Retronauts - 768: Mother 3

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

For over a decade, its release seemed like an impossibility, but 20 years ago, Mother 3 entered our world—and then proceeded to never leave Japan. While it superficially resembles the earlier Mother games, this long-awaited sequel differs greatly in tone and structure, yet somehow delivers a satisfying (if surprising) final installment of Shigesato Itoi's beloved RPG series. On this episode, join Bob Mackey, Reid Young, Charlie Verdin, and Everdraed (all of Fangamer) as the crew turn off their Happy-Happy Boxes and sit down to discuss the Game Boy Advance game that gives new meaning to the term "tonda gossa."Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 100+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

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Start your free trial today. This week on Retronauts, a podcast that's strange, funny, and hard Rending. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackey.

And this time we are talking about Mother 3, the long-awaited Earthbound sequel that went through development hell, only to emerge in a pretty unexpected form. And then it never left Japan,

much to our chagrin. But thankfully, some savvy and kind folks gifted us a localization a few years later. So we are here to gather on its 20th anniversary to ask, how do we feel

about the supposed finale to the Mother series? I have a lot of thoughts. Before I continue, who is here with me today? My name is Reid Young. I am the co-founder at Starman.netnet and Fan Gamer. And who else do we have? I am Charlie Verden.

I'm a old starman.net user and also an employee at Fan Gamer. And last Belonle, who do we have? Hey, it's me Everdread. So I'm a weird internet guy, animator, video editor. I work at Fan Gamer, helped out on Undertale sort of things and do some stuff for Toby, like trailers and things. But a big fan of Mother and a Starman. met her back in the day for sure. Yes, we all gathered last year to talk about the 30th anniversary

of Mother 2 slash Earthbound. Now we're here to talk about the 20th anniversary of Mother 3. There is no slash. Again, I never came out here. And all you folks are from Fangamer, I just realized I'm wearing a very out-of-print fan gamer shirts. Yes. Unintentionally. I'm wearing it because I was not really going anywhere, and this is a very old shirt. So the Midnight Channel shirt out of print. But if you want to phone me up and get a very exclusive shirt that might be a little pit-stained, I'm more than willing to offer it to you. It's amazing how well they hold up.

They really do. This thing has been watched a thousand times. This is the fan gamer ad up front, by the way. Quality T-shirts. Anyhow, before I go on any further, I do want to ask everybody what your history is with Mother 3. And frankly, I'm just the guy who played the game and enjoyed it. A lot of you on this podcast have a closer relationship to Mother 3. Let's start with Reed.

So Mother 3 was a huge chunk of my life for, like, probably five years leading up to its release and even after, because I was kind of one of the organizing forces who coordinated the petitions at starmin. Not net to try to let Nintendo know how badly we wanted this game to be brought out to the states. And we never got there. So after we got really frustrated with that, I helped organize the fan translation. I didn't actually perform any labor for the translation.

I worked on the websites that surrounded it and the publicity campaigns, but I didn't actually do any like ROM hacking or localization. And thereafter, once that was done, one of the first, really the first major fan gamer product was the Mother Three Handbook. And I was the kind of the force pushing a lot of the, that like overarching organization and like the editing on that. And yeah, that was kind of, that was the last like major thing aside from like camp fan gamer. You know, there's, I've made a lot of efforts, you know, in the direction of Mother Three over

the years. But again, none of them have borne fruit aside from this Mother Three handbook. And I've got a very handsome first edition right here. Look at that beautiful dust cover. Wait, I didn't order. I'm actually, I wanted the Mother Three Handbook. Yes. My wife tells me that's a common complaint with people who don't actually open the book yet and realize they got the thing they ordered and the dust cover is just for fun.

But yes, this is the first time I've actually gotten to use the book because the guide shipped, I don't know, maybe six months after the fan translation did. So with this new playthrough I've done, I've been able to use the book and I'm really enjoying it. It's been kind of sitting on my shelf unused for like 17 years. The book was really, remains to this day, my pride and joy. It was one of the Fangammer products that I was most involved with for the longest time. and it's the longest running product that we've ever had. There's no other product in the store that we've sold as long as the Mother 3 handbook, and I think that record will definitely go unbeaten.

We're just going to keep it in stock forever. Yeah, it's beautiful. I mean, I page through when I got it in the mail, like in 2009, I guess. And then now for the first time I'm really just reading every bit of text, and it's just, it's glorious. I'm glad it's still available at FanGamer. Let's move on to Charlie. Charlie, how about you and Mother 3?

So I think even like the first time I played earthbound, I was kind of obsessed with this like throwaway line and foreside. There's a little sign in front of a nondescript building that says planning meeting for earthbound too. And I just really wanted to get into that building and see what they had planned. But yeah, I think by the time I actually got to Starmid.net and was spending a lot of time there. The Earthbound 64 was already canceled. I just kind of watched its progress in the upcoming section of Nintendo Power. But they had so much stuff on Starman.net about it, like all the videos that were in the promotionals before, it got canceled, music that I'd never heard of. And then, yeah, I just kind of got on the roller coaster ride where it's like, there's a new game, now it's delayed, now it's canceled.

Now we're making it for Game Boy Advance, but there's no plans to localize it, so maybe we can petition them. And then that didn't work. So then we'll just do it ourselves. And then, yeah, I got to actually play the game using a translation guide before the translation, the fan translation came out because I was preparing to help write the Mother 3 handbook. So I had to get familiar with the game earlier than, you know, I otherwise would have. Yeah, I was also very fascinated with the few sequel teases in Mother 2 slash Earthbound.

