Welcome back to Franchise Festival, where we explore and discuss noteworthy video game series from the last four decades. Older entries can be found here.
This week we will be wistfully contemplating Mother / Earthbound. Cover art, unless otherwise noted, is from MobyGames. Please consider supporting that website, as its volunteers tirelessly catalog key information and art assets for an often ephemeral medium.
General sources for this article include Clyde Mandelin’s book Legends of Localization 2: Earthbound, the exhaustive STARMEN.net, cartoonist Keiichi Tanaka’s illustrated interview with Shigesato Itoi, and Retronauts‘ podcast episode on Earthbound. Please consult these sources to learn more about this incredible series.
Background
Shigesato Itoi was born in 1948 and spent much of his career as a copywriter at Japanese advertising agencies. This brought him more public acclaim and awareness than one might have expected, and he had become a popular cultural commentator in Japan by the middle of the 1980s. Itoi also spent some of his free time during the middle of that decade playing Super Mario Bros. (1985) on Nintendo’s new Famicom game console; while other genres, notably role-playing games (RPGs), felt stiff and abrasive to him, Itoi found Mario to be highly inspirational.
The copywriter’s aversion to RPGs softened when he encountered Enix’s Dragon Quest II in 1987. While playing it, he felt a sense of professional jealousy and wondered why he too couldn’t be developing video games. Itoi began jotting down thoughts on how his own RPG might play. In a striking coincidence, he was soon invited to Nintendo headquarters to offer his opinion on an upcoming game after Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi spotted him discussing the Famicom on a TV talk show.
After talking about the aforementioned upcoming release (Square-developed Miho Nakayama’s Heartbeat High School, published by Nintendo in 1987 but never localized outside of Japan), Itoi took the opportunity to pitch his own game concept directly to Mario and Donkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto. Inspired by Hollywood’s Steven Spielberg, his proposed RPG would break with contemporary trends by being a coming-of-age story set in modern times rather than a high fantasy epic. Miyamoto politely reviewed the proposal and seemingly dismissed it. Shigesato Itoi departed Nintendo’s offices, despondent and resigned to having no place in the world of game development.
Mother / Earthbound Beginnings (1989/2015)
Months after his meeting with Shigeru Miyamoto, Itoi received a surprising call from Nintendo’s Hiroshi Imanishi indicating that the company had pulled together a team to develop his proposed RPG. Itoi and the team eventually rented out an apartment in Ichikawa for the last few months of development and, with the backing of Hiroshi Yamauchi, established a new studio called Ape, Inc. The resulting game was released on the Famicom in July 1989.
Mother is not an instantly engaging work, restricted as it is by the Famicom’s limited color palette. Artist Shinbo Minami’s character sprites, certainly cute as they explore an Americana-influenced modern landscape from an angled overhead perspective, are small and lack much animation. Turn-based combat initiated through frequent unseen random encounters, depicted in a first-person perspective reminiscent of Dragon Quest, features a punishing difficulty curve. This outline suggests a game which would struggle to attract an audience in the increasingly competitive home console market of 1989.
What separates Mother from its contemporaries, though, is its utterly unique authorial voice. Unlike any other game of its era, Mother was driven by a director with experience in writing rather than in programming or art. Shigesato Itoi composed the dialogue not by typing it at a computer – as he remained entirely unfamiliar with typing even into the early 1990s – but rather by dictating phrases to an assistant and determining whether they would make it into the game based on her reaction. The writing is often funny but sometimes quietly moving.
Mother‘s narrative concerns the adventures of a young silent protagonist named Ninten. Ninten acquires psychic powers called PSI and departs his hometown of Podunk for an adventure across the countryside, cities, and a dangerous mountain named for the game’s creator. Most enemies are cartoonish exaggerations of objects and living things that the player might encounter in real life. A magical realm called Magicant awaits at the game’s conclusion, wrapping up what had been a comparatively down-to-earth adventure with an existential conclusion.
