MOTHER/EarthBound series

Wrong thread.

edited 16th Oct '12 5:20:30 PM by rmctagg09

Any posted a Mother 3 full rip yet? I'd definitely download that. M3 had some bangin' tunes.

Here's one. It also uses the techniques to make them crisp and high-quality, too.

Thread necromancy go!

I just had a Fridge Logic moment for Earth Bound. One of the primary goals for the game is Ness realizing his power in order to be strong enough to beat Giygas. But he doesn't directly defeat Giygas; Paula does, by uniting the prayers of all of the Chosen Four's friends from all over the world.

Does this mean that the entire quest for Ness to get stronger was pointless?

Ness' role is more of a protector. He gains great power, but doesn't use it to directly destroy Giygas. Rather, using him to heal and protect your party members is how he uses that power.

Wasn't Ness doing a pretty good job protecting Paula beforehand? He's already really strong and can take a lot of damage before realizing his hidden power.

Giygas clearly has some sort of connection to Ness. Maybe if Ness hadn't defeated his Nightmare and unlocked his true potential, Giygas could've, I don't know, taken control of him or something.

You have to realize, that unlike most other RPGs, Ness does not walk all over enemies when he gained all that power. Giygas' troops are still a very big threat gameplay wise. Ness' added strength and defense helps the others recover and protects them, while he gets hard to take down himself. It's a symbolic thing or something. I talked about this before with some other people, but I can't remember exactly what was said.

Ness didn't walk all over those enemies because they were scaled in difficulty accordingly. I remember initially having difficulty with those enemies until I realized Paula's PSI Shield Sigma and Omega comes in handy.

Yeah, Paula makes most enemies into giant pussies.

I'm sticking with my theory that, had Ness not defeated his Nightmare, Giygas would've been able to take him over, and thus doom the world.

There's not really any proof of that, and it doesn't really make any sense. Really, what Ness' Nightmare really was, was his self doubt. Ness had the power, he had to literally beat his self doubt and all that evil stuff into submission to unlock it.

I'm mostly going by the way Giygas seems to have some sort of connection to Ness. When you first encounter Giygas, it has Ness's face in its eyeball thing. It talks to Ness throughout the fight. That says, to me, that there's some connection between them.

It's one of those things in the MOTHER series that's never explained, but I always thought of it as Giygas's strange way of saying Ness's name while he's still in the Devil's Machine.

Well now...

Itoi said on Twitter they're making progress on a Mother re-release. It's not really clear what it is other than that, whether it could be a VC release or a port or compilation or what, but hey, news is news.

http://earthboundcentral.com/?p=10806

Just wanted to leave this here.

Oh. My. God. Are they actually working on getting the legal issues out of the way?

Anyone ever notice that the Love Theme has an almost-identical melody to Disney's Beauty and the Beast theme.

I'm more interested right now in the progress of the fan made sequel than the localization of the original Mother. It seems like they're really trying to expand upon the work of the earlier games while keeping true to their original spirit. I'm always happier to see people build and improve on existing works than brush up and rerelease them.

edited 30th Dec '12 4:33:30 PM by Desertopa

So for those who haven't heard, Mother 2 is finally being released for the Virtual Console in Japan this March. It's part of a celebration of the NES 30th anniversary where they're releasing a game on the Wii U VC each month...however, we've already seen the list of games for North America, and it's been replaced by another game on there (I assume the same is true for Europe; I haven't heard otherwise).

I want to stay hopeful and think that maybe they're still going to bring it over, they just didn't include it as part of the anniversary celebration because it's not as big a deal here...but perhaps I should know better. And yet, the thing that always seemed odd about Earthbound not being on VC is that it was never made available in Japan either. If they're finally releasing it over there, I would think any major obstacle preventing it from being released must've been taken care of, right?

Also, from what Itoi has said, I get the impression they're planning to rerelease all three games...and what do you know, they've just revealed that there are going to be Game Boy Advance games on the Wii U Virtual Console, so I expect Mother 3 will end up on there. Which depresses me even more...if the rerelease had been a compilation on the 3DS or something I would have had some hope of it being localized, but I highly doubt they'll localize a VC port. I'm pretty sure they've never done that before.

And here I was getting really hopeful about the games finally being made available in the west too. Itoi (and Iwata too, I think) have acknowledged the series' western fans several times recently. In fact, Itoi met and had a talk with one, and it apparently made an impression on him because he talked about it in an interview that otherwise had nothing to do with Mother series. And that combined with his sudden revealing of plans to rerelease the Mother games made me think that maybe they would actually have a western release in mind.

Admittedly, I'm making a lot of assumptions here and maybe I'll proven wrong and the games will be localized, but I'm just not so sure anymore...

Sin and Punishment got a localised VC release, but that may be a slightly different case considering the entire game's dialogue was already recorded in English.

It also helps that it didn't have any of the legal issues that the Mother series would have to overcome.

But since it's being released on VC in Japan, I assume they must've either taken care of any legal issues, or they weren't a problem in the first place. Otherwise, we must assume that the reason it hasn't been released in North America or Europe for all this time is "legal issues", but the reason it hasn't been released in Japan all this time is "no reason at all".

Sadly, that's rather accurate.

Also, I believe a GBA port of MOTHER 1 and Earthbound was released in Japan, so there don't seem to be as many persistent legal issues regarding the series there - it just seems to get overlooked globally.

edited 25th Jan '13 4:21:38 PM by Null

Legal issues were never an issue in Japan — Copyright laws and the like aren't as strict over there as they are here, so things like famous characters or something can be displayed or referenced to with relative ease...In America, howevver, lots of really minor things-An allusion to older music,(Like the Battle Against a New-Age Retro Hippie/Franky Battle being pretty much a homage to Johnny B. Goode) or lots of explicit references to famous figures, even old, can leave them in a fine area for suing...

edited 25th Jan '13 5:07:30 PM by lightdarkhero250

But there must have been some reason it wasn't released in Japan, especially considering it was, I believe, specifically named by Iwata when the Virtual Console was first introduced, and it got a demo on the Japanese version of Super Smash Bros Brawl. Why would they do that if they simply had no plans at all to make it available?

And let's say that there was nothing preventing it from being released in Japan. Then why would anyone think it had a chance of being released on VC over here regardless of legal issues, if they wouldn't even bother to release it in Japan just because?