There's the offices for development of Mother 2, or sorry, Earthbound 2, Mother 3, and then in the ending, an NPC says, oh, write into Nintendo about the sequel. I did that. And the letter I got in return is in Clyde Mandelins' mother three, sorry, Mother 2, Lodges of Localization. I'm going to be mixing up all these mothers throughout this podcast, by the way. Because there's three of them, and then two of them have alternate names. So apologies in advance. But, yeah, like, even in Earthbound, there are kind of teases as to what will be coming next,

at least the idea like we want to make more of these. Let's move over to Everdred. Everdred, how about you in Mother 3? I just want to note, the end dot, dot, dot, question mark. I mean, the end here came like that. And you mentioned Earthbound 2. You're going to have people interested in it. I definitely think the interest of like, oh, is there more to this?

Is there going to be more to this? And Super Smash Brothers seeing Ness appear in, like, oh, my goodness, they're they actually care about this character in some way. They brought it over the U.S. It's like, that's, that was a big part of actually going to Sturman.net and Earthbound before that. the my role if I were to say like a specific role I was one of there's a there's a group of very jaded cynical people at sermon dot net who felt that like no matter what was going to happen it was never going to happen like there was it was never going to work out positively I remember for the petitions and I say this I remember everybody getting really excited going to them and I was in a position I think I had staffed at that point I was like I had to figure out a way to avoid doing any work I didn't want to I just I somehow avoided I'm going to I just I somehow avoided I'm going to I was in a position I think I had staffed at that point I was like I was like I was in a position I just I somehow avoided I okaying any of the signings.

I was like, this isn't going to work. This isn't going to happen. I have to be positive, but I, I, I don't, I have never, I have never thought that things were going to work out for the best for, for, for, for, the fountain mother. And in the sense, it's, I feel like, in some ways, the fact that it existed at all proved me wrong, but the fact that it never came to the U.S. proved me right. So it's sort of like a mixed bag of being a naysayer while deeply loving the game so much. Like they, obviously, they're incredibly inspirational for a lot of the things that I do in

my childhood. and all that sort of stuff. But it, Mother 3, if anything, Mother 3 had this really interesting sort of tie of like, well, I better go check in with the community again.

I better go see what's going on because they're doing a, they're doing the fan translation. I had worked, I mean, I had hung out in Tomatoes, IRC channel for my, most of my childhood and like doing crazy stuff. We'd done like,

I was part of little, like a very silly little subtitle group of Tomato. And like, tomato doing that stuff was like, well, I better go check in. people are going, Mother 3 is kind of going off the rails as far as people handle like the entire experience and like what it means for the community. So it was really, Mother 3 as a whole was just a very strange sort of coming back to like all this stuff that was from a younger childhood.

Well, the gang is back again and doing something really interesting. So I would say that was more of my role. I was not active in the translation. It was mostly seeing it after the fact. Yeah, I talked a lot about my own mother earthbound journey in the last. episode we did together, but it's very similar. Of course, I didn't work a fan game at any point my life, but I was a big supporter of Mother 3, like all of you folks were. And I followed the the tortured development of the sequel. We'll talk about that when it was for the N64. I thought,

well, I have to buy an N64 for this game. I probably will. And then it ends up not happening. And then learning about the Game Boy Advance version, following development of that. And in that weird dead period, just being excited for whatever earthbound scraps I was thrown, like, oh my God, Ness is in Smash Brothers. Nobody knows who this character is but me. Everyone is like, who is this hat kid? And I can tell them all players. And he's overpowered too.

Yes. And I still can't play as him. That's the curse of the mother fan. Like, Ness is in the game. But he's so hard to play as. I'm no pro at Smash Brothers. But yes, like I was along for the ride like many of you. A few, like people on this podcast were kind of steering the car a little bit more.

But I was happily in the backseat just waiting to be driven to the mother three translation factory. because that's exactly when I was able to enjoy the game in October of 2008. Now, did you, so you waited until the fan translation, did you not play it with like a guide? I actually, I downloaded the, I can say this now because the statute of limitations has expired, but I downloaded the ROM illegally and I thought, wow, Mother 3 is out. But I wanted to wait for the translation. I got through naming the characters and I realized there's like 30 hours in front of me and I want to play this in a way I can enjoy it

and won't be constantly like cross-referencing somebody's fact or some rough translation. So I did wait the excruciating, let me see was it like four, sorry, it was like 18 months, I think. So it wasn't even that long. And we'll talk about that, but the gap between

the release of this game in Japan and release of the fan translation was fairly short as far as like geological time goes. I remember getting through the game. I remember the ROM dropping, the Japanese ROM dropping. That night I started playing. I remember with that night, I got stuck on using Dragos tooth, but I played the entire game without any guy.

Other than somebody telling me, oh, you need to use that item from your inventory. I played through the entire game with no understanding of Japanese, nothing, just completely without support or help. And it made into a really interesting bizarre, like, the callbacks became maybe the biggest thing of like, oh, that's something I recognize and notice. But it was a very mechanical experience of like trying to understand and like in the moment, discern what the heck is going on here. It was a really interesting experience. I would actually recommend folks, maybe not entire games, but to give that experience a try, because it's, it can really be eye-opening as far as what game dev is. And like what, what is intrinsic, what is intuitive and what really isn't without some sort of goal posting or signposting?

