The completion.
I don't want to say "the end" because it isn't.
I've finished Mother 3. I've finished playing through a trilogy of games some twenty years in the making. I've finished playing through the final installment of a series that has made up more than half of my life so far.
And it feels g......o......o......d.
...Hahaha. Just kidding.
I want to get this post right, though, and I am still wrapping my brain around this game, all of its twists and secrets (most of which I am pretty sure I found on this first full play-through). So I'm going to leave it at this, for now, and come back to this in a little while.
But I am really, really content right now. I was really, really angry earlier, haha. And then I was crying about as hard as I ever have (I am looking at you, Fruits Basket and Gundam 00). But, after everything is said and done, I am happy.
In the summer of 1989, a video game for the Famicom (NES to the English-speaking world) was released in Japan that would influence its culture for many years to come. Though a seemingly typical RPG on the surface, it takes literally minutes into the game before the player realizes it is anything but. Mother would come to be something else entirely.
I was only three when the game was released in Japan and wasn't quite playing video games yet, but that ultimately ended up being of no concern. The game was originally going to be marketed to the United States the year following its Japanese debut, under the name EarthBound. However, after a full translation and localization complete with plans to release the game with a manual that was also part enormously helpful player's guide, it was deemed that the game would take more money to promote than it would actually bring in, despite being such a success in Japan - not to mention the NES was rumored to be on the way out, as the next generation of systems was nearly complete.
Nearly exactly five years later, a sequel of sorts was released for the Super Famicom (SNES), known as Mother 2: Gyiyg's Counterattack. It mostly picks up where Mother left off, having a common theme evident in the title that has all of the fans of the first buying this new game.
And this time, North America got a taste, too.
The game was released stateside, a year later, for the SNES under the title of EarthBound - yes, the same name as its ill-fated predecessor. It was easily identifiable among its peers as it was marketed in a box the size of a standard magazine - to accomodate that manual/player's guide they'd mapped out for the first (obviously compatible with this game, and not that game). However, not even the bright, primary colors and large, golden robot-looking entity - complete with spikes - that emblazoned the box could undo the damage Nintendo had done to the game via the rest of their marketing scheme. After all, with a slogan like "This game stinks!" would you want to buy it? Soon, the game fell into obscurity.
But that all happened long after I'd discovered it at my local grocery store, which also rents out video games and movies. My brothers and I eyed the three boxes hungrily; they were inexplicably enormous and brighty-colored and we were small (plus, you know, there was that spiked robot thing on the cover). So we decided that we must have it, and made our mother rent a copy for us.
This is where it started: in 1995, when I got my first chance to help a boy named Ness save the world. And got to have him eat trash can burgers to do it.
I don't think I can possibly count how many times I've played that game, or how intensely I have loved it all these years, or how much of my humor came from it. The game caught me right at some of my most formative years and remains firmly lodged in my brain to this day as one of my fondest memories of growing up - honestly, one of the very few.
However, it wasn't until I was much older, into my mid-teens, that I sought out a fanbase and discovered Starmen.Net (though I think it was around the time that it was still shedding its skin as EarthBound.Net). This would prove a pivotal thing indeed, especially in years to come. Firstly, I discovered that there was a prequel to the game I'd loved as a child. There is a saga there, too, involving a prototype NES cartridge, complete with the official (though still slightly beta) version of the English translation of Mother discovered on eBay in 1998. It was scooped up by a well-known ROM hacker/translator, borrowed for quite a sum of money, then subsequently dumped, hacked, edited, and released so that the English speaking world could finally have it. Naturally, I fished around for it immediately, but it took me until last year to finally play it. That was mostly because while it is a lot like EarthBound it is for the NES and is also quite a challenging game, so I sort of had to gear myself up for it - and I am really glad that I did because it explains a lot about EarthBound that I never knew, seeing as that game was not even marketed as a sequel for obvious reasons. (These reasons may or may not include the widely known but as of yet unsubstantially proven fact that Nintendo of America hates EarthBound/Mother.)
I also discovered that, in 1999, a mere five years after the release of Mother 2, it was announced that its third installment - aptly named Mother 3 - was in progress for the Nintendo 64DD.
This was a seemingly wondrous piece of news. In reality, this was only the first of many, many mistakes.
Ultimately, the DD (Disk Drive) was a failed attempt at an expansion to the console, so the game was downgraded to be compatible with the Nintendo 64. Still, sparing the gory details (of which there are far, far too many), this didn't prove to be an any more fruitful venture. The project was ultimately terminated in August of 2000, despite the angry, fervent petitioning of so many fans.
But then came hope.
In 2002, the game was rumored to have been resurrected. Of course, this turned out to be only the beginning of a great lot of teasing, as the game hung in the balance of in-production and cancellation for nearly four more years.
Nobody really let out those held breaths until the series' creator, Shigesato Itoi, started up a website and cleverly began releasing screenshots, music, and information about the third Mother game, little by little, until on April 20, 2006, the game that was nearly a decade in the making finally hit the shelves in Japan.
And English-speaking fans waited and hoped and prayed and had their hopes for their very own translation completely-fucking-obliterated. After everything we'd done - after all the noise we'd made - we were being ignored, set aside, and forgotten. It just was not fair.
So Starmen.Net had a plan.
And two years of dedicated, excruciating hacking work later, after slogging through a coding system that couldn't have been more ludicrous, they finished a 100% completely English translation for all of us and released it on October 17, 2008. (A day that will go down in history, if only for a handful of us.)
All three games in the series have brought me to tears. All three games have made me laugh out loud. All three games make up the most incredible story of nature versus technology, of friendship, of family that I have ever read.
Thirteen years after I fell in love with this story, I finally got to see how it all ends. And, honestly? It was more than worth the wait.
