The REAL Greatest Game of All Time

Forget about that E.T. crap; this is the real deal. But you’ll still have to phone home.

When it hit American store shelves in June of 1995, Nintendo’s wacky SNES role playing game, Earthbound, was met with disappointing sales. Despite a generous amount of coverage in Nintendo Power magazine and an ad campaign that reportedly cost the Big N about $2 million, only about 140,000 copies of Earthbound found their way into the homes of eager Nintendo gamers. Compared to the 300,000 copies that made it into the hands of players in Japan and the fact that the RPG genre had yet to hit its stride in North America, 140,000 units might be considered a respectable performance. After all, games Final Fantasy II and III on the Super Nintendo met with similar success in the United States, though the actual numbers escape me right now.

Earthbound unboxed.

But then there’s this statement from Nintendo gaming guru Shigeru Miyamoto: “We had high hopes for Earthbound, the Super NES version, in the US, but it didn’t do well. We even did a TV commercial, thinking, ‘Hey… this thing could sell three million copies!’ But it didn’t.”

Suddenly, Nintendo’s reluctance to release the title on the Wii’s Virtual Console doesn’t seem as boneheaded.


Proof that EB's marketing was intended to cost $2 million. Borrowed from Earthbound Central.



Whether it was Nintendo’s poorly planned scratch ‘n sniff promotions of the game, the lukewarm (and frankly ill reasoned and written) reviews that criticized Earthbound’s “squashed” and “childish” graphics, or the fact that video games were transitioning to the world of three dimensions right as Earthbound hit the market, many American players missed out on one of the most touching, hilarious games ever. Known as MOTHER 2 in Japan, Earthbound is the coming of age story of a boy named Ness who, after being awoken one night by a meteor crashing practically in his backyard, discovers that it’s up to him and three friends he’s never met to save the world from the intergalactic menace known only as Giygas. Defying the typical RPG conventions of the time, Earthbound takes place in a postmodern world where baseball bats and frying pans replace swords and shields; hippies, drunken old men and scalding cups of coffee roam the streets looking for a fight; and to restore hit points, all one has to do is order a pizza. And if you’re feeling homesick, just give your mom a ring and you’ll get over it in a snap. Earthbound even came with its own strategy guide. Designed to look like a travel brochure, the guide quickly became an indelible part of the Earthbound experience.

Screens from the back of the box.

Many of the game’s unique situations and locales were based on the adventures of Japanese copywriter and TV celebrity Shigesato Itoi, who just so happens to have created the MOTHER series in the first place. For example, the “mole mine” in the Dusty Dunes Desert is based on a cave expedition Itoi took for a Japanese television program, and the final battle with the universal destroyer, Giygas, was inspired in part by a rape scene from a 1957 film called The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty, which a young Itoi was exposed to when he accidently entered the wrong movie theater.

Itoi

Yes, even though Earthbound is often light-hearted, Itoi cleverly approaches mature themes such as death, absentee parenting, homosexuality and psychological trauma as a father might explain them to his children. Other times the player is forced to face the facts with no one there to guide them, just like growing up in real life. It’s a potent metaphor for what many young adults, just like Ness and his friends, will endure as they reach adulthood. It’s especially meaningful for those who just entered the confusing corridors of teendom themselves, as I had the year the game was released.

Another of Shigeru Miyamoto’s pearls of wisdom, this time in reference to his inspiration for games like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros.: “What if you walk along and everything that you see is more than what you see – the person in the T-shirt and slacks is a warrior, the space that appears empty is a secret door to an alternate world? What if, on a crowded street, you look up and see something appear that should not, given what we know, be there? You either shake your head and dismiss it or you accept that there is much more to the world than we think. Perhaps it really is a doorway to another place. If you choose to go inside you might find many unexpected things.”

What else would you expect from a guy who
runs around like this all day?

It’s that kind of childlike wonder that made Miyamoto’s many masterpieces the hits they were; his own monuments to kiddom. Likewise, Earthbound is Itoi’s celebration of childhood, but not through the lens of the very young like Zelda or the original MOTHER game. Earthbound represents late childhood, where the world is still a wonderful and intriguing place, but there’s the creeping realization that society is in some way diseased; along with the burgeoning sense of romantic love comes the unease of sensing that there could be heartache right around the corner. Maybe that’s why I don’t much like MOTHER 3, Earthbound’s Japan-only sequel, because it’s the gaming equivalent of the transition from teen to adult. The carefree feelings of MOTHER and Earthbound are mostly absent in MOTHER 3, replaced with dread, pain, loss and a musical battle system that BAFFLES THE CRAP OUT OF ME, just like real life.