It's really kind of interesting. Yeah, I think in my case, it was less being patient and more being lazy because even as a huge mother fan, it seemed like a lot of work to play it with that much assistance and I thought, I forget when the fan translation project started, but I thought somebody somewhere will turn this into English and hats off to them. Godspeed. I bless them in their work, but I will wait for that and it was definitely worth the wait. So we'll talk about all kinds of other three related subjects. It was really hard to figure out a way to encapsulate this very big, important game into 90 minutes and the very long torture development process will hit all the points we can, but I do want to point out there will be spoilers on this podcast. So

play Mother 3 before you listen. Just play Mother 3 in general. It's a really good game. I think all of us on this podcast like the game or else who wouldn't be like so actively involved in the communities and in proselytizing the world of mother and all that stuff. And it's been available in English for close to 18 years now. So you've had your chance. The chance still exists. And the fan translation is very good.

And there are now like other translations of this game in English. I know there's at least one other translation that I think Tomato has approved of that adds a little more personality to the characters that's not necessarily there in the original version. I'm not sure if anyone else is aware of this one. I haven't seen that I haven't seen a new one. That's actually quite interesting because I think tomato has historically said he had played it kind of straight in some ways. Like he had I am so glad that tomato when mother three came out and it seemed hesitant about what was going to down if would ever be officially translated or if who was going to take the mantle for it before tomato stepped in. There is a few groups. There's a few people that really were very

interested of doing it as fast as possible. And in some ways, I'm very happy that Tomato did throw his hat into the ring and do what he did there because we could have gotten the first fan translation that goes out, fan localization of a game that goes out, that's what people first engage with and kind of like memorialize. The fact that when Tomatoes stepped in, it prevented other people from immediate, like, they were like, okay, everyone could trust Tomato was going to do a really good job with it. And it's suddenly like a lot of warring factions if he was going to get it out for me. It seemed to just melt away and be like, okay, this is going to be really good.

No one's going to try to compete with what is going down here. And I think that really allowed an incredible localization that took the time that it needed for something really special. But it also, tomato historically has always felt very cautious about like if you're not working directly with a dev, if you're not talking with a team that's behind it, there is some localization aspects and like characterizations that you just might not feel comfortable about. and tomato played that, I think, in a very smart way, like the absolutely the way you should have, but there is a difference between someone who's a little bit more casual with character reads

and what they're putting into it would go. So I'm actually, I'm pretty interested to see what, I want to go see what the differences are. That's really interesting. Yeah, I only heard about it recently when doing this research. And I think, you know, obviously the Tomatoes fan translation stands on its own,

but I think people wanted a little more out of the population of characters you meet and that translation serves that goal, even though that is not in the original text. So there's more than one option depending on what you're in the mood for. And we'll bring up this translation throughout this podcast, obviously. Real quick, just because there are modifications of the ROM, I just wanted to note that there is actually a high-quality audio mod that you can apply.

Like, if you have it, if you use the official or the unmodded game ROM, you can actually apply, they change how the audio engine for the GBA works. So essentially that ROM will suddenly play music a lot more clear. you don't have nearly as much GBA fuzz just from the intrinsic sort of sound issues that they had and it actually is a really noticeable nice improvement so I would just recommend if you are going to be playing this on a ROM because you're kind of you know that is likely how you're playing it in English

definitely look up the high quality mother 3 mod it's on GitHub and you can apply it and it's very nice I wish I had known about that but after overtime I think the hiss became very soothing Charlie yeah I'm actually very curious about these other fan translations as well, for no other reason, then because I wonder, did they use the framework that Jeff Mann built for the translation, or did they figure that out on their own? Because that was a huge issue in getting the fan translation made is just the way that the text works was so

complicated and caused things to break constantly while they were doing, making the translation. So I'm very curious how they handled that. Yeah, I'm sorry, don't have more info about this. I'll look more into this before the episode goes out, so I have some answers. But this came up in a video and I thought, well, what's the point of retranslating the game? The translation is great. And then the video goes on to say, and Tomato approved of this. So I thought like, okay, there must be something here. It must be like legit, in other words. Read. Yeah, I had a chance to talk to Clyde before this, you know, recording. And one thing that he wanted to express is that he really hopes other people will try to play the original game in Japanese. And, you know, when possible, try to play. try to translate the game for themselves, which obviously there's only a narrow, you know, group of people on Earth who could actually do that. But he says the more people who translate the game, especially in the more languages, the better from his perspective. So that's the word from tomato. Yeah, as far as I know, Mother 3 is also all in Kata Kana, right? All of the the text? I think so. Okay. So at least with my duolingo, sorry, my duolingo knowledge now,

I can at least read all the texts out loud, not necessarily knowing what most of it means. But I'm moving in that direction. So this should be the goal for all of us to play these games in their original language. Well, let's talk about the history of Mother 3. It's very long. It's very tortured. And I tried to hit all of the main points. So if you want a little more context about Mother Earthbound and its creator, Shigasato It Toi, check out episode 699, 30 years of Earthbound. All these guys were on it. It's a great episode. And just more context for you. So before Mother 3, there was 1994 as Mother 2. This was a success in Japan. In America, the 1995 release of Earthbound was another.

failed attempt by Nintendo to try to get RPGs to catch on in the West like they had caught on in the East. And then 1998 we had Pokemon and then it doesn't matter anymore. So that is what's going on with the original release of Earthbound. So it is just a cult hit. The cult is growing over time.

