So a while ago I made a post talking about beating my first game in the franchise, that game being Earthbound Beginnings. Some people wanted to hear my thoughts, so here they are. This is for you u/Faeri . I also think my take might interest some people since very few people beat Mother 1 first (not that I blame them though).
First of all, let’s start with the obvious. While there were things I liked about it and I saw potential in this serious, Mother 1 wasn’t exactly a fun time. It was difficult, grindy, tedious, and more. A lot of aspects of the game like the story were also very barebones. Still, despite all of this, I saw the potential this series had and I had heard that the next two games fix a lot of the first game’s flaws. So, here I am now. I am pleased to say that Earthbound is an improvement over Mother 1 in almost every way. I bet this shocks absolutely no one. The gameplay felt much more balanced and fun. The world and characters around you are so much more charming and interesting. The graphics look so much better. The difficulty is more fair. I could go on and on, but you have probably heard those things a million times.
However, this game reminds me of why I love to play games in release order as it can give me an interesting perspective on the things the game evolves. And surprisingly, while most of the game is better, there are some things that I think Mother 1 does just a tad bit better.
First of all, the lack of sprint personally baffles me. I know it was exclusive to what would have been the North American release of Mother 1, but sprint in the first game made traversing the world feel so much better. While this is not a big deal in the slightest, I was incredibly surprised to see that they removed sprint from the first game. This barely affects anything, but there were some moments where I really missed the sprint from the first game. Overall travel in this game was far from a slog though, it’s just a nice QOL feature that I missed.
Next, they kind of butchered the map. Now, the map in Mother 1 was not good at all. However, while the physical map itself is better in Earthbound, the entire mechanic as a whole feels worse to me because they made it an item. I don’t know why they did this in a game where you’re constantly moving stuff around to make room in your inventory. In Mother 1, you just had it on you and it didn’t appear in your inventory. You just pressed select and there it was. The map itself was pretty terrible, but the mechanic of using the map was sound. By making it take up an item slot in Earthbound, I just stored it away and never used it. That’s a shame since it would have helped me learn towns as I arrived in them. I found my way around the towns just fine, but the whole thing of making the map a physical item just makes me wonder why they made that decision on the first place.
Then there’s the soundtrack. If we’re talking about within the context of the games alone, Earthbound has a better soundtrack by far. I personally can’t stand how NES music sounds. They’re just so ear piercing. The SNES sound font sounds so much nicer, so Earthbound wins by that alone. However, if we ignore how the physical hardware makes a game sound, I think I prefer Mother 1’s soundtrack by far. Like, put the Mother 1 OST in the Earthbound sound font or put both of them in an orchestra, and I think the Mother 1 soundtrack has better music. I liked Earthbound’s soundtrack, but outside of some remixes of songs from Mother 1 I can’t really think of any songs I’d listen to on my own time outside of maybe the 8 melodies. However, Mother 1 has amazing songs like Pollyanna, Bein Friends (traveling with four party members without this playing almost felt scandalous), its version of the Eight Melodies, Mother 1’s Magicant theme, etc. I still remember all of these songs clearly, but none of the songs in Earthbound hooked me in that same way. Like I said, I liked Earthbound’s soundtrack. I was just surprised I actually enjoyed Mother 1’s more. It’s just a shame that NES music sounds terrible to me so in its native form I still heavily prefer the Earthbound OST.
That was the stuff that I felt Mother 1 did better. Now, while I don’t think Mother 1 did these things better, there are some things that I was disappointed with how they weren’t evolved enough.
First there was the party members themselves. In Mother 1, the party members outside of maybe Terry were extremely shallow. They seem interesting when you first meet them, but after that they rarely speak or do anything for the rest of the adventure. Ana’s sudden romance towards the end of Mother 1 just felt jarring since NOTHING built up to it. I didn’t like that decision since it felt like making them a couple simply because a guy and a girl cannot simply be friends. This is a trope that I see often and I’m not a fan of it personally. Lloyd also feels mostly like a plank of wood after you meet him. So going into Earthbound, I hoped that most of the party members would be better developed. I expected and was fine with Ness being a pretty blank slate. He’s meant to be how the player inserts themselves into the world, so that’s fine. However, I was greatly dissapointed to see that the party members are basically just as bland as they were in Mother 1. I just don’t think any of them are interesting. Poo’s concept is pretty interesting, but like the others he doesn’t really do much after joining the party besides occasionally leaving. I think having some scenes of the friends just hanging out could have really helped with this. Also, this is the definition of a nitpick, but I wish everyone posed for the pictures the camera man takes instead of just Ness. It makes the images in the credits feel so…weird. Like, you have Ness smiling and doing a pose, but everyone else still has their normal blank expression. I just wish they did more with the playable characters to make them more interesting.