If you ever get the chance to play the underappreciated gem that is Earthbound, grab your controller, start whacking the local crazy animal population with baseball bats, and don’t look back. Even if you don’t agree with me that it’s the greatest game of all time (which it is), I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

In fact, here’s the perfect excuse to play Earthbound TODAY:



Starmen.net’s yearly Earthbound Fanfast and Funktastic Gamplay Event is where it’s at. Every two days, the player is told how far to advance in the game and everyone talks about their shared experiences on the message boards. It’s a great way to connect to other Earthbound players and an even better way to reconnect with the greatest game of all time. Also there’s prizes and prizes are fun.

So find those strategy guides, grab your Leave It to Beaver-style red hat and get crackin’, because you’ve got a world to save!

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That'll do it for my top games list, but many of you have yet to tell me about YOUR favorite games of all time! If you haven’t, take a minute to post your top three games as a comment to this post. I’ll reveal the results in a future article here on Wordsmith VG!

Of Gods and Starmen

About three years ago, Earthbound supersite Starmen.net held an event called "EB Siege" in which the MOTHER series faithful called Nintendo every day requesting that MOTHER 3 be released in the United States. It went on for quite awhile, but since years later the only English version of MOTHER 3 we have is Tomato's excellent fan translation, you can guess the results.

The logo.

For a brief while though, Nintendo seemed to be taking note of our campaign and we a felt like we could actually pull it off. This essay was written during that final push when it appeared that maybe, just maybe, we might get our wish.

*   *   *

As you might expect, one meets more than a few people working as a reporter for a weekly newspaper in a small city. I’m not some uber-journalist who would risk his life trying to get the scoop on, say, a zombie-infested mall or something, but I do speak with approximately 10 people a week, depending on the stories I have to write up. Especially with my position as an entertainment writer - with a few hard news items thrown in when my fellow reporters need to actually get some sleep - the people I meet are usually chatty, middle-aged women who love theater, kind-but-boring old men and my favorite, uppity art snobs. But I met someone today who was different – someone whom I actually enjoyed interviewing.

Gerardo Castro is a local artist with an exhibit coming up at one of my city’s newest art galleries, the River Art Emporium. This guy has quite the way with words and it’s all right off the cuff. As a writer, I choose my words carefully, read and reread my articles and agonize over sentence structure long after the word processor is shut down. But today, as I sat in my office’s conference room with my rinky-dink tape recorder and my cell phone on speaker, there was Castro, talking to me as if he were a cross between Maya Angelou and Dr. Seuss.

“My colors are really intense,” he said. “I use a lot of things, like sequins and beads and rhinestones and shells and jingle bells and ribbons and they drag sometimes to the floor.”



Castro, left, standing outside his art shop, Newburgh Art Supply



Wow.

Castro’s new exhibit is called Romancing the Gods. As the name implies, it’s all about religion. But like Castro himself, the gallery is anything but run-of-the-mill.

“The idea of romancing; when you romance something, it means you do things to entrance; you do things to seduce, things to captivate,” said Castro. “So the idea of romancing the gods has a lot to do with painting and doing these art objects in which I’m almost trying to make THEM fall in love with ME. It’s like I’m almost trying to seduce them into believing in me instead of the other way around.”

It only hit me an hour or two later when I was while writing the article that we, as Earthbound fans and patrons of Starmen.net, are “romancing a god” with the current, biggest and possibly final EB Siege. We’re trying to get a video-juggernaut that, in the end, only cares about money, to believe in love, passion and something that’s not Pokemon Fuchsia or Mario Party 37 for once. We’re trying to get them to believe in us, a bunch of average human beings who have a very unaverage commitment to our favorite video game. We’re all a little like Ness and his friends – we’re fighting against what seems to be insurmountable odds, but there’s defiantly a way for us to triumph – and it’s going to take all of us to do it.

David vs. Goliath

All the pieces are in place for a typical David and Goliath comparison, only we’re not trying to kill the Big N, we’re trying to get it to go to the prom with us. (Though if it gets that far, I’m not going to be the one to dance with Nintendo; that would be weird.) And like Castro implied, that’s a pretty hard thing to do. But it has happened before. For example, in Greek mythology, Poseidon, god of the sea, fell in love with Cleito, a young human girl from Atlantis. Okay, so he essentially fell for her because she was totally hot and all, but still, it happened. Now if only it were that easy for us.