We're part of it. I think everyone knows that Earthbound and Mother are now, but in the past, not so much. And Shigasato It Toy, the creator of this series, actually thought up a pitch for this sequel during the final stretch of development for Mother 2. That's how excited he was to keep working on these games. And it would end up being a little different than

the mother three we know and love. So there is a great resource online. It was translated a billion years ago. It's called the Mother Three cancellation interview. And I can say this because I was in the press. Japanese developers are very reticent to say anything about anything. And I understand why. But when it's time to apologize, oh boy, they'll go on forever and ever and ever. And that is the best thing about this interview because they're going through the entire process of like, here are the many steps we followed and here's where things went wrong

and here's what we wish we could have done. So I remember reading this in full like 26 years ago. And I don't think I've read it since it went live, the translation, all those years ago. And it was just a fascinating to go back into this, having already played Mother 3 now twice, to see what they had in mind for this failed version of the game.

I'm not sure if any, I'm sure like, you guys probably all read this in like the year 2000, in this very long interview with Itoi and Miyamoto, and I believe I Wada might be there too. I think that's, like, I'm pretty sure the translation that exists of this is actually from our friend and colleague, Lindsay, Lindsay Moore. Okay. And it's more recent, right? Yeah, she translated it like in like 10 or like 13 years ago or something.

Okay. Yeah, I wasn't true when I read it, but it is very extensive. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, like when it came out, like it took her forever to translate. this interview because it was so long, like you said, they go on and on. There's so much interesting detail on there. And yeah, it is funny how, like, you often have to wait. It seems decades to really get interesting information out of Japanese game developers for some reason.

Yeah, and this is something I don't think they do now, but at the time the internet was so new, they didn't have a problem with like, oh, here's a place for a long form discussion. between us. That's sort of like what Iwada asks turn into much later after this. So yeah, that's where I'm pulling a lot of this information from. And the original idea would deviate from the

standard RPG idea and that the standard RPG is more of a road trip. This mother three, the initial idea, would focus on a single city that continues to grow. And in the 2000 interview, Miyamoto, compares ETOI's original idea to the then new video game Majora's mask. And I think

ETOI agrees like, yeah, that's sort of like what I had in mind. Just a small population you get to know over time that changes based on various events in the game. So I love Majora's Mask. I also would have loved to see like this probably much more janky version of Mother 3 that Ito had in mind with the power of the N64 behind it. And this is the version that we saw a lot of screenshots of and lots of, maybe not lots of videos of, but enough videos up to peak our interest. So the final version of the game that we've all played has a singular city that changes over time. time, but the plot differs greatly from Itoy's original idea. The original idea E. Toy had, it was going to be about a deadbeat womanizing detective who gets caught up in a huge murder case. And as the story progresses, this singular town in its population would grow and change. And apparently, E. Toy wanted a whole lot of unique interactions, many of which the player could miss. And lots of different conversations with townspeople who all had their own unique behaviors and schedules. So to me, this really does sound like he was reaching towards

Majores Mass before Nintendo even realized that's what they wanted to do with that Ocaryana of Time sequel. One thing that I learned when I got a chance to talk with Miyodosan, who was the game designer for Earthbound and who was working on Mother 3 up until the Game Boy advanced version, he said that like his whole team, he and his whole team were just like creating these completely, in retrospect, completely impossible design specs for this game because they all just thought like, well, the M64 is this dream machine that could do anything. So we're going to go nuts.

And that was part of the reason for the development hell. Yeah, yeah. That's what I got from this interview. They were shown Mario 64 and they thought, well, this is the future. Think of all we can do with this. And their ideas got very big. But in retrospect, I love the N64 guys. It's really kind of a junkie console that can only do a few kinds of things right.

And one of those things was not RPGs. Right. And I think they learned that through the development of the game, like, oh, this is actually the cartridge format and the limitations of the system do not fit what we want to do. Mario 64, that looks great, but that's the best case scenario for the N64 in its hardware and the controller, to be fair. So they were really just like envisioning the future that the N64 did not have in store for itself. So even though the story differed, the themes were still the same. So the original subtitle was Forrest of the Chimeras.

And this would feature the same idea about mankind intruding upon nature as seen in the logo for the final game. So there's some similar themes, even though the original story was much different with this womanizing detective. Charlie, go ahead. Yeah, I just wanted to mention, I don't think that, like, I can see how trying to build that sort of city that would change and have a bunch of interesting quirky characters who all have their unique interactions being like just a nightmare, especially at the time. And I don't think there's a lot of games that have done that sense, but there are a few. the thing that, the one that comes to mind, for me, is Radiata stories, which,

likewise, it takes place in a city, and it's just filled with a bunch of quirky characters, and it's got a full 24-hour, basically, you know, day-night cycle, and you can just follow a character from the time they get up in the morning and see everything they do throughout the, throughout the day, and how they interact with other characters in the city. And, of course, that was PlayStation 2 era, so it had, you know, a lot more power behind it. But I think it's really cool that they were thinking about stuff that would be able to be accomplished later, even if they failed to make it happen. That kind of game design is honestly one of my favorite kinds of game. That game where things are just happening around you, you need to burn certain places at certain times.

