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alt title(s): Mother 2
It's kind of like that.
An SNES game about Ness, a seemingly normal boy in Eagleland who is suddenly awakened by a meteorite. The meteorite brings a bee from the future, who tells of an indestructible being, Giygas, that Ness is destined to defeat. Thus begins Ness's journey through time and space to meet the other destined children (Paula, Jeff and Poo) and collect all the different "sounds" for his sound stone.
The second of a series of Japanese role playing games known as Mother, the setting of the first two are essentially the same - an affectionate homage to 1950s America. Earthbound ( Mother 2 in Japan) was the only game in the series that was released in North America; while Mother 3 was released in Japan, there are no plans for a North American release.
The first game in the series was originally planned for North American release and originally had the name Earthbound; Nintendo of America scrapped release plans after the translation was complete, however, as the Super Nintendo had already launched and the company wished to focus on that. A prototype of the game surfaced years later in the hands of a collector; the ROM was dumped and released to the Emulation community as Earthbound Zero.
Earthbound was best known for its unusual gameplay — fantasy goblin-slaying gave way to the realities of urban life, with slingshots, frying pans, and baseball bats taking the place of swords and axes; rather than goblins, the party battled drunks, hippies, angry taxicabs, a cult dedicated to worshiping the color blue, and even a giant circus tent. The vast majority of the game's non-plot related humor is focused on the way the West is viewed by other countries (in particular, Asia/Japan), with references to the Beatles and the Blues Brothers found throughout.
Notable for including the official Strategy Guide with every copy of the game yet costing no more than other games. Shows you how much faith Nintendo had in the game's ability to sell. But due to a very strange and failed advertising campaign , the game sold horribly in the States.
Ness and Lucas (the protagonist of Mother 3) are probably best-known to American audiences for their appearances in the Super Smash Bros games.
This game provides examples of:
- Absentminded Professor: Dr. Andonuts
- Absurdly Spacious Sewer (Sewers under Fourside)
- Abusive Parents: In the Japanese version, Porky and his brother are beaten off camera by their father after you bring them back home at the start of the game.
- Uhh, they get beaten in the American version too.
- The sound effect was changed, though, so it sounds more like they were getting yelled at or something.
- Action Bomb: The Territorial Oak burst into flames!
- AI Roulette - more striking because there are multiple AI moves that do nothing, and still more that inflict bad status effects on the enemy that uses them
- All Cavemen Were Neanderthals
- All Deserts Have Cacti: Dusty Dunes Desert has cacti, but thankfully, the trope is averted in Scaraba.
- Amazing Technicolor Battlefield - in every battle.
- Ambidextrous Sprite - It's the YAWAИUЯ van when facing left.
- Another Dimension: Both Moonside and Magicant are sort of Another Dimension-Phantom Zone hybrids.
- A Taste Of Power (Buzz Buzz)
- Awesome But Impractical (the Casey Bat)
- The Casey Bat becomes Awesome Yet Practical when trying to find the Sword of Kings as quickly as possible. But there are plenty of other relatively useless items covered under this trope, like the Pair of Dirty Socks.
- Awesome Yet Practical: Bags of Dragonite, the Bottle Rockets, and Jeff's Heavy Bazooka are among some of things.
- Did somebody say "Dragonite"?
- Badass Normal (Jeff has no psychic powers, but has a variety of self-made weapons and is frequently the team's pilot)
- A few of his inventions include a Shield Killer, laser beams and a Heavy Bazooka.
- Bare Fisted Monk (Poo)
- Until he gets his only actual weapon, the Sword of Kings.
- Barrier Warrior (Ness)
- Because Destiny Says So
- Big Damn Heroes (The Runaway Five)
- Bizarro Universe (Moonside)
- Blinding Bangs: Porky's and Picky's.
- Bottomless Bladder (There are washrooms, but they're always occupied.)
- Breaking The Fourth Wall (In the First Town, a dog tells Ness that he's been possessed by the spirit of the game designer to explain something.)
- Additionally, this is how Ness and co. defeat the final boss.