Last time I checked, I wasn’t exactly the hottest dude in Atlantis (probably if I were a little taller though), so it looks like we’ll have to do this the old fashioned way: by deluging NoA with our MOTHER 3/Earthbound demands via e-mails, snail mails, voice mails, text messages, smoke signals, wooden carvings, etc. But if anyone can make a dent in Nintendo of America’s seemingly impenetrable anti-Earthbound armor, it’s us. Who knows how many of us there are and how many are taking part in the Siege, but like the time nearly 10 years ago that NeoDemiforce scraped together the money to purchase and dump the Earthbound Zero prototype, it only takes a few persistent people to make a difference. This time, though, we’ve got a whole BUNCH of persistent people.

Thankfully, it finally looks like the gods at Nintendo are starting to pay attention to our pleas. They know how much we love the MOTHER series; in fact, when I called NoA the first week of PK Call’N, a very nice customer rep by the name of Josh said as much.

“Earthbound fans love the game as if Ness were their own child,” he said. He wasn’t being sarcastic or degrading. He really meant it.

PK Call'N's logo.

And this was only the first week of the Siege. Nintendo knew of our unparalleled devotion even BEFORE we started the latest campaign. Weeks later we started hearing reports on the starmen.net forms that customer reps are taking callers’ names, and today I read that Nintendo is starting to ask what gaming platform callers would like to see Earthbound/MOTHER 3 on.

The god, it seems, is finally starting to fall for us.

Stalone as "Rocky"

Do you remember that nobody boxer from Philadelphia who took on the champion and beat the living snot out of him? I’m talking about Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stalone’s character in the Rocky series of films. Even against Apollo Creed, who was clearly faster and much more skilled, Rocky didn’t give up – and neither will we. If EB Siege 2007-08 doesn’t work and the Big N refuses to translate MOTHER 3 into English or release Earthbound on the Wii’s Virtual Console, I’ll accept it, albeit begrudgingly, because we, the Earthbound community, did everything we could have instead of sulking in front of our respective computers and starting endless “oh man MOTHER 3 would be so awesome” topics on the forms. Like Rocky Balboa at the end of his first film, we all went the distance against the Nintendo juggernaut, and even if we don’t “win,” we let them know that we mean business. And like Rocky, it looks like we’ve got the once-skeptical crowd on our side, judging from some of the outside press we’ve been receiving – another case of romancing a god, this time the god that is public opinion.

However, this Siege could be the knockout punch we needed. Once again, Rocky was able to captivate the crowd in Rocky II, and that time, he took down the god-like Apollo Creed. Maybe those other sieges were all leading up to this one. Maybe we can get the Nintendo gods to fall in love with us and finally give us what we want.
By the time I had hung up the phone after speaking to Gerardo Castro, he had managed to romance me into believing in him and his art. I’ve become jaded after working at my paper for so long and I can honestly say that I don’t really care about 99 percent of the events I cover. But Castro managed to get me excited about his work in less than ten minutes on a day where everything was going wrong and my stress level was though the roof. My encounter with him gave me renewed hope that maybe we can do the same with Nintendo.

It’s going to take a lot more than a phone call or even flowers and candy to woo this god, but I’m starting to think it can be done. Like Castro, Poseidon and Rocky, we just have to be persistent, confident, careful and good at what we do.

Original EB Siege art of the Chosen Four

MOTHER 3 and the Masses: The Long Road to Success

Borrowed from Eb Central.

When Earthbound, known as MOTHER 2 in Japan, was released in the United States in the summer of 1995, it didn’t make quite the splash Nintendo had hoped: It flopped. Earthbound’s failure might have been because the game was released close to the end of the Super Nintendo’s life span; after all, exciting new 3D gaming systems, like Sony’s Playstation and Sega’s Saturn, were just around the corner. (Personally, I blame Sega’s fantastic 32X.) Or it might have been the slightly outdated graphics, which many reviewers dismissed as “squashed” or “childish.” But ironically, the biggest factor might have been the Big N itself. Perhaps much of Earthbound’s failure can be attributed to Nintendo’s hideous advertising campaign - the ill-conceived “This game stinks” tagline may have actually done more damage than good. While normally, this would have been a refreshing dose of truth in advertising, it wasn’t true of Earthbound at all. But whatever the reason, Earthbound found itself with a small but devoted band of followers and little else. The American gaming public had failed to take notice of one of the best games on market. Six months later, everyone was playing Battle Arena Toshinden on the new but soon to be overheated PlayStations they had received for Christmas and Earthbound had been banished to bargain bins across the United States, lost in the eternal video shuffle.

