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1989 · Famicom
In 1988, a poltergeist attacks a boy's house. His name is Ninten, and his father tells him his great-grandfather studied psychic powers and asks him to look into the odd things happening across America. So a kid with a baseball bat sets out through towns with names like Mother's Day and Valentine, gathering eight melodies for a queen who hears them in her dreams, and picking up friends: Lloyd, a bullied boy genius; Ana, a girl with psychic powers looking for her mother; and Teddy, a gang leader.
Mechanically it is Dragon Quest in modern clothes: random battles in first person, menus and levels. The difference is the dressing. You heal at hospitals and with fast food, fight hippies, zombies, possessed objects, robots and aliens, travel by train, and save by phoning your dad, who also pays money into your bank account after battles.
Copywriter Shigesato Itoi fell for Dragon Quest in 1987 and wanted to make a role-playing game set in his own time, not a medieval fantasy. He pitched it to Shigeru Miyamoto, who at first doubted him and told him to go away and simplify, then called back with a team. Itoi wrote the script, borrowing from Spielberg's films for mood, and named the game after John Lennon's song. Keiichi Suzuki wrote pop songs for it, with real lyrics recorded for an album, and Hirokazu Tanaka programmed the music.
Nintendo released it on the Famicom in Japan on 27 July 1989, and it sold about 400,000 copies, the sixth best-selling game of the year there. An English version called Earth Bound was finished and advertised for 1991, then shelved as unprofitable. A prototype surfaced in 1998 and circulated online as EarthBound Zero. Its sequel became EarthBound on the SNES, and the first game finally came out in English, as EarthBound Beginnings, in 2015.
Its charm has not faded. The writing is warm and odd, the setting still feels unlike any other 8-bit RPG, and the music, especially the Eight Melodies that tie the story together, is gorgeous. There is a real sense of childhood adventure in it, of a kid who might be pretending to be a hero, and the ending still hits.
The balance is another matter. Random battles come often, many enemies hit hard, and the game expects a lot of grinding. Directions are vague, the map is large, and the first-person battles are plain to look at. Critics at the time and since have called it too hard and unevenly balanced, and EarthBound took the same ideas and did them better. Play it for the story and the mood, and use a guide.
Shigesato Itoi wanted a role-playing game set in his own time, not a medieval fantasy, and Mother is what came of it. The hero carries a baseball bat, heals with fast food and saves by phoning his dad. It is a child's summer, stretched across America and bent by aliens, and it feels like being small again.
Tim Wildschut and colleagues found nostalgia is mostly positive, often features close others, and raises social connectedness and self-regard. Mother seems to know that. The Eight Melodies are tunes gathered for a queen who hears them in her dreams, and the friends Ninten makes on the way, Lloyd the bullied genius and Ana looking for her mother, are the close others memory keeps. English speakers waited from a shelved 1991 release to 2015 to play it officially, and many arrived already fond of EarthBound. Missing something you never had is its own strange, warm ache.
Read: Why old games feel like home →
Verdict · 7/10
A lovely, strange and moving RPG buried under a grind that has aged badly. Worth playing for anyone who loved EarthBound.