- Additionally aditionally, you, the player, enter your name multiple times throughout the game, under the guise of Jeff's gay friend Tony contacting you via phone.
- Heck, those good moles who give you game advice. "Oh, I mean in front of you!!"
- Bumbling Dad (Paula's dad)
- Broken Bridge: Lampshaded - the Onett police department is famous for closing roads, and are reportedly going for the
Guiness world record of most roads closed due to emergency.
- Carnivore Confusion: One of the healing items in the game is the Hamburger. Later on, you have a conversation with a cow. So yeah.
- Circus Of Fear: Boogie Tent
- Combat Medic: Ness is frequently your best healer in addition to having the highest attack power.
- Copy Protection (if you ran the game from a copied cartridge or cartridge-copying device, bad things would happen. Like the game suddenly crashing and all your saves getting deleted during the final boss fight, for instance.)
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Mr. Monotoli
- Cosmic Horror (After the Genre Shift from comedy at the Cave of the Past.)
- Cult: The Happy Happists. Blue, blue...
- Cut The Juice: How the Clumsy Robot is defeated.
- Dark World: Moonside, though It's a hallucination caused by the Mani Mani Statue.
- Defeat Means Friendship: The first boss, Frank Fly.
- Determinator (Any character, if their Guts stat is sufficiently high, will hang in there through repeated mortal blows for a very long times - enough, usually, to heal them completely)
- The Hit Points in this game rolls down, much like a odometer in your car. When a character takes enough damage to be knocked out, it will say "X has taken Y points of mortal damage!" but they won't actually die until the meter rolls down to zero. This will lead to the fact that you rush to heal the party member or end the battle before their HP counter rolls down to zero and they die. There's a chance that the game will omit the "mortal" part in the message and the meter will stop at one instead of zero, the chances of this happening depends on the characters Guts stat.
- There's also an item called the "Sudden Guts Pill" that, when used in battle, will temporarily double the character's Guts stat for the duration. However, it's incredibly rare, and the one shop that has it sells it at a ridiculous price.
- Dirty Coward (Porky Minch)
- Distressed Damsel (Paula gets kidnapped from time to time)
- Doomy Dooms Of Doom (The Plague Rat OF DOOM)
- Duel Boss (Ness's Nightmare)
- Eagleland (Trope Namer, and one of the few rare modern-day examples of Flavor #1.)
- Ear Worm - Just try to get the Onett theme out of your head.
- Easter Egg: Early in the game, the police chief will explain that "...kids like you should be at home playing Nintendo games in a time like this!"
- Then again, if you go back to Onett later on, you'll find the police chief talking about how he's having a hard time playing this game called "Earthbound".
- There's also a planning meeting for Earthbound 2 in Fourside.
- Eccentric Townsfolk
- Eldritch Abomination - Giygas is....freaky. It doesn't have a form, it exists in the future and the past, and its only dialog is inspired by the trauma of viewing a violent murder scene misinterpreted by the writer as a rape scene in a movie that scarred the writer when he was a kid. Really!
- Eldritch Location - Moonside, and possibly Giygas.
- Epileptic Trees (The long running Giygas/Fetus/Abortion theory, albeit with some truth involved.)
- To further elaborate, the theory revolves around the background image in the later phases of the Giygas fight looking like a child in its mother's womb. The "YOU WERE SENT BACK IN TIME TO ABORT A FETUS" element was introduced later.
- Everything Trying To Kill You (Animals, stop signs, hippies, robots, animate cups of coffee, and a hundred other weird monsters, including those god-damn exploding trees!)
- Expy (Ness, Paula and Jeff are near-identical to their original Mother counterparts Ninten, Ana, and Loid, and even hold many of the same abilities. Frank Fly appears to be an expy of Teddy, but he's not playable.)
- Fight Woosh There're three different kinds. 1) The grey woosh means that the battle will go on as normal, 2) Sneak up behind an enemy to get a green woosh and a surprise attack 3) Don't let the enemy sneak up behind you or you'll get a red woosh and they'll get a surprise attack on you!