MOTHER 3 logo, from the box.

If MOTHER 2 didn’t do so hot in the States, what could be done to increase sales of its sequel? If it ever got an English release, would MOTHER 3 be just as unnoticed as its predecessor? In response, I’ve devised with a few ways to make MOTHER 3 more palatable for the general American audience. I know some of these changes might seem radical, but please, bear with me. This might be the only way we’ll ever see MOTHER 3 stateside.

One thing what would make MOTHER 3 a success here in America is lasers. And some sort of rocket launcher as well. These weapons could be used to blow up the space marines that will inhabit MOTHER 3’s lush, 3D environments. Lucas and his friends would wear green armor that conceals their faces, so everyone in the game looks exactly the same. Next, there would have to be tanks that require the use of nine analogue sticks to drive. And check it out – once you get to the end of MOTHER 3, you’d have to turn around and play through it again… only BACKWARDS! What could possibly top an innovation like that? Finally, I’d like the game to appear on Xbox 360 (and six years later, PC) as MOTHER 3: Reaching for Combat Evolved. Shigesato Itoi, MOTHER 3’s creator, will make millions!

MOTHER 3: Reaching for Combat Evolved

For MOTHER 3 to be commercially successful over here in the States, it would pretty much have to be Halo. That’s because many of today’s gamers expect all graphics to be photorealistic, and most games to involve firing giant doomsday rockets, or at least setting something on fire. These people probably can’t even remember what a Super Nintendo looks like, let alone an obscure, decade old Super Nintendo role playing game. MOTHER 3 would look absolutely prehistoric to them. So without completely redoing the gameplay and graphics, only devoted fans, old school gamers and those willing to accept the game’s 2D graphics will take notice of poor MOTHER 3.

However, making any changes would ruin the game’s integrity. MOTHER games are supposed to have squashed, cartoony graphics and midi music. Those are hallmarks of the MOTHER series. It’s never been about an intense audio/visual experience or cutting edge gameplay – MOTHER has always been about getting the most out of what little the programmers had to work with. MOTHER and MOTHER 2 gave us wonderful, enduring stories many gamers will never forget and music that we still hum while stopped at a traffic light or while falling asleep on a long bus ride. These elements are the essence of MOTHER, and cannot be altered. So the question still remains: If not reworking the graphics and gameplay, what can be done to make MOTHER 3 a success in America?

I actually don't like MOTHER 3, but I wish it would come out in the States anyway.

Nintendo must take a drastically different direction with MOTHER 3’s advertising, one that is sure to turn heads and create such a buzz that everyone in America will want their very own copy of MOTHER 3: Nintendo must lie mightily. Their first course of action is to drop quotes to gaming magazines such as “MOTHER 3: Now with 250 percent more exploding heads than Grand Theft Auto,” “MOTHER 3 will be the greatest racing game since Gran Turismo 5,” and even “MOTHER 3 is shaping up to be the best Metal Gear Solid game yet!” Next, Nintendo should invite the press to their headquarters and play footage of the newest Legend of Zelda game, only refer to the game in question as MOTHER 3. (“As you can see, Link has many new and amazing abilities in the latest Legend of Zelda game, MOTHER 3.”) Most people in America have no idea what MOTHER 3 really is, and they’ll believe anything Nintendo tells them. After all, it’s worked in the past; remember when Nintendo told us there was going to be an Earthbound 64? Oh, and it wouldn’t hurt to say that MOTHER 3 can get you a better job, more friends and lots of money.

Those of us in the know will smile silently to ourselves, waiting patiently for the day MOTHER 3 takes over America. Yes, I know lying is wrong, but once the masses are exposed to MOTHER 3’s brilliance (well, I actually don’t like it that much, but everyone else does), they’ll forgive Nintendo for any lies the company might have told. It’s like hiding a nasty pill inside some delicious cookie dough, only for all the gamers in America. See, they’ll feel much better after playing MOTHER 3, even if they had to be tricked into trying it. A similar campaign can be used in Europe. All Nintendo needs to do is spell everything with extra U’s, change all references to elevators to “lifts,” and make a few more references to soccer. Ta-da! Nintendo will have themselves an international best seller! Itoi will be revered as a God, and true MOTHER fans will finally have received a sequel to one of their favorite games of all time!