And to be for a Nintendo, Majores Mask was a much smaller game in scope compared to what they wanted from Mother 3. And even that game needed the N64 RAM cartridge just to run properly. And what the Ram Cartridge was doing was keeping track of everything behind the scenes. It wasn't necessarily there for like graphical effects or anything. Everett? Yeah, I just want to say the scope, you can look at Majorist Mass Scope and understand how clever they were about essentially a reset, about having, you're absolutely modifying the sort of story arcs of these characters, but there's always a reset point where it doesn't allow too far of a complexity. Like it is all very reasonable for a three-day period, but it's very cleverly designed for that space. this feels more of a like someone that isn't coming from the game design aspect of how do you make it all work

trying to have complex character interactions over a full narrative of like a mystery going through it it is it's a pretty classic sort of not really drilling down into the scope and overscoping in a way that's there's a lot of people who want to make games like radiate of stories and radiate stories actually does a really clever thing where it actually it has so many interesting characters and each one can be befriended and pulled into your party but it has a really smart split point where essentially like more than half of the characters are no longer accessible and the evolution of like what the characters are

and what they're doing and interacting with there are behind whichever pathway you choose. So it's finding this to try to do a concept like this almost always requires concessions and what is like the overarching design philosophy of your game that both is concession but also works with what you're doing.

That's like that's how you make these things possible and it doesn't sound like a toy might have been directly in that mind space to really enable it. But man, you can see the, something that Mother 3 does do very well is that every time there's a major narrative shift or beat, you can go back to the town of Tasmania. You can talk to the characters and they do have interesting comments.

I'm sure we'll get into it more late, but just you can see those seeds, the, the ideas still making their way into the actual game that we got. And I, I think that is the compromise that inevitably sort of has to happen. They could have not bothered at all. They could have gone much softer on that. But it's clear that that was still an important aspect of the game. Yeah, I don't blame them for failing because I don't see anyone making a game like this today at least 30 years later. The closest I can think of is something like Hitman.

And that is a very small space relatively compared to a town. And the events that play out last about an hour. There's a bunch of characters with schedules and pretty complex environments. But it's all very small in scale. So I've not seen an idea this complicated at the time. the scale they wanted to yet, really. I mean, there are things like Radiata stories, but... Shadows of doubt.

Shadows of doubt, I think, is the current game where it has a procedural, like, you have a city with all these things and they're all, it's dynamically generated. I think they are doing the closest to that idea. And that is an incredibly complex, really interesting, like, beautiful implementation of it. But, man, did it seem like an incredible amount of tech debt to make that work? Yeah, that's a very impressive game. And I need to get more into it. Like, the depth of that game kind of scares me.

There's just too many things to play around with, but I do like what it's trying to do. So more about this original version of Mother 3. The battle system also featured the same sort of rhythm-based attacks as seen in the final version. You can see this in some of the few videos that launched about this game. And E. Toy was planning for Mother 3 to last for 12 chapters, and this would end up being eight chapters in the finish game. But even at the time, they were trying to find ways to tell these chapters in different ways other than gameplay. Like, what if one chapter was just pictures intact? And we kind of get that in Mother 3 with Chapter 6, which is just basically a cutscene.

And then Chapter 7 is essentially half of the game for the rest of the game. And then there's like a bit of Chapter 8. But yeah, they were trying to find ways like, okay, we can't, this story is very big. We can't tell all of it through gameplay. What do we do from here? And yeah, these are just the broad strokes of the original Mother 3. And this game potentially had four different platforms it was going to be released for over time, not all at the same time.

So the game went into development for 94 for the Super Famicom. There are some sources that lead us to believe that this could have been like pre-rendered graphics. I think even in the interview they said, well, we were influenced by Donkey Kong Country wanted our game to look like that. With the planned release date of 1996, clearly that did not happen. And then they eventually fell in love with Mario 64, moved Mother 3 to that platform. It was going to be a 64 DD game. And then they decided we're just going to put it on a cartridge.

because the writing is on the law for the system. And I saw some sources here and there and confirmed that Mother 3 could have also been planned for the S&S's CD-ROM peripheral that that was never released. So potentially this game was being developed over time for four different platforms independently. So you can see like just how also quickly things were moving in the 90s.

Now we're used to sitting on the same console generation for a decade. Now console generations are kind of fake. But back then, things were moving. are just flying at the speed of light. I want to note how interesting, so the original, like, the expansions that Nintendo did for their consoles, like the Nintendo, their internet,

you could download aspects, and you'd go into a place and get the expansional sort of stuff for the original Nintendo. Some of the stuff, like the DD, some of their concepts might feel like a little pie in the sky, but they literally pioneered it with a nest, and it worked.

It was really effective in Japan. We didn't get it. But the sort of, Nintendo was always very forward thinking with this. So it's not surprising that they had, some projects going into the space. But when things fall through, it really puts a project into bad,

it puts it really on the back foot where you're expecting all of these sort of, oh, this is going to save us. We suddenly have extra space, extra RAM, extra capacity, but that's gone now. And we have to scope back when we fought so hard to avoid doing that.