- First Town (Onett)
- Gadgeteer Genius (Jeff lacks the psychic powers of his friends, but he can take things you'd find in most typical junkyards, such as broken harmonicas, irons, pipes, and antennas, and somehow retrofit them into highly advanced laser guns, psychic shield destroyers, and slime blasters.)
- Game Breaker - The Rock Candy + Sugar Packet trick. (Ab)Using this leads to characters with erroneously higher stats than they normally would have.
- Global Currency (Slightly more acceptable here. Sure, the world only uses one currency, but it's dollars. And stuff in other countries is more expensive, but this may be because of the Sorting Algorithm Of Weapon Effectiveness, and one of the last towns is a tourist resort. The signs for stores in other countries also make a point of stating that they do indeed accept Eagleland currency, something real foreign stores would do to promote tourist spending.)
- It starts to get ridiculous though when a FLOATING KINGDOM only accessible by teleportation is seen to accept them...
- Goddamn Bats: Those trees those trees those trees...
- Good Morning Crono (Justified by the fact that the game begins in the middle of the night. The main character is wide awake by the time the sun rises.)
- Good Hurts Evil (How Giygas meets his end.)
- Guest Star Party Member (Quite a few, actually, ranging from Porky/Pokey to his brother Picky to Ness's dog King to an an alien insect from the future to invisible man with a unibrow and a gold tooth to a giant animated tower to inanimate teddy bears to demonic ghosts that can possess you to manifestations of Ness's subconscious. So Yeah. Some of them are more useful than others.)
- In the last moments of the final battle with Giygas, the player — as in, the one holding the controller — as in, YOU join the party. And it is awesome.
- Hello Insert Name Here
- Heroic Mime (Whoever the player is controlling at the time. As soon as they meet up with the main group, they start talking and introduce themselves. The only exception is at two points in the game, where a special wall displays Ness' thoughts, and where Ness talks to himself telling him where he needs to go next near the end of the game.)
- The Heartless (Many of the enemies in the game are influenced to fight Ness through Giygas's control over their inherent evil. Right before Ness gets charged with a great deal of power, he has to fight Giygas's influence over the evil in his mind via a boss battle.)
- Ho Yay (Tony, to Jeff. Itoi confirmed it.)
- Improbable Weapon User (From yo-yos to frying pans)
- Instant Awesome Just Add Dragons: The bag of dragonite, which turns the player into a dragon temporarily, has no explanation where it comes from or how it is made.
- Although a monkey wonders if... "it is really made by dragons?"
- [[Pokemon Dragonite]]? Are you serious?!?
- Insurmountable Waist High Fence (Parodied - at one point your path is blocked by a statue of a pencil. In the original Japanese, it was of an octopus.)
- Later on is another parody, where the blockade is an eraser statue. Originally, it was a statue of a type of doll (the item to remove it forms a play on words in Japanese).
- Interface Screw: In Moonside, yes means no, and no means yes.
- Also, if any player characters get Mashroomized, the game's interpretation of D-pad inputs will rotate 90 degrees clockwise every thirty seconds.
- Jerk Ass (Taken higher and higher with
Pokey Porky Minch)
- Joke Character: The worthless protoplasm, fobbies, and foppies.
- Joke Item (The Insignificant Item, among others)
- Ruler: "It can be used in battle! Can be used many times."
- This Troper thought (before actually using it) that you could assault Hippies in a manner not dissimilar to a nun.
- Kid Hero (All the main cast)
- Kleptomaniac Hero (Parodied, when the protagonist Ness can get items from trash cans. And this includes food items. He also gets the chance to properly steal food items, but will be attacked for it.)
- This troper found it particularly funny when he found a hamburger in the trashcan outside of a building, and then went inside and sold it to the man at the counter.
- There is also an NPC (in Summers, if memory serves) that lampshades the use of this trope in "other" games.
- Leitmotif (The Runaway Five, Pokey, and Paula all have theme music - the latter's doesn't play all that often, though)
- Lethal Joke Character: You wouldn't think that the mystical record or that animate cup of coffee wouldn't be that deadly, would you?
- The Smilin' Sphere!!