But the game’s biggest hurdle looms large in the background, overshadowing every aspect of its development: MOTHER 3 has little, if any, time to spare. The other two games in the series came out right at the end of their respective console’s life cycle – for MOTHER 3 to be a success, it must be released before the already obsolete GBA hardware is totally obliterated from American stores, which at this point, seems to have already happened. Time is what Itoi and his team must fear the most, because it’s timing that would determine whether MOTHER 3 is a hit or just another obscure footnote in gaming history like its brethren. We all know the effects poor timing had on the no-show American release of MOTHER 1, the lucky to exist Earthbound, and perhaps the greatest causality of the series, Earthbound 64. MOTHER 3 or not, let’s hope that Nintendo has learned from the mistakes of the past and will finally find a way do the MOTHER series proud.

Well, they could do all that, or they could just put Super Mario on the cover. That’s been selling games for years.


It'sa me, Mario! And I'ma badly Photoshopped onto thisa box. WOO-HOO!



Earthbound Zero: Know Your Roots

It’s hard for many of us to not get caught up in the excitement of the recent MOTHER 3 Fanfest, hosted by Starmen.net. If you’re reading this, either you enjoy MOTHER games enough to read essays about them, or something went horribly wrong while you were surfing the net, and you crashed-landed, cold and confused, on my virtual doorstep. (For the latter – keep reading anyway; it’ll make me feel loved.) I’m assuming you’re here because you just finished MOTHER 3 along with the fanfest and are rabidly soaking up any and all MOTHER information as a sort of conclusion to the fun. But let me ask you what might sound like an odd question, given the circumstances: What did you think of MOTHER 1 or as some know it, Earthbound Zero? Have you finished it? Have you ever played it?

Buried deep within the abyss that is my closet, I have a T-shirt that I wore so much, the stitching started to unravel and one could see my armpit through the sizable hole it left. On the front was an 8-bit Nintendo controller, with the words “Know your Roots!” scrawled across the bottom. MOTHER 2 might have been the only installment of the series we’ve officially seen (and probably ever will see) in English, but MOTHER 1 has been available, just as Nintendo was planning to release it in the United States, for more than a decade now. There’s nothing wrong with being excited about MOTHER 3 – especially after the fanfest – but if you still haven’t played the original, you’re missing out on an indispensable part of the MOTHER trilogy.

Every summer, devoted MOTHER fans everywhere break out their copies Earthbound and their likely-decaying Super NES control decks to participate in Starmen.net’s Earthbound Funktastic Gameplay Event, with MOTHER 3 getting the limelight this year with its own fanfest. Yet, no one has never had a playthrough event for the title that started it all, MOTHER 1. So ponder this: Wouldn’t it be awesome if everyone banded together for the first ever Earthbound Zero Fanfest? We could call it the “Know Your Roots Campaign.” Like previous fanfests, we would only need about 30 days of gameplay points for the event, so hopefully it wouldn’t be as much work to set up as one might think.

But like I’ve said before on this blog, you don’t have to wait for Starmen.net to have a gameplay event before you can enjoy the MOTHER series. If you’ve never played MOTHER 1 much (or at all), give it a whirl – I think you’ll like what you find. And even if you’ve finished MOTHER 1 before, load it up and walk around for an hour; take in the sights and sounds of a surreal adventure that smacks of a childhood you once knew.

It’s time to know your roots.

Forever Funktastic: It’s Never Too Late for Earthbound

Regular patrons of Starmen.net are no doubt familiar with the Earthbound Funktastic Gameplay event, in which participants play through Earthbound over the course of a month. Many of us wait with bated breath for the summer to roll around so we can be given the opportunity (or as some would see it, the excuse) to experience one of our favorite games again. This summer, MOTHER 3 was given the spotlight, and Earthbounders will have to wait until October to get their fanfest on. But if you’ve still got the itch to see good ol’ Ness in action this summer, you’ve still got a few options.

Even in an age when you can pay bills, have tomatoes sent to your grandfather, and get married without ever leaving your comfortable, most likely stinky computer chair, you don’t always have to do what the web tells you. (Well, not yet, anyway. It’s only a matter of time before they send out the robots.) For a healthy punch of nostalgia, go to classic starmen.net at http://ebfgp.starmen.net/ebfgps03/ and play along with the 2003 fanfest. Just start at Day One and follow along with the original calendar.

