This game knows no bounds.
That's not a photoshop or anything. That's seriously the first enemy in the game. It's only in English thanks to the beautiful person who bought the prototype of an English version and leaked it online. The fan translation group Demiforce then fixed all it's kinks and put the fully playable game online with the title Earthbound Zero.
As you can see a large portion of the charm of this game come from just how batshit insane it lets itself get. From the moment you fight that lamp, you go on to fight baby dolls, cars, even the flora of the world wants you dead.
I will eat your children's dreams.
The game gives you this simple task that we're all familiar with, save the world, and lets us explore this big Americana inspired world, kill shit, and get stronger. Straight forward, fun, I love it already. Then the game reminds that, no, this is not some sort of mundane nonsense and throws into the clearly drug inspired magic dream land of Magicant.
Those ice creams are houses.
The queen fills you in on the whole plot thing. Spoilers, by the way. Aliens all over the world, blah, blah, blah, in order to stop them you need to find eight melodies and then sing them to her. You know, like you do. You're whisked back home where you now add 'find melodies' to your list of crazy shit to accomplish and go on your merry way.
Along the way you meet a bunch of people who join you party. You first meet Lloyd, a scrawny kid who gets picked on for being a weakling.
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Get it? Cause he has glasses, like a nerd.
You also befriend Ana, a psychic girl who saw you in a dream.
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When you're a kid you trust all girls.
And finally we join up with Teddy, a John Travolta lookalike who initially wants to beat you, a group of three children, up.
So we're just trusting everyone.
Once you finally meet all your 'friends' and learn all eight melodies, you sing them to the queen of Magicant and she remembers that, oh yeah, that's right, the main alien was once someone she really loved named Giygas and that song was kind of what always calmed him down. Which seems like pretty useful information that she just kind of forgot.
Tee-Hee, Whoops!
You then learn that druggy, ice cream land is all in her mind (okay), so we're chucked out of there, probably screaming in sheer confusion. So now you have to find this alien and sing to it. You do and it gets mad and weird and defeated and presumably loses his physical form. Real quick before it disappears it casually mentions that you're the queen's grandson and that you're doing this because your grandpa knew too much, by the way. The game ends with Ninten most likely very shaken by this big news.
"Ho-ly Shit."
Fade to black, credits. That's it. That's how it ends. Which would be insane and nuts and weird for everyone if they didn't make game two in the series, Mother 2, or Earthbound in America.
The story is roughly the same. Aliens, kid with baseball bats, crazy drug fueled segments...
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This isn't a game anymore.
But over all the story is the same. Except this time, each chapter has you solving even crazier problems. Some examples are you get rid of some bullies at the Onett arcade, then you go to a town called Twoson and deal with a neighboring village where there's a cult who likes to paint everything blue. Eventually you get to Threed (See what they did here, with the town names?) and once there, you're tasked with getting rid of zombies and the only way to get rid of them is by setting out some zombie paper.
Get it? Like fly paper? HAHAHAHA!
Then you do your balls tripping in Fourside, when you touch a statue that gives you halucinations and sends you into a strange land where yes is no and up is down and everything looks like a black light poster.
Yeah! The 90's!
Along the way the protagonist, Ness, meets Paula, who's abilities include damaging magic attacks and a useless 'Pray' ability, and Jeff, this game's nerd with glasses.
"We'll kill you."
The final, obviously foreign, member of the party is named Poo. You can name the characters whatever you like, but Nintendo decided that you should probably name him after butt stuff.
Oddly enough that's not the strangest thing about Poo. Prior to meeting him, you play a segment of the game from his point of view in which he goes through a, shall we say, horrifying form of meditation.
This game is for kids right?
The terrifying head-ghost goes ahead tears off various parts of your body You know, as a test, and deems you worthy of helping the original three characters.
You meet up with them and going on some more crazy adventures. Hang out in a beach club, go to the desert, meet a goofy race of little guys who all seem to be called Mr. Saturn.
Oh thank god, this is for kids.
At one point the game breaks the fourth wall and asks you what your name is. Not what you want to name your character, what is your name. It's kind of weird, but the whole game is sort of insane, so eff it.