In keeping with its Beatles-inspired title, Mother‘s Keiichi Suzuki-directed soundtrack is also highly innovative. Suzuki had previously worked on only one video game, Batman (1989), but was primarily chosen for his experience as the founder of experimental Japanese rock band The Moonriders. Suzuki would integrate numerous samples of pop music and ambient soundscapes into a genuinely distinctive palette. His collaborator, Hirokazu ‘Hip’ Tanaka, was no less instrumental in honing the game’s unique sound. Tanaka was particularly enthusiastic about reggae’s dub sub-genre, delicately integrating it with 1960s American and British rock music when composing songs for Mother.
Mother was an overnight success in Japan, rapidly selling over 100,000 copies. A localization process to bring the game to the land which had inspired so much of its visual design, North America, was soon begun under the direction of Nintendo of America’s Phil Sandhop. An expansive strategy guide was even prepared for distribution. Unfortunately, the game would not make its planned 1991 overseas publication due to the 1990 release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in North America. As had been the case with Square’s contemporary abandonment of an English-language Final Fantasy II (1988), Nintendo seems to have calculated that releasing an RPG for a previous-generation game console could only lead to commercial disappointment. The localization was quietly shelved in spite of promotional material having already found its way to the North American market.
Fans intrigued by what they had read would receive a surprise when, seven years later, an English version of the game began to circulate online as Earthbound Zero. The mysterious cartridge from which this ROM was derived seems to have been a legitimate copy of the game developed by Nintendo. Modifications and patches designed to reduce the game’s frustrating difficulty curve were quickly developed by the fan community, and the budding world of game emulation received another infusion of interest through its acquisition of this once-lost artifact.
Still more surprising was Nintendo’s decision to officially publish the English version of Mother on the Wii U Virtual Console in 2015 as Earthbound Beginnings. Though the initial announcement was greeted with fanfare, critical reception to the game was middling. Much of what Mother did well had already been encountered by North American players, after all, when its successor was released on the SNES in the 1990s.
Note: Mother cover sourced from Famicom World
Mother 2 / Earthbound (1994/1995)
Production on Mother 2 began shortly after Mother was complete. With more powerful hardware, Itoi and Ape, Inc. expected to be able to more fully realize their vision on the Super Famicom / SNES. In reality, the process proved to be fraught with challenges.
Aside from Itoi’s direction and audio by Suzuki and Tanaka, much of Mother 2′s development team was entirely new. Itoi retained a unique, often hilarious authorial voice, but he lacked the management background needed to corral staff ideas and maintain focus. Many of the final game’s most brilliant subversions of genre cliches came from Itoi’s solicitation of any and all thoughts from his team, but this was not a conducive atmosphere for making measurable progress on a complex project. Even the post-1991 involvement of Tsunekazu Ishihara – at the time a special effects artist and line producer who would later go on to form Creatures, Inc. and become President and CEO of the The Pokémon Company – did little to keep the Mother 2 development process from grinding to a halt.
Shigeru Miyamoto soon interceded by introducing Satoru Iwata and Iwata’s studio, HAL Laboratories, to Itoi in 1993. HAL had salvaged the similarly lost (if not similarly ambitious) Famicom title Pinball in 1985 and recently developed the hugely successful Kirby’s Dreamland (1992) for Nintendo’s Game Boy platform. Though Mother 2 had only recently been facing the real threat of cancellation by Nintendo, Iwata and his team of programmers assured Itoi that the game could be completed with their help in six months. One year later, following six months of development and a final six months of debugging, Mother 2 was on Japanese store shelves.
The game was a successful evolution on every aspect of its predecessor. The presence of Mother‘s primary antagonist Giygas and the striking visual similarity of the two games’ protagonist – though Mother 2‘s playable character is canonically named Ness, the player has the option to enter any name at the game’s start – confirm that Mother 2 is more of a refinement than a sequel played straight. Itoi and his team seemed to be implying that this was the game they had intended to make since 1987.
The story is banal in its broad strokes but entirely unique in its particulars: upon the guidance of a time-traveler from the future, Ness must leave his hometown to find eight musical tones and avert the destruction of Earth. Ness eventually joins up with a psychic woman named Paula, an inventor named Jeff, and an Eastern prince named Poo. The party travels through towns, rural landscapes, cities, and dungeons in the manner of any contemporary RPG, though these are highly influenced by mid-20th Century Americana rather than medieval Europe or science fiction.
