see, the main difference between the book and the game is that the book is told from the perspective of Ana, and it not only allows us to see everything that had happened in her life before Ninten met her, but it also allows us to experience this grand tale through her eyes. The novel not only offered me far more insight into her thoughts on the whole thing, but it also helped to underline just how weird it was that kids were supposed to save the world (this was before video games seemingly decided that kids were the only people who were able to do anything. We’re looking at you, Persona! Give us more adult protagonists like we had in Persona 2!), plus we also get the chance to see that the protagonist is honestly kind of a brat. Truthfully, as I read through the novel, I was finally hit by that fun experience that I had been hoping for back when I first started this game, and so I’m really grateful for having found this novel as, without it, I would have missed out Mother’s unique plot. Because of that, whilst I wouldn’t recommend the game to even my worst enemy, I will most certainly recommend the novel to absolutely anyone who is even remotely interested in the story of this series! Really, it’s a great read and definitely worth your time!
Luckily for us, I also happen to know that this game sequel, “Earthbound”, has greatly improved gameplay, and the same can also be said for the rather famous Mother 3, both of which I’ll review at a later date (honestly, the only reason I even played this game in the first place was so that I could talk about the other two, but at least I got an amazing novel out of it!). Even so, despite my grievances with it, I can at least say that it’s nice to see where it all started and to have some insight into the lore that precedes Earthbound. So yes, whilst I don’t usually like reviewing games I’m not a fan of (as I dislike spreading negativity), I still wanted to talk about this, primarily to set the stage for the later two games, as well as to shed some light onto the existence of its splendid novelization.
So, to conclude this blog, if you are interested in this game mostly because of its story, I suggest you read the novelization, if not, then you should probably just go and play Earthbound instead. Still, if you are absolutely certain that you really want to play Mother, then I actually recommend playing this version of the game, since it has better and non-compressed music, and you can try to use the so-called Easy Patch or an item called Easy Ring in order to make everything more bearable (assuming you can find the item, that is)[1].
With that all said, I would like to thank you all for reading, and I hope I’ll see you in next Thursday’s Journal Page! Also, please don’t forget to answer our survey question below.
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References
- Wikipedia: Mother (video game) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_(video_game)
- Nyaasu no Bouken: MOTHER (EarthBound) Series Translations – https://nyaasunobouken.com/mother.htm
- [1] This is an item that is supposedly found at some point in the early game, though I couldn’t find it in any way, and I’m not sure why; the thought of having to restart the game to find it (I was halfway through it) or to apply the patch made me eventually quit the game altogether :’).
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