That’s all fine and good, but what if you don’t have the time to play every day? This is especially true with classes about to resume and precious few days of summer left. “I never got a chance to wax my goat or protest the cancellation of Diff’rent Strokes by shaving off my eyebrows!” I can hear you yelling. “I need the rest of the summer to do those other things!” And I agree with you. Never one to advocate missing out on summer or even, God forbid, truancy from classes, I’ve got the solution for you: Play Earthbound at your own pace. It encourages exploration and discovery at one’s own discretion.

“That makes sense, but what if I hate pants?” I can hear some of your saying. “I can’t play Earthbound in my skivvies!” Don’t worry, fellow Earthbounder! If your eye offends you, pluck it out! And if your pants offend you, take them off! I too hate those accursed pants, and have sworn to only wear them when I must. In doing so, I’ve discovered something: Earthbound is an equal opportunity video game. It doesn’t care if you’re black or white, Asian or Jewish, pantsed or pantless. Earthbound, my friend, is for everyone – adults, kids, and young women, too.

Even if you don’t have time to run through the entire Earthbound storyline, do yourself a favor – just go back and play the game a little bit. You know that save file you never finished that’s been on your cartridge since 2001? It doesn’t matter where you last saved. Plug it in and give it a whirl. Or maybe you’d just like to start a new game and walk around Onett for a bit. Hey, that’s cool. Just grab the controller and reminisce for a while.

Don’t miss this opportunity to relive your childhood and remember what makes Earthbound so great. Whether you play it every other Sunday or have regular Earthbound marathons, like the sign post in Threed says, “just play it!”

MOTHER 3 Fanfest Begins; Old Man Prefers Earthbound

Starmen.net, a longtime authority on all things Earthbound/MOTHER announced the beginning of their MOTHER 3 Fanfest yesterday. Just in time to interfere with everyone’s moving back to college, now you too can play though MOTHER 3 in predetermined segments while watching live shows starting Starmen staffers, participating in daily or game-long challenges, and chewing the fat with other MOTHER fans.

You might remember Starmen.net doing something similar with Earthbound/MOTHER 2 in the last ten years. You’re correct: Usually, the web site holds their Earthbound Funktastic Gameplay Event every summer focusing on “getting back in the game” for longtime Earthbound fans. Judging by the positive response the MOTHER 3 Fanfest idea received on the Starmen.net message boards, there’s a lot of excitement and support for the change. The Earthbound event has reportedly been moved back to October.

But there are some out there, like me, who aren’t happy with the change. This year marks the 15 anniversary of Earthbound’s release in the United States and I assumed there was going to be some sort of hoopla that would involve a traditional summer playthough. Earthbound was released in the summer, and for many of us who jumped on the EB wagon in 1995, Earthbound is, was, and always will be a summer game.

MOTHER 3 was released in Japan in April of 2006, with the English translation patch hitting the scene in October of 2008, thanks to the tremendous efforts of Earthbound Central’s Tomato. Since it’s been less than two years since MOTHER 3 was accessible to English-speaking players, I don’t yet see the need for postponing the Earthbound event in favor of playing MOTHER 3. The Earthbound Fanfests were always meant to get people to reconnect with the game that likely ignited their love for the MOTHER series, but MOTHER 3 is still fresh to a lot of players. Having a funfest for it now feels like having a funfest of Resident Evil 5 or Metal Gear Solid 4.

One of the biggest reasons I’m bummed out is simply a matter of personal preference: I was disappointed with the third installment in the series. Earthbound and MOTHER 1 helped define who I am not only as a gamer, but also as a person. Unfortunately, MOTHER 3 lacks the charm and intrigue of the previous two titles. The ridged chapter system kills the exploratory aspect present in the older entries and the supposedly brilliant, tearjerker of a storyline is actually rather predictable, occasionally bordering on hackneyed. I feel little connection to MOTHER 3 and I doubt I would have completed the game if it didn’t have the MOTHER logo stamped on it.

I understand that Starmen.net must evolve if the staffers hope to keep the years-old website fresh, and switching up the Fanfests is one way to do that. Go enjoy MOTHER 3 if you’re so inclined. I’ll be following along too, but my heart just isn’t in it this year.