Unlike virtually any RPG of the early 1990s, Mother 2 features no world map. The player instead controls Ness and his friends as they move through and between entirely to-scale environments from an oblique perspective. A world map was created, and serves to make clear the real-world analogues of the in-game countries Ness visits, but it is present only in supplementary materials. The effect of an entirely to-scale diegetic environment is a telescoping of space and and an infusion of surreality which helps to inform every other aspect of the game.
Enemies are encountered as sprites wandering explorable environments rather than in the random encounters of Mother and most other contemporary RPGs. They can be ambushed by having Ness approach them from behind, giving the player a first strike in battle, or can ambush the player if their sprite strikes Ness from behind. In one of the game’s most player-friendly (and rarely imitated) concessions, running into an enemy of a much lower level than Ness will automatically win the encounter.
Combat otherwise plays out through a unique battle system. Like most other RPGs, the player’s party is whisked away to a distinct combat sequence once their sprites intersect with an enemy sprite during exploration. The view is still first-person, as it had been in Mother, but the background is a constantly moving psychedelic pattern rather than the staid black backdrop of the earlier game. Battle commands are turn-based, alternating between party members and enemies based on their speed statistic.
After each attack on a party member, though, damage is inflicted in a rolling fashion visually represented by an odometer-like health point (HP) gauge – the higher the damage sustained, the longer it takes for the character’s HP counter to tally up the damage in real-time. Consequently, a speedy player can have a party member use items or abilities to heal or attack an enemy before he or she receives the full extent of an injury. This element of real-time problem-solving adds a layer of stress and excitement on top of what might otherwise be a bog-standard RPG battle system. The odometer-based rolling damage system replaced Itoi’s original plan to have health loss represented by pachinko balls falling from a character’s total HP pool; the original mechanic didn’t work well once characters gained a large amount of HP through leveling up and was cut as early as 1990.
Nowhere is Mother 2‘s unique character more on display, though, than in its surreal characters, dialogue, and environments. Non-player characters (NPCs) include a man who becomes a dungeon, a group of five devious moles each claiming to be the third of five, a corrupt police force, a cult dedicated to making the world happy through overzealous application of the color blue, an itinerant group of Blues Brothers-inspired musicians, and more. Towns include the idyllic Onett, menaced by a gang who runs the local arcade; the zombie-infested Threed; the urban psychedelic dreamscape of Moonside; and the beach resort town of Summers. An innovative late-game sequence, influenced by Japanese musical film The Tigers: The World’s Waiting For Us (1968), even sees the fictional characters breaking the fourth wall and calling on the players themselves for in-game assistance.
Unlike its predecessor, and in spite of the rapidly approaching launch of Sony’s PlayStation console, Mother 2‘s localization was not shelved. Localization was carried out by Dan Owsen and Marcus Lindblom over a period of roughly one year and Mother 2 was published on the SNES as Earthbound in 1995. The changes are numerous, and are summarized at the Legends of Localization website, but I strongly suggest buying a copy of Clyde Mandelin’s exhaustive book Legends of Localization 2: Earthbound for the full story. In short, Owsen and Lindblom managed to sympathetically translate Itoi’s distinctive voice into English while also hewing to the extensive content restrictions mandated by Nintendo of America.
A misleading advertising campaign for the game in North American media was heavily influenced by gross-out culture aimed at a teenage and young adult audience. This discordant messaging, along with an uncharacteristically high cost of $69.95 USD at the time of release, led to poor sales. Contemporary reviews were largely negative and seemed to ensure that the game would be forgotten as the industry soon transitioned from one hardware generation to another. Unexpectedly, Ness’ inclusion as one of twelve playable characters in the instantly popular Super Smash Bros. (1999) and a dedicated online fan community saved the game from obscurity.
A compilation called Mother 1 + 2 would be released in Japan on the Game Boy Advance in 2003 and feature a handful of updates to both games, but North American players would need to wait until 2013 for an official re-release of the game on Nintendo’s Wii U console. Its inclusion alongside only nineteen other titles on the SNES Classic mini console in 2017 would conclusively reassure players that Nintendo had finally acknowledged the series’ cult status. Even this resurgence of popularity in the 2010s, though, could not secure a Western release for the series’ long-suffering final entry.
