MOTHER series

[Anonymous No.10402504]

So which one of these three games from Mother are your preferred one, and why? And which one is the one you dislike more?

[Anonymous No.10402513]

mother 1 is primitive but fun, a bit of a slog especially the early game
mother 2 is the best game in the series by far
mother 3 is joyless trash

[Anonymous No.10402521]

>>10402504
First one is the best.
Huge open world, good difficulty, non-linearity, actual soul, good atmosphere.
Second one is easier, more streamlined, and has forced soul.
Third one is super-linear and its story insists upon itself.

[Anonymous No.10402538]

>>10402521
>Huge open world
and most of it is empty wilderness with nothing to do

[Anonymous No.10402545]

It's probably the obvious answer. I like Earthbound. It's the one I played as a kid, and it also flows better to me.
I like a lot about Mother, I should probably replay it.
3 I didn't care for. I got about 6 hours in, was not liking it at all, and so never beat it. So, I can't fairly judge it in that regard.

[Anonymous No.10402578]

>>10402513
not joyless but definitely underwhelming. Mother 3 is the reason EarthBound has such a retarded le quirky so deep image attached. We wouldnt have moronic youtube videos and dogshit indie games as grating as they are without 3 being so up its own ass. Now people have it in their head that 2 was like 3 and only 1 is safe from it all until it gets a remake, then people will cherrypick apart the dialogue and reduce it to the same shit

[Anonymous No.10402606]

1 is the best and it's still filtering people today
2 is okay
3 is a piece of shit

[Anonymous No.10402618]

2 > 3
>1
I never got very far in 1, but I'd probably appreciate it more now that I'm older and have actually played more RPGs.
>2
2 is still fantastic, maybe a bit overrated. The game starts to lose me after Fourside and I have mixed feelings on Poo.
>3
3 is really good but I have no desire to replay it despite the fact that I haven't beaten it since the original translation patch came out. I wish the pacing was better.

[Anonymous No.10402624]

1 is great soulful open rpg.
2 is fun dq-clone with inventive setting.
3 is meh dq4-clone that overstays its welcome.

[Anonymous No.10402629]

>>10402513
Mother 3 is like the prototypical "2010s cartoon made by millennials". Whenever I see footage of it I am instantly reminded of shit like Adventure Time.

[Anonymous No.10402630]

>>10402618
If you play one, I'd say don't play speed up or anything. Just get yourself into the slower paced mindset.
You will consume it slower; you will enjoy it more.

[Anonymous No.10402635]

>>10402630
For sure. I used to fast forward grinding whenever I played 2 as a kid, but now I've learned to love the grind.
If I can force myself back into learning Japanese, I'll pick up a cart and play through it on original hardware.

[Anonymous No.10402720]

>>10402504
to me it's 1 >> 2 > 3
openness / exploration: 1>>2>>3
combat/tactics: 1>>3>2
style: 2>>1>3
characters: 2>>1>3
atmosphere: 2>1>3
story: 3>2>1
1 is unironically one of the best NES RPGs, the only one with the good gameplay. 2 is really stylish and quirky, but the gameplay is just tedious. 3 is striped socks + rope core, it TRIED to do good combat and "cinematic" serious story but it doesn't work out in the end.

[Anonymous No.10402780]

>>10402578
>Mother 3 is the reason EarthBound has such a retarded le quirky so deep image attached. We wouldnt have moronic youtube videos and dogshit indie games as grating as they are without 3 being so up its own ass

you're obviously extremely young. earthbound's ending gave the game this notoriety years before mother 3 released. mother 3 was basically fucking vaporware for years.

[Anonymous No.10402870]

>>10402780
>vaporware
>most downloaded translated game
mother 3 has been relentlessly shilled since the day it came out.

[Anonymous No.10402904]

>>10402870
you don't know what vaporware means, which to be fair, it's kind of an old term. vaporware means a game which is in dev hell and will never exist, which mother 3 was when earthbound hit its peak early internet popularity. until mother 3 was rerevealed for GBA, Mother 3 was assumed cancelled and dead on the N64DD. It didn't have impact on earthbound's reception because it was not something anybody knew about. it was a pipe dream if a game called mother 3 would see release.

Earthbound was received as "quirky and deep" because that's what the game went for by having such an abstract ending.

[Anonymous No.10402949]

>>10402720
>1 is unironically one of the best NES RPGs, the only one with the good gameplay.

Which ones have you played? Gameplay wise, everything about its structure and combat, Mother is basically Dragon Quest 2 on steroids. On steroids but still a DQ clone; and there are other games in the same style with some degree of freedom and a lot of customization like Metal Max or Lagrange Point.
My top 5 Famicom JRPGs are Dragon Warrior 2, FF2, Earthbound Beginnings, Megami Tensei II and FF1. Then Metal Max, DQ3 an DQ4 are close.