And that is a really demoralizing place to be on a development project. Yeah, it sounds like it. I think the final compromise was the game would be released for the N64, and then there would be a disc drive expansion. I'm not sure what the expansion would cover. I would assume that the entire N64 cartridge would contain the story,

but they still wanted some portion of it via the disc drive, because I guess their scope was that big. They needed an expansion for the game. Maybe textures and music. I mean, those are usually the things that become just a file-sized nightmare for the N-64. It could be. Ultimately, we'll never know. And even though the disc drive came out in Japan,

there's like five or six games for it. Some of them aren't really even games. So not a popular peripheral. when it released over there. I do want to mention that everyone should check out the Mother 3 timeline of hope. I forgot this existed.

Clyde Mandelin, who led the translation effort for the fan translation, put together a lot of stuff, but pertaining to our interest, the Mother 3 timeline of hope, which tracks the development of the game via official sources

and the press at the same time. So you can just see how much we were just waiting and waiting and getting dribs and drabs and drabs of content and in speculating just constantly about this game. And then I was reading this over again and just re-experiencing the highs and the lows of being a mother-slash earthbound fan from like 1995 to 2006. It was a, it was a rocky ride. Yeah, going back over this, like we were, for a while, we were thinking about turning this into like a book in the Legends of Localization series.

And it didn't work out. But, you know, Clyde went to, this is so Clyde, like, you know, just going incredibly hard collecting sources, like historical, you know, information about, like, you know, what was it like to be a fan of Earthbound, you know, between 96 and 2006. And it's all there. Like, he really does, you know, like his original source reporting here is unmatched. Yeah, and lots of games get canceled. but I don't think we were used to games this high profile or at least Nintendo games that are covered this much getting canceled because there were multiple magazine articles

Nintendo Power ran features on Earthbound 2 slash Mother 3 We saw a video come out of Space World I'm sure all of us have watched that trailer like a thousand times in our life Watching it again I just thought like wow I as a teenager I watch this trailer over and over again Just thinking like what is this game This game that seemingly only I care about and want.

Like, what's going to be happening? It's so cinematic. Yeah, yeah. It's so impressive for a trailer back in the day. Yeah, especially for like an N64 trailer. But, yeah, this game was covered extensively in the press. And we don't have time to go over just like how it was covered, how people were reacting to it, but definitely check out the timeline of hope.

It's on Legends of Localization.com. And Clyde put together a great resource for just the torture we all went through and the fight to get Mother 3 in any kind of playable format here. So, yeah, this was definitely a huge help for me in putting together this history of Mother 3. And the story that we eventually played in the final game would end up differing greatly from ETOI's pitch. And based on press coverage, some version of the plot that we know and love was in place when Mother 3 for the N64 was canceled. So it seems like E. Toy was heavily inspired by the 1986 novel, The Notebook, written by Agatha Christoph. It is a three-part novel series about the harrowing struggle of two twins named Lucas and Klaus

as they experience the horrors of war. I heard these novels are a bummer, which is why I wasn't about to run out and read them all before this podcast. I am very curious about the notebook, but it feels like this might account for, or probably does account for, the very melancholy tone of this game, where one and mother two have their kind of bittersweet's sad moment. but this game is just a constant series of bringdowns that's really effective, I think. Yeah, I remember an interview with Itoi where someone was asking him on Japanese TV,

so with this sequel, like, are we going to get more of what we expect? And he says, like, no, I'm going to betray everyone's expectations. And he was very excited about it. Yes, yeah, I mean, we'll talk about the game, how it plays out. But upon replaying this game, what strikes me as interesting is that it's very, very little of the game is about giving you references and making you feel good as a mother fan. And in fact, the last chapter seems to be mad that you wanted a sequel. In a way that feels kind of mean-spirited, I guess we can hash out our feelings about that. But yeah, this is not pandering in any way.

This is a guy who wants to tell a different story via similar, like, tones and colors and sounds. But he's not interested in saying, like, oh, there's this character and there's that. character and remember this song, there's just, it's not really doing that and operating that way. There's not a whole lot of fan service to be found. Everdrat. Every time you see something that is familiar, referential to Earthbound Mother 2, it creates a pit in your stomach about what it must mean, about the fact that you are seeing it now, seeing it integrated in the way it is. It's kind of lovely where every time more of the, of Mother 2 is shown, you're like, oh, no. How is this gross, grotesque nostalgia corrupted

this world further. It's really, really interesting. I remember hearing a while back, a toy, originally toy had darker plans for the game. I remember this is the, we got the happy ending, essentially, and a big part of the inspiration, a toy spent a huge amount of time trying to make these projects, these game projects happen. Obviously, originally it was considered a big failure, and it was like a lot of lost time. And I remember them talking about, you know, their daughter, about this mistime that, you know, they were so busy with this. They missed them growing up in a lot of ways. And a lot of that really comes through into the game itself,

as far as the notion of parenthood and, like, being so absorbed into something that is all consuming, you miss out on what you even have left. It's, I think coming from that direction, a toy did a really masterful job of probably getting some personal feelings into the game without, like, and I could absolutely see how it could be so much darker. there is a cathartic aspect to the game that I think is really successful.

But it's definitely, when people were really expecting, you know, earthbound two, when they're expecting the happy go lucky kids, stand by me sort of style, Mother 3 was a shock. And I love that aspect. I really love that. Yeah, it wasn't a case of like, oh, what's nest up to this time? It was more like, oh, I know what pokey's up to this time. And I don't want to see a lot of it.