Note: Earthbound cover image sourced from YouTuber what.sf2
Mother 3 (2006)
Mother 2‘s commercial success in Japan had convinced Nintendo of the franchise’s long-term viability and production on Mother 3 was underway by the end of 1994. In contrast to the transition between Mother and Mother 2, Shigesato Itoi was given control of the entire Mother 2 team as he began work on the game’s sequel. Ongoing internal excitement about the studio’s upcoming Super Mario 64 (1996) inspired Itoi and his team to move Mother into a 3D space on the Nintendo 64; an early version of the game was on display at Nintendo’s Spaceworld 1996 Trade Show, as revealed in archival footage that only began to circulate online in 2019. Mother 3‘s innovative structure, planned but not prototyped during the early months of development, involved twelve chapters with a rotating cast of playable protagonists.
As had been the case with Mother 2 before it, development of Mother 3 soon experienced setbacks. Itoi’s ambition to create a game which resembled a Hollywood film outstripped the capabilities of the Nintendo 64 hardware and production was shifted to the Nintendo 64DD. This peripheral, a disc-based deck which could be plugged into the bottom of the Nintendo 64 and opened up dramatically advanced processing power, would falter in the market and never be released outside of Japan. The failure of the Nintendo 64DD saw Mother 3‘s developers reduce its scope and shift back to the cartridge-based Nintendo 64.
By Nintendo’s Spaceworld 1999 conference, the game was in a playable state and promoted to English-language press as Earthbound 64. IGN’s contemporary report on the demo indicates that play focused on a party comprised of Flint, a cowboy reminiscent of Clint Eastwood; Lucca and Klaus, two young boys; and Boney, the kids’ dog. The player could navigate around a vast desert environment on foot or using a bean-shaped aircraft. Pig-like enemies wandered the landscape and, if touched by the player character, could be battled in a first-person turn-based sequence which resembled a 3D evolution of Mother 2‘s combat. Though commands were input through menus typical of the genre, the player also had the ability to enhance his or her character’s attacks by engaging with a rhythm component based on background music. A handful of thrilling cutscenes, including a mine cart chase and a dragon running alongside a bullet train, showed off some of the best-looking action designed for the Nintendo 64 at the time of the event.
Unfortunately, Mother 3 was canceled by Nintendo in mid-2000. An unusually candid roundtable conversation between Shigesato Itoi, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Satoru Iwata was published as an article accompanying the cancelation notice and translated into English 13 years later. The three senior developers discussed reasons for the project’s failure, settling primarily on the need to reallocate staff for development on the studio’s next console and an unnecessary focus on cutting edge graphics. In spite of the somber tone, Iwata left the door open for future series entries.
As suggested by this ambivalence over the collapse of Mother 3 on Nintendo 64, development on a new version of the game would begin after a three-year hiatus. The visual design was consciously changed from 3D to 2D and the game targeted release on the GBA. Brownie Brown, a studio with staff drawn from Square’s Mana franchise, aided Itoi’s team on his project’s newest iteration. In conjunction with the announcement of Japan’s Mother 1 + 2 GBA compilation in 2003, Itoi officially confirmed that work had begun anew on Mother 3. Japanese fans rejoiced at the long-overdue release and collectively purchased 200,000 copies within a week of the game’s April 2006 release.
Mother 3 is surprisingly successful as a successor to Mother 2, in spite of that game’s distinctive character and a stunning 12 years in development. Its graphical overhaul maintains the general appearance of locations and characters from the Nintendo 64 prototype while hewing closely to Mother 2‘s style. The pixelated, colorful world is depicted from an overhead perspective that would be familiar to fans of earlier series entries. Mother 3 was the sequel that fans had been waiting for.