- Yeah, they're all over the place. Floating lips, electric guitars, phonograph records, angry ladies, hippies, surfer dudes...
- Lets Play: Not called Let's Play, but Starmen.net's Funktastic Earthbound Gameplay Summer is basically a bunch of people playing through the game together, with the site having one person playing live over streaming video.
- Lighter And Softer (The story is taken with arguably less seriousness than in Earthbound Zero, and it often becomes simply for humor's sake...until the end, when it's just Nightmare Fuel.)
- Look What I Can Do Now (Starstorm Alpha)
- Loss Of Identity
- Lost In Translation (Several puns make more sense in Japanese.)
- And it's Porky Minch, not Pokey Minch.
- And that sort of eyeball thing with Ness' face inside it, on the Devil's Machine in Giygas' Lair? That's the Apple of Enlightenment we were told about.
- Mad Scientist (Dr. Andonuts, Apple Kid, and Jeff)
- Made Of Evil
- Made Of Explodium (Trees!)
- The Smilin' Sphere!! D:
- Nuclear Reactor Robots too.
- Madness Mantra: Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness
- Magicant (Trope Namer)
- Meet Cute
- Memetic Mutation ("You cannot grasp the true form" of this meme! Though many have tried...)
- Mirror Boss (Ness's Nightmare)
- Money Spider (Averted. When you defeat enemies, Ness's father deposits money into a bank account, which you can access via an ATM.)
- Mood Whiplash (See Nightmare Fuel below.)
- Mooks (including enemies literally called "mooks")
- Mr Fixit (Jeff, the Mad Scientist of the group, creates many of his weapons by fixing junk)
- Muck Monster (Master Belch and Master Barf)
- Multinational Team (Four kids from three continents)
- Musical Pastiche (Would you believe that it's used so frequently that the resulting legal muck means this game is not going to see an international re-release?)
- Nerf Arm
- New Age Retro Hippie (Trope Namer)
- Nightmare Fuel (Just about every last thing regarding Giygas.)
- No Export For You - none of the Mother games have been released in Europe.
- And of the three Mother games, only this, the second, was released in the US.
- Non Lethal KO (Somewhat justified by the fact that the message you receive depends on the type of enemy defeated — wild animals turned evil by Giygas' influence "become tame," inanimate objects like vinyl records and coffee cups "stop moving," undead enemies "return to the dust of the earth," human enemies "return to normal," and so on.)
- Non Linear Sequel
- Now Where Was I Going Again
- Only Idiots May Pass (advanced to an art form!)
- Painting The Fourth Wall (Mr. Saturns weird very font have, boing!)
- Palette Swap (Several enemies are like this, including a *shudder* stronger version of the Territorial Oak, Foppies and Fobbies, and the Mani Mani Statue/Ness' Nightmare)
- Parental Abandonment (Jeff's father hasn't seen him in ten years despite living fairly near his boarding school (and this is a twelve to fourteen year old boy) and seems to think nothing of it; his mother is never mentioned. We do see both of Paula's parents and Ness' mother, and the latter's father can be spoken to over the phone but Poo's parents are nowhere in sight.)
- Photo Montage (the ending credits)
- Power Of Friendship: How Giygas is defeated.
- Power Up Food (Ramen noodles bring back the dead)
- Psychic Powers
- Punny Name (By the bushelful.)
- Most blatantly, the main character (hint: rearrange the acronym for the console it was released on).
- Though the character was originally named this in the Japanese version, and you can't anagram Ness into SFC.
- Considering the character in the first game's name is "Ninten", I think we can lay the confusion over the name's origin to rest.
- Qurac: Scaraba
- Randomly Drops (The infamous 1/128 items)
- Recurring Traveller: the photographer who descends from the sky in certain places.
- Retraux: Giygas and Heavily Armed Porky's battle theme starts out with some NES chiptune-sounding music before spontaneously jumping into a rock version of the same tune.
- Say My Name (One of Giygas's attacks has him saying the hero's name over and over.)
- Scratch Damage (Averted: the system automatically wins battles with enemies who are way below you)
- Screwed By The Network: Only 1/3 of the entire series ever made it to American shores and the infamous marketing campaign ('this game stinks' was the marketing slogan) likely put a dent on sales.