[Anonymous No.10402956]

>>10402513
>>10402578
I think the problem with 3 is that it tries to shoehorn a serious antiutopian story about loss and society into babby's first RPG. I can't take any of it seriously when your party is silent for 99.9% of the game. The setting went from modern America to god knows what, it goes from dinosaurs to magic to modern cities to cowboys to underwater trannies. The game isn't even sure what it wants to be, Earthbound at least knew it was a saturday morning cartoon and it did that one thing very well.

[Anonymous No.10402962]

>>10402904
>vaporware means a game which is in dev hell and will never exist

What it means is that the game had some taiser / announcement or something but no real proof it's in dev and no real content shown. Vapor = smokes

[Anonymous No.10403003]

>>10402949
I'll be honest I haven't played that many. I just meant "if you want to try NES RPGs, be sure to look into Mother". M1 is accessible and looks pretty good, yet it retains challenge and gameplay focus of NES era. this is one thing that sets it apart from grindy dungeon crawlers of the era with basic blocky graphics.

[Anonymous No.10403040]

>>10402956
it felt like itoi was going through a midlife crisis or depression or something. whatever he was trying to communicate...another mother game was not the right avenue

[Anonymous No.10403487]

>>10402504
Earthbound is easily the best one. Mother 1 suffers from Famicom JRPG problems and Mother 3 just isn't as good as Earthbound.

[Anonymous No.10403535]

>>10402504
I started with Earthbound as a kid and then as a teen got halfway through it before putting it down. Now I've beaten Mother 1, Earthbound, and started 3. I like Mother 1 WAY more than Earthbound. I don't even know why he made Earthbound given that it's almost a 1 to 1 remake but with everything done worse.

I'm alone on this, but I also found Earthbound MUCH harder. Going through that part in your head at the end of the game as solo Ness was insane. That boss there was complete bullshit and so was the final stretch through Giygas. I hated everything about that fight. It was so long and any mistake essentially instantly lost you the fight (whether you realized it or not) and structurally it was identical to Gigue from Mother 1, but worse. I was told over and over how Mother 1 was one of the hardest jrpgs and I would need to grind my ass off in order to beat it, but really you just grind some at the beginning to survive and then after you get the spell to run from battles, you can do that for the whole game because there's only 2 bosses in it and one is Gigue which is more of a set piece than a real fight (though you still need stats to survive it). I had a real experience playing Mother 1 and figuring it out. I felt things and it was a sweet story. After Earthbound I was just annoyed it didn't get me to feel anything other than irritation and occasional laughter. I'm looking forward to 3 because so far it's incredibly sad and WAY different from the previous 2.

[Anonymous No.10403565]

>>10403535
> you can do that for the whole game because there's only 2 bosses in it

This is my n°1 complain about the game, IIRC you're given a freebie for all the bosses in the second half of the game so you don't have to fight them for real.
With that said, the idea of using special methods like this for bosses (and specifically the final boss) were novel at the time AFAIK, especially when you consider that the method used for the final boss is central to the plot.
And in retrospect, DQ1 and 2 didn't have that many bosses either except at the end of the game (some of bosses in DQ2 were just special versions of regular enemies too), by that I mean there was plenty of dungeons or quests without bosses at the end. I think the act of going through the dungeon, finding what you need, and surviving the ordeal was considered the real challenge.

This is also why the more I think about it the more I respect the first Final Fantasy and the way it uses bosses (which is now standard, but wasn't in the genre at the time, not even DQ3 which use of bosses is more "standard" had been out yet)

[Anonymous No.10403694]

>>10402780
It was fine before people played the translation and saw that mother could so blatantly be in your face exploring le deep emotional traumas, before that people didnt take mother as seriously as they did. It was more known for THIS GAME STINKS type of parody discussion followed by love for the whimsy and not the quirky

[Anonymous No.10403721]

>>10402504
1 is a prototype of ideas for what defined a style of suburban RPG that 2 fleshed out (but 1 has more open wandering compared to 2)

3 is fine as its own thing. It feels more like a gaiden side game instead of what came before.

[Anonymous No.10403770]

>>10402956
I liked how a plot point of M3 was essentially Porky trying to forcibly recreate the setting (world he knew/was nostalgic for) of Mother 2 on the Nowhere Islands in a distorted form. I guess you could heap that onto the layers of discussion to disect about its Meta narrative BS.

[Anonymous No.10403816]

>>10403770
The Nowhere Islands are Japan and the game is a clumsy indictment of Japanese society being nothing but a parody of West. Well... at least that's what a redditor told me once.

[Anonymous No.10405242]

>>10403040
That, or Itoi rode the Edginess trends of that time. In any case, if not before, Itoi could had become depressed during the EarthBound64 development with how hard was the process, and doing it on the already hard Nintendo 64 made it worse; plus he was too much overconfident about the game and tried to put to many things/ideas on the game that in the end only meant more delays & problems.