When approaching the Mother series, I was always told to play Earthbound first, then if I liked that move on to Mother 3, and then, and only then, if I still needed more of Shigesato Itoi’s series, to give Mother a try. I was told to not expect much, and in some ways felt warned away from it. It was the one you didn’t need to play; they hadn’t quite figured it out yet. It was hard without being rewarding, the forgotten sibling in a legendary trilogy. Having now played through it I see that I was misled. This game isn’t the scrappy sibling of Earthbound and Mother 3 that failed to hit its mark. It’s actually their mother.
Starting as something between an ode to and a parody of Dragon Quest and similar RPGs, Mother diverted from norms by grounding itself in a version of modern day America. It understood there was no need to send main character Ninten off to a strange land of swords and sorceries. As a kid, the adult world is bizarre enough. Many of the early enemies are just weird adults and animals you would expect to see on a walk. Eventually you meet actual extraterrestrials, but even that feels unsurprising for our party. The world outside of their friendship is both commonplace and alien the entire time, with things being just off enough to cultivate an air of unease. By the time you encounter an alien it makes just as much sense as anything else. Of course there are aliens here; at least they’re not hippies.
While this game is known for being surreal and goofy, I think it’s the tenderness of it that has immortalized the series. Dispatched enemies are said to “calm down” or “come to their senses” rather than faint or die. It features almost no boss fights, with an emphasis placed on exploration and random encounters. It does feature some of the most oppressive random encounters I’ve ever faced, with enemies at times coming at you every step, but that fits its grander narrative. You’ve stepped outside without your parents. You’re unsupervised. Anything can happen. In its final battle you come face to face with an alien menace that has been kidnapping adults the entire game, but you don’t attempt to subdue him physically. Instead Ninten and his two friends Ana and Lloyd sing him a lullaby they’ve been collecting throughout the game. The battle is to keep the party alive and singing long enough to touch the heart of your enemy. The song reminds him of his adoptive mother.
While I’ve said that Ninten is adventuring with his ragtag group of friends and no supervision, that’s not entirely true. To save your game, you call Ninten’s father, who is kind enough to save your progress and put a little money in your bank account. During one of these calls, Ninten’s father will ask to speak to you, the player. He asks you to enter your name, so that he can address you when he thanks you for keeping an eye on Ninten and his friends. Lloyd’s father will do something similar later in the game. It’s in these moments that you realize that Ninten isn’t unsupervised. You are the babysitter. You’re the fourth, albeit off screen, party member. It is your responsibility to make sure these kids are okay on their long journey across the map to stop the aliens. You keep them healthy, you decide when it’s time to sleep, and their parents appreciate this. They can feel at ease with their kids out in the larger world because the player is there to keep an eye on them.
I say that Mother is the mother of Earthbound and Mother 3 because it follows the (perhaps assumed) roles of motherhood. Without it, Earthbound and Mother 3 would not exist, but their existence also serves to move past it, move beyond it, and in certain ways, cause it to be forgotten. Like many children before and after them, its two sequels go on to live their own lives, with Earthbound being widely agreed upon as a better implementation of what Mother was trying to do, and Mother 3 developing a legendary reputation among its very dedicated fan base. Its sequels grew up, moved out, and reached heights that the original Mother did not, and in a way, that has to be the goal of Mother. The very best parts of it shine through into the sequels, laying the groundwork for them to build themselves higher on. It presents so many ideas that are honed and expanded upon as time and technology progressed, and none of that could have happened without Mother doing this work first.
With this in mind, I’d recommend that you give Mother a call, or rather, find the means to play it if you can. (It’s available through Nintendo Switch Online as Earthbound Beginnings.) I don’t disagree that Earthbound and Mother 3 are better games, but so much of their heart and soul can be found in the original Mother. The heights that those games reached are a direct result of how exciting and daring the original was. Mother may have taken inspiration from Dragon Quest mechanically and a bit tonally, but its vision is so singularly it’s own, and with nothing quite like it existing at the time, making a game that is such a bizarre mirror image of modern life feels so daring. Sure, it’s a little clunky and you need to grind a lot, the dungeons are long and arduous, but it inspired the entire genre of offbeat slice of life games that came after it. It was one of the first of its kind, and the way it handles that is lovely.
Dave Tomaine is a comic writer and musician from Philadelphia. You can find him at @cavedomain and @FFBedtime on Twitter.