Charlie, go ahead. Yeah, I wonder how much of that is reflected. and how different the game was being, like you said, if it was originally going to have like pre-rendered backgrounds and then eventually went into like the Nintendo 64 style, there's such different art styles than Earthbound was that it seems like it would naturally lend itself to a much darker story or just allow a much bigger break from what the previous game was.

And the fact that we ended up with Mother Three, as it turned out, which art design-wise was so much closer to Earthbound. I wonder if that also colored, like, how they ended up taking the story just because it didn't seem like, you know, the tonal shift would have been a little too harsh if they had gone darker than they did. Yeah, I think you're right, Charlie, because if you, I remember first seeing screenshots and video of, of Earthbound 64 or Mother 3. And like this, I say this with a lot of admiration. It's a gross looking game. It's a game that is like,

I've never seen 3D models in that low res, but like going for high-res texture. It's a very unsettling game. And that's without seeing the characters in motion. Seeing them interact and like having, I think it would have very much been in the space of Majorius mask, which naturally did lend itself to a gritty or darker sort of space

and like a surreal Lynchian sort of aspect. I think that would have been, almost unavoidable. There's so much silly, like, despite some of the horror that goes throughout the Mother 3 that we got, there's always a whimsy, a cartoonish sort of playout and spectacle that is always like, there's so many scenes and sequences that are just having fun with it. And I think that did color a lot of the overall tone that got into the game. Yeah, the N64 versions of these characters are really kind of creepy and off-putting

in a way that doesn't always feel intentional. But if you read the 2000 cancellation interview, I believe they were really inspired by Toy Story. So if you imagine the humans in Toy Story, they're kind of freakish and boil them down into an N604 resolution and character polygon limit. You can see what was going on there. And I believe they, you even called out Sid from Toy Story as an inspiration for this game where the chimeras in this game are inspired by the horrible creations that Sid would make in Toy Story. But I'm going to say Sid Innocent. He was just being a creative kid. That's my perspective on the film.

So is Parky, you know. Yeah. Creative in certain ways, playing with life. But yes, yes, this game, we were talking about the tone of the game. We'll get more into that. But I find it very interesting that this is a Nintendo published game. This would only happen because it is a legacy series in the power of Shigasato Itoi. But if you look at just the very horrible things that happen in this game,

and now Nintendo won't even let your Animal Crossing Villagers be mean to you, I feel like this is such an outlier when it comes to the company's normal output. And they can go dark occasionally. I understand that. There's darker implications in like the Splatoon universe and the Zelda. games can go dark. But this game is just like thoroughly has a vibe that Nintendo I feel like resists, especially in some of the messages it sends about

like capitalism and things like that. And I think part of the freaky art stuff is definitely like Betamaro Ito, who was the art director back in the Earthbound 64 era of the game. And his just really bizarre style. He's a very interesting guy. He's still got this old like GeoCities looking website that's live, strongly recommend checking out his work.

I will always be shocked. Going into chapter two, you first see the pig masks, and it looks like a Nazi salute. Like the immediate fascist sort of notions that are like, there is something deeply, immediately wrong here. It is deeply surprised. I mean, that was on the Game Boy Advance. That was like somebody on a train ride,

seeing this for the first time. I can't imagine what the Japanese experience, like we're able to have it such, like have that. as part of the cultural consciousness of a game that has just released, to play that out in public on like a portable console, like, whoa. I'm having a serious reaction to this stuff. And I'm like around other people.

It feels like such a private experience, like a much more intense one than you'd expect from almost any video game. So it's just a really interesting sort of way that played out. Yeah, I mean, we're all thinking about fascism more than ever. No reason at all, by the way. Just thinking about it. And yeah, some of them imitated in this game now in 2026, you're like, hmm, okay.

Like, this is a lot more powerful to me now. a lot closer to certain elements of what's happening in this world. Again, more on that later. Still in the development here. Rocky, rocky developments, multiple platforms, many delays. Mother 3 seemed to be on track for a year 2000 release. That's a year where you don't want to release an N64 game, by the way, the year 2000. Only if you're Majores Mask.

And even then, you're in trouble. There was a trailer at Nintendo Space World in 1999. I'm sure that's the one that we all watched a billion times. Still available to watch online. I'm sure many people have analyzed the hell out of that by now. And two days before Nintendo's next Space World event in July of 2000, I believe, sorry, no, August of 2000,

Mother 3 was formally canceled. They realized like, well, if we don't show Mother 3 here, people will know it's canceled. Let's get ahead of things. Let's cancel the game. So they canceled the game. They put out that interview, that very long interview. And in that interview,

Miyamoto and Etoe are like, well, we want there to be a Mother 3. It's just not going to happen now. So that would only continue people's hunger for this game because the spirit was not quite dead for Mother 3. And then pertaining to our guests, this is when Starmen.net launched the Earthbound 64 petition. So this is the second of three big petitions. And going over the history of this, I forgot the first petition was, I believe, put Earthbound on Game Boy Color.

Is that correct? Mother. Mother won on Game. Oh, Mother. First Mother, yeah. So, yeah, the Earthbound 64 petition was something that, if I remember correctly, we had been working on it when Mother 3 got released. when Earthbound 64 was canceled, sorry. And so we're like, well, I guess this is extra relevant or irrelevant?