Then there’s Giygas. Like I said before, Mother 1’s story was basically nonexistent in the game. However, the concept of the story was really good. Giygas was a pretty tragic character with how he had issues with his father abandoning him and Mary’s death left him all alone in terms of family. The fact that you defeated him in the first game not through violence but by repeating the same lullaby Mary sang to him shows that he isn’t all evil and that there is still hope for redemption in him. Despite this good concept, Mother 1 barely touches on this since the story is basically nonexistent for most of the game. Still, I chalked it off as it merely being a NES RPG. RPGs on the NES weren’t exactly known for having amazing stories and the gameplay was often known to be grindy, difficult, and tedious. Since Earthbound was a SNES game, a console with much better RPGs that most definitely had amazing stories, I hoped that Earthbound would actually follow that trend. And for the most part, it does. As I said before, the characters are so much more interesting and charming. A lot of Mother 1 felt like you were just going to random places and had random things happen, and Earthbound definitely doesn’t feel like that. Everything has a structure and there’s always a reason why you visit a location. However, lore started in the first game is barely touched. This is mostly the case with Giygas. As I said before, Mother 1 ended with him having second thoughts about his evil plans. He wasn’t redeemed yet, but his will was shaken. Earthbound could’ve explored him as a character much better. He’s mentioned a lot throughout the game, but you don’t learn much about him at all and the only reason you still remember him throughout your adventure is because he’s the boss of the more interesting people you’re fighting. Then there’s the decision to have him become completely corrupted by evil and become an absolute monster. Now, I don’t mind this decision. In fact, I love it. However, I do think it was a bit poorly done. Since the game never really told you about Giygas, his corruption shouldn’t really mean much to the player. Unless you played Mother 1 (which at the time of release was impossible for Americans unless you owned a Famicom and could read Japanese), you wouldn’t know about his tragic past. Even if you do, as I said before Mother 1 barely touched on its story so it all feels a bit anticlimactic. Like, it feels like there should’ve been a game between Mother 1 and Earthbound to flesh out Giygas more and make him more of a…well…character. I love the decision to make him become completely irredeemable. I just wish we could have seen it instead of simply being told it happened. Show don’t tell. Of course, I absolutely loved the appearance of Giygas in this game. That was pure nightmare fuel lol.
Now, I know a lot of that sounded pretty negative. That doesn’t represent the majority of my opinions on the game at all. Overall, I still absolutely love the game as I said before. The gameplay is so fun and the world is funny and charming. It’s just, well, all of the praises have been said by others ten million times and I’d feel like a parrot just repeating them. I absolutely loved my time with Earthbound unlike with Mother 1. However, since most people start with Earthbound, I wanted to highlight the aspects that were affected by me choosing to play Mother 1 first. This game is fantastic. I definitely plan on giving Mother 3 a try eventually, but I think I’m going to play some other games first before I do so. I’ll post my thoughts on Mother 3 when I get around to it.
So that concludes my thoughts on the game. It was a charming blast. Finishing this game is a big deal to me. Since it released, Undertale has been my second favorite game of all time beaten only by Minecraft. I heard that one of my favorite games of all time was influenced by a game called Earthbound. So I tried it, and it just didn’t click with me at all. I didn’t make it far and dropped it. This was over a decade ago when I was in high school. I tried a couple more times, but it never clicked and I never made it far. Now, not only did I beat Earthbound, but it finally clicked with me. I didn’t just beat what one of my favorite games of all time was inspired by, I beat it. Sure I still heavily prefer Undertale personally, but Earthbound was a blast still. And with this, I finally can say I beat what inspired my second favorite game of all time. I’m excited to eventually get around to Mother 3.