I've finished Mother 3. I've finished playing through a trilogy of games some twenty years in the making. I've finished playing through the final installment of a series that has made up more than half of my life so far.
And it feels g......o......o......d.
...Hahaha. Just kidding.
I want to get this post right, though, and I am still wrapping my brain around this game, all of its twists and secrets (most of which I am pretty sure I found on this first full play-through). So I'm going to leave it at this, for now, and come back to this in a little while.
But I am really, really content right now. I was really, really angry earlier, haha. And then I was crying about as hard as I ever have (I am looking at you, Fruits Basket and Gundam 00). But, after everything is said and done, I am happy.
In the summer of 1989, a video game for the Famicom (NES to the English-speaking world) was released in Japan that would influence its culture for many years to come. Though a seemingly typical RPG on the surface, it takes literally minutes into the game before the player realizes it is anything but. Mother would come to be something else entirely.
I was only three when the game was released in Japan and wasn't quite playing video games yet, but that ultimately ended up being of no concern. The game was originally going to be marketed to the United States the year following its Japanese debut, under the name EarthBound. However, after a full translation and localization complete with plans to release the game with a manual that was also part enormously helpful player's guide, it was deemed that the game would take more money to promote than it would actually bring in, despite being such a success in Japan - not to mention the NES was rumored to be on the way out, as the next generation of systems was nearly complete.
Nearly exactly five years later, a sequel of sorts was released for the Super Famicom (SNES), known as Mother 2: Gyiyg's Counterattack. It mostly picks up where Mother left off, having a common theme evident in the title that has all of the fans of the first buying this new game.
And this time, North America got a taste, too.
The game was released stateside, a year later, for the SNES under the title of EarthBound - yes, the same name as its ill-fated predecessor. It was easily identifiable among its peers as it was marketed in a box the size of a standard magazine - to accomodate that manual/player's guide they'd mapped out for the first (obviously compatible with this game, and not that game). However, not even the bright, primary colors and large, golden robot-looking entity - complete with spikes - that emblazoned the box could undo the damage Nintendo had done to the game via the rest of their marketing scheme. After all, with a slogan like "This game stinks!" would you want to buy it? Soon, the game fell into obscurity.
But that all happened long after I'd discovered it at my local grocery store, which also rents out video games and movies. My brothers and I eyed the three boxes hungrily; they were inexplicably enormous and brighty-colored and we were small (plus, you know, there was that spiked robot thing on the cover). So we decided that we must have it, and made our mother rent a copy for us.
This is where it started: in 1995, when I got my first chance to help a boy named Ness save the world. And got to have him eat trash can burgers to do it.
I don't think I can possibly count how many times I've played that game, or how intensely I have loved it all these years, or how much of my humor came from it. The game caught me right at some of my most formative years and remains firmly lodged in my brain to this day as one of my fondest memories of growing up - honestly, one of the very few.
However, it wasn't until I was much older, into my mid-teens, that I sought out a fanbase and discovered Starmen.Net (though I think it was around the time that it was still shedding its skin as EarthBound.Net). This would prove a pivotal thing indeed, especially in years to come. Firstly, I discovered that there was a prequel to the game I'd loved as a child. There is a saga there, too, involving a prototype NES cartridge, complete with the official (though still slightly beta) version of the English translation of Mother discovered on eBay in 1998. It was scooped up by a well-known ROM hacker/translator, borrowed for quite a sum of money, then subsequently dumped, hacked, edited, and released so that the English speaking world could finally have it. Naturally, I fished around for it immediately, but it took me until last year to finally play it. That was mostly because while it is a lot like EarthBound it is for the NES and is also quite a challenging game, so I sort of had to gear myself up for it - and I am really glad that I did because it explains a lot about EarthBound that I never knew, seeing as that game was not even marketed as a sequel for obvious reasons. (These reasons may or may not include the widely known but as of yet unsubstantially proven fact that Nintendo of America hates EarthBound/Mother.)
I also discovered that, in 1999, a mere five years after the release of Mother 2, it was announced that its third installment - aptly named Mother 3 - was in progress for the Nintendo 64DD.
This was a seemingly wondrous piece of news. In reality, this was only the first of many, many mistakes.
Ultimately, the DD (Disk Drive) was a failed attempt at an expansion to the console, so the game was downgraded to be compatible with the Nintendo 64. Still, sparing the gory details (of which there are far, far too many), this didn't prove to be an any more fruitful venture. The project was ultimately terminated in August of 2000, despite the angry, fervent petitioning of so many fans.
But then came hope.
In 2002, the game was rumored to have been resurrected. Of course, this turned out to be only the beginning of a great lot of teasing, as the game hung in the balance of in-production and cancellation for nearly four more years.
Nobody really let out those held breaths until the series' creator, Shigesato Itoi, started up a website and cleverly began releasing screenshots, music, and information about the third Mother game, little by little, until on April 20, 2006, the game that was nearly a decade in the making finally hit the shelves in Japan.
And English-speaking fans waited and hoped and prayed and had their hopes for their very own translation completely-fucking-obliterated. After everything we'd done - after all the noise we'd made - we were being ignored, set aside, and forgotten. It just was not fair.
So Starmen.Net had a plan.
And two years of dedicated, excruciating hacking work later, after slogging through a coding system that couldn't have been more ludicrous, they finished a 100% completely English translation for all of us and released it on October 17, 2008. (A day that will go down in history, if only for a handful of us.)
All three games in the series have brought me to tears. All three games have made me laugh out loud. All three games make up the most incredible story of nature versus technology, of friendship, of family that I have ever read.
Thirteen years after I fell in love with this story, I finally got to see how it all ends. And, honestly? It was more than worth the wait.