You finish your journey, which is also to collect melodies, which brings you back to Magicant, to fight your inner dark side. You also learn that you have to go back in time to fight a young Giygas, who if you recall is the final boss from Mother 1. In order to safely travel to the past, Ness and company remove their minds from their fleshy bodies and stick them inside robots that can survive time travel. You get to the final area approach the boss who was pretty a regular looking alien in the first game so I can only imagine he looks that way now.
HOLY MOTHER OF SHIT!
That terrifying thing is Giygas as a kid apparently. You can't hurt him and he wrecks your party with every attack which the game describes as an attack that one "cannot comprehend." Try as you might you cannot hurt him. You try one move, nothing, try hitting him with another great move you've earned, nothing. You choose every ability, every magical psychic attack you've earned, every item you've found and you find they all do nothing.
All hope seems lost as you heal your party desperately trying to keep them alive. You'll try anything to defeat this foe. ANYTHING. Then you notice Paula's 'pray' ability that's been useless this entire time. If there's a time to use it, now's as good as any. As you use it, your party reaches out to all of the characters you've met on your journey. They all decide, 'Hey, I'm gonna give Ness and his friends my thoughts right now. That seems like a good idea' and they all start sending you good vibes.
Good freaking heavens man.
So now Giygas starts having horrifying emotions, saying he feels happy and that things aren't right. Paula keeps praying, reaching out to everyone she knows. Giygas starts getting weaker and weaker, but just before he's weak enough to be bested, Paula runs out of people to contact via prayer. Well that's no good, so she just starts praying to whoever is listening. Meanwhile you're sitting there tense as all hell from this long battle shouting at your TV, "For the love of God someone help them!"
And then on the screen, you see your name.
You as the player are the final prayer that delivers the final blow to the boss and it is so god damn satisfying. You are then returned to your bodies and are free to roam the entire world as it is now enemy free. That is until you go home and talk to your mom and watch the credits.
Man I love that game.
Mother 3 was another one that came out in Japan only. It's much more story driven than the first two and is an entirely separate plot with a few elements from Mother 2. That and the fact this post is getting insanely long, and there's not a whole lot of Mother 3 stuff in the Smash Bros game coming out, I'm gonna just just you the basic rundown. If you want to get the full impact of the plot, play the game, it's freakin art man. Spoilers, obviously.
You begin as a young boy named Lucas and right off the bat tragedy strikes and your mom dies. This understandably destroys Lucas and his dad, Flint, and his brother, Claus. What makes this even worse is that we had just named all of our characters, even mom, who's canon name was Hinawa. So we've already formed a connection with her by the time she's taken from us. To make matters worse your brother Claus goes missing soon after.
We then meet the other characters. Boney, your dog, Duster the thief, Kumatora the ninja type girl, and Salsa the enslaved monkey
So much cuter than that demon fetus.
They all come together one way or another and learn that the town Lucas grew up in is being changed because Salsa's captor Fasaad starts giving the townsfolk pink boxes that have moving pictures. Soon the town has an economy for the first time ever and people start being put in the jail that has been empty for as long as everyone can remember. Not to mention Lucas needs to race against the Pigmask Army to pull out seven pins from the earth to awaken a dragon that will either save the world, or destroy it based on the character of the person who pulls the final pin.
The game throws a lot at you at once.
You eventually get to the final pin and who's one of the leaders of the bad guys? Your brainwashed brother Claus. Oh snap! After a heart to heart which I am doing no justice, Claus asks you to finish him off as he doesn't want the world to go to the wrong hands.
Pictured: No Justice
The game ends on a very open ended note and then there are credits.
Sweet jesus, if you're still here, that's awesome.
The Mother series is fantastic. If you get a chance, play all three. If you only get to play one, I'd suggest Mother 2/Earthbound, as that's the only one available in the States. In the new Smash Bros., Ness from Earthbound is a playable character and Magicant from Mother 1 and 2 is a stage.
Ugh, come out now please.
The music, the characters, the stories, everything you do in the Mother games is so quirky and charming that it's hard not to like them. I don't think I can make my other posts this long because the other series I'm going to talk about are more fun for the gameplay and design and not the rich stories the Mother games tell.
This post is almost all about the stories of these great games as that's what makes them special to me. The next series is the exact opposite of that, which is to say, hardly any story at all, so it will be shorter. It has to be, it's a game about going very fast for Pete's sake.
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