- Shout Out
- Single Palette Town (the Happy Happy Village)
- Sorting Algorithm Of Evil - Mostly played straight, but averted at the beginning when Giygas, in a moment of being Dangerously Genre Savvy, decides to just kill Ness (and possibly Pokey. I mean, he IS a tool and ends up "destroying his mind" by turning his Restraining Bolt off...) before he becomes a nuisance by sending a Starman at them at the start of the game. Thankfully, the good guys were equally smart and sent in Buzz Buzz too, thus canceling each other out.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: Some of the (great) music in this game is so out there, it is hard to tell what kind of mood the composer is trying to evoke.
- Squishy Wizard - Definitely Paula... Especially when she first joins. Easily two-shotted due to her low level at first, and then two-shotted at later levels due to her mediocre defense and terrible HP growths (She has around 250HP at LV60-LV70... and that's if the game was generous with RNG and if you're not (ab)using the gamebreaking) rockcandy+sugarpack trick, meanwhile everyone else has nearly twice that amount (triple in Ness' case). She has the best offensive spells of course (and a couple good defensive spells too), but yeah expect to be healing and reviving her during playthroughs, at lot.
- Even through massive amounts of legitimate grinding making your party level 80+, the others will be god-like while Paula has a fraction of their defense and HP.
- Standard Status Effects, as well as many non-standard ones. Characters can be affected by sickness, heat stroke, ghostly possession, homesickness (in Ness' case — this happens at random, and it's cured by calling Mom), mushroom growth, the common cold...
- Start Of Darkness (Pokey)
- Still The Eighties Although it takes place in "199X", pay phones are still widely used, there are no household computers (but they do appear to have Nintendo games), and a lot of the slang is Totally Radical.
- Tear Jerker: If you look about Giygas' origins, you just might feel sorry for him.
- The Load (Although he's only with you at the very beginning of the game, all Porky/Pokey does is alternately whine, beg for mercy, hide behind Ness, and otherwise do nothing to contribute.)
- Theme Naming (The towns are named by numbers, for their climate, or for musical references. Also, in the Japanese version, the "Don't Care" preset names for the main characters were grouped by the following themes: The Beatles, Super Mario Bros, primates, the Japanese band SMAP, the character's signature head ornament, and dog commands, in addition the starting "Ness, Paula, Jeff, etc." Of course, those sets, like some other things, got Lost In Translation)
- Parodied with Slot Machine Brothers — Pincho, Pancho, and Tomas Jefferson
- Time To Unlock More True Potential: The massive powerup Ness gets at the end of Magicant.
- Too Awesome To Use: Bags of Dragonite, of which there are only 5 in the game.
- Trauma Inn (subverted; hotels restore HP and MP, but don't heal status effects — you have to go to a hospital for that.)
- Two Guys And A Girl (Although in fact it would be three boys and a girl, for a long part of the game this is the basic formation)
- Undisclosed Funds Played straight in Mother 2, but averted in Earthbound. During localization, for some reason a couple of vague references meaning roughly "a bajillion dollars" were changed to real numbers (Ness' family's debt to Porky's family is "a hundred thousand dollars or more" and the Diamond "could pay off a million dollar debt easily").
- Unfortunate Names (Poo.)
- Video Game Caring Potential (Take care of those Flying Men. You don't really want to use them all up.)
- Wake Up Call Boss (Frank Fly and his robot, Frankystein)
- When Trees Attack (Exploding trees, as a matter of fact...)
- Where It All Began (To enter the final dungeon to Earthbound, you need to get a piece of the meteorite that started everything in Ness's hometown. Of course, it has been taken over by aliens at that point.)
- Widget Series
- With Great Power Comes Great Insanity (Giygas oh god, Giygas.)
- Woolseyism A collection here.
- You All Look Familiar (a few NPC sprites, including what some gamers call "Mr. T")
- You Cannot Grasp The True Form (Trope Namer)
- Zombie Apocalypse: Happens in the town of Threed. Sort of.
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