We don't know, but we're sending it anyway. And, you know, the experience of having a game canceled, as we were working on a petition to tell Nintendo how badly we wanted the game, was like, okay, this is really stealing our resolve to do this bigger and better next time. And that kind of like rolled forward into our final petition effort, which is a couple years later. Right, and that launched around the time when there was an official announcement. So the early 2000s rolled on. Iwada, Miyamoto, and Itoi made various comments about wanting to see Mother 3 in some other form. And then in 2003, we saw a TV advertisement for the Japanese release of Mother 1 plus 2. That was the Game Boy Advance release of the first two

mother games. And at the end of that release, sorry, the end of that commercial was the announcement that Mother 3 is coming to the Game Boy Advance. And according to my resources, the, the the third and most known other petition launched around this time, but it was actually started in 2002. That's when it was getting off the ground. So you guys were ready for this too. You were like, you had one foot in the door as this news was happening essentially. Yeah, yeah. It was just really, again, you know, fortunate or unfortunate timing, depending on your perspective. But yeah, we had been working like the final petition, which got like 31,000 signatures or something. we worked on for the better part of a year, if I remember correctly.

And when we finally printed that off and sent it off, it was like six, 700 pages, if I remember correctly, like a gigantic tone. And we sent that to a lot more people as well, like not just to Nintendo, but also to like some news outlets, just to hopefully make more of a splash. Because by this point in our evolutionist family,

we realize like, oh, okay, we can't just tell Nintendo that we want something. Like, we have to make a much bigger noise than that. Yeah, and at this point, video game websites are a big deal in the early odds. And you're sending these out to them as well. So you're making a good stink about the game, not a bad stink. And this is really the campaign that is talked about the most in the press. I believe Brechtanaut's host, Jeremy Parrish, might have received one of these, oneup.com back in the day.

Okay. That's what oneup.com was a new website, I believe. This is early, sorry, like mid to late 2003. OneUp would have just been getting off the ground there, too. Well, it was either that or the anthology, which was a separate thing later. I know he got one. Okay. Yeah, it might have been that one, actually. Yeah. So yes, Mother Three is announced for the Game Boy Advance. A whole lot happens between the announcement and the release. The development and the lead up to Mother Three could be like three podcasts, by the way. I'm just hitting the major points. But we need to cut to the chase because Mother Three hits Japan on April 20th, 2006, and it never leaves Japan, but English-speaking fans don't have to wait long because the official, not the official, but the most official fan translation releases 14 months later on October 17th, 2008. And it's been updated a bit since its original release. I was looking at the changes. Yeah, there are changes. There are bug fixes. I played the first release. And for this podcast, I played the most recent release. I can't remember what was going on in the first release. But I know I couldn't save my game traditionally. I had to use safe states. And I think there was some issue there. But. that's all been fixed now and the translation of this game alone could be its own podcast but it cannot be understated or overstated just the amount of work that went into

this translation and it is again we've talked about this before but with fan translations it's not just the case of like okay give me the text in Japanese I'll just shove the English text in there no it's about reprogramming the game and working around all of the weird formatting and all the weird compression that's going on to get so much text

into a little cartridge and it's a phenomenal effort and much has already been written about it. A lot of it by Tomato himself, the development of this translation. Yeah, the blog, the Mother Three blog, which is kind of where he just talked about the process of making

the fan translation, I mean, it was gigantic. Like, before the fan translation came out, I mean, we were getting just incredible traffic to this blog just because people were so desperate to get news about what was going on and how it was going that, you know, Clyde would just release

a blog post and get hundreds and hundreds of comments, which nowadays, you see major news publications getting a couple dozen comments on the story. So you get a sense of how big the appetite was for this translation. And of course, this is around the time you folks launched the Mother 3 Handbook, very extensive, very great resource still on sale today, definitely recommended. And you provided the clay figures that Nintendo would not make this time around. Yeah, when we first started talking about the handbook, part of what we would talk about is that like, all right, you know, Clyde's working on this fan translation and these fans are finally going to get a chance to experience this. But like,

so many of the fans will not have the experience that we did of having this player's guide that comes with the game and really just like adds to the world of the game. And so, you know, I was talking to Camille and I said like, well, what do you think? Because like, you know, she was so inspired in so much of her art by the clay models from, from Mother 2. And so she went for us. So she made not all of the enemies in the game, but a pretty big chunk of the enemies and main characters of the game and Clayform. And we photographed them.

The photographs don't hold up very well in the players guide. We could do a lot better if we redid it. So one of these years, we'll get around to like a deluxe edition of the Mother Three handbook or something. But yeah, we got it all done. Yeah, still very impressive. It looks like they are official. Definitely.

And yeah, I guess with all the times they had to restart development on this game, there was no time to sculpt clay things. They just had to keep moving with their heads down. Go ahead, Everdrault. I just want to, I mean, if you look, it was such a labor of love and you can compare it to the original Earthbound guide that came out in the U.S. release of Earthbound. It's the level of quality there. I mean, there's limitations, but it is such a well-produced set piece as far as an experience. So many people, you know, that is how they engaged, both with Earthbound. and with Mother 3, having these guides

and this sort of joyous expansion of the worlds around them, when you have a physical artifact of a game that you're experiencing really intensely when there's a lot of emotions behind it, there's like, it becomes so much more impactful. So I love the fact that people have engaged.

That was not how I originally played Mother 3, and I still haven't dealt. Like, I want to be very rigorously going through the guide for it. But I am so impressed when people have been able to have that experience. Yeah, and it's amazing