The greatest difference between Mother 2 and Mother 3 is one of tone. Itoi’s well-honed sense of satire and humor is as effective here as ever, but the game’s script is steeped in a profound melancholy largely absent from earlier titles. Loss and the need to extend a helping hand even to one’s enemies are among the game’s core themes, as outlined by Itoi in an extensive analysis of his game. Capitalism’s tendency to inspire class conflict and stratify wealth is also explored. Interestingly, Itoi asserts that the final version is less emotionally heavy than the version initially developed for the Nintendo 64.
Mother 3‘s plot focuses on the residents of the Nowhere Islands’ rustic Tazmily Village and their reaction to a world increasingly beset by conflict. The game opens on Lucas, a young boy whose family is caught up in a violent attack by the mysterious Pigmask Army, though play soon shifts to focus on Lucas’ father Flint. Mother 2‘s eight chapters progress through time and see multiple playable protagonists making their way across the Nowhere Islands’ rapidly modernizing landscape. In an intentional rebuke to broader game design trends, Itoi sought to emphasize characters with a more diverse range of life experiences than typical RPGs – these include the handicapped Duster and gender-fluid Magypsies.
Gameplay is similar to Mother 2, though a handful of new systems have been added. The player now guides his or her party from an overhead perspective rather than the oblique view of earlier series entries. NPCs are frequently encountered in urban and wild spaces, still spouting the unique brand of absurd dialogue for which Itoi’s work is known.
Enemies wander the field as well, kicking off battle sequences when encountered. Combat occurs from a first-person perspective with enemy sprites set against psychedelic backdrops. Commands are input in a turn-based manner roughly identical to Mother 2, though a rhythm minigame used to enhance the power of attacks has been carried forward from Mother 3‘s Nintendo 64 prototype.
For reasons which remain obscure, Nintendo opted not to localize the game in North America. Speculation has tended to focus on the fact that it had the misfortune to be released on a soon-to-be-discontinued platform, as the GBA was already being replaced by the Nintendo DS on North American store shelves in 2004, but its controversial treatment of the aforementioned Magypsy characters is likely another reason for Nintendo’s ongoing decision to keep Mother 3 region-locked.
Luckily, the enthusiasm of Earthbound‘s fan community ensured that dedicated players could get their hands on a translated version only two years after Mother 3‘s Japanese release. Clyde Mandelin, author of Legends of Localization 2: Earthbound, spearheaded the translation effort. Though emulation software has tended to struggle with recreating Mother 3‘s unique rhythm mechanic, players who purchased an unofficial cartridge containing the translated game could play it in its original form on GBA hardware; due to the presence of GBA hardware within the Nintendo DS and even the 3DS, emulating the game on those platforms proved similarly effective. Fans continue to clamor for an official Western release but have so far been rebuffed.
Conclusion
No further entries in the Mother franchise have been released since 2006, and are unlikely to be developed in the foreseeable future. Shigesato Itoi has explicitly ruled out continuing the series in spite of its sustained popularity among fans. Given Itoi’s guiding role and the game’s limited commercial impact outside of Japan, it is unreasonable to expect that Nintendo will produce another Mother title without its creator’s involvement.
Still, Mother‘s influence on other developers remains stronger than ever. A fan-made Mother 4 has been in development since 2010, though it underwent rebranding in 2017. Numerous standalone indie projects, like Dingaling Productions’ Lisa: the Painful (2014) and Toby Fox’s Undertale (2015), share much of the tone and visual style of Shigesato Itoi’s saga. Whatever Nintendo’s future plans may be, the ever-beguiling Mother franchise will be a source of inspiration for decades to come.
What do you think about the Mother / Earthbound series? Which is your favorite entry? Would you like to see a future release in the franchise and, if so, how do you suppose it would differ from earlier titles? What’s your stance on average, run-of-the mill moles? Let’s discuss below.
Next week we’ll be taking a deep dive into the perfectly cromulent history of The Simpsons game franchise. I’m happy to announce that the article will feature an exclusive interview with Bob Mackey, host of Retronauts and the Talking Simpsons podcasts. Be sure to join us at 9:00 AM EST on Friday, June 28, 2019!
For reference, here is a list of upcoming Franchise Festival entries (subject to change):
- June 28: The Simpsons
- July 5: Mega Man X
- July 12: Mega Man Legends
- July 19: Call of Duty
- July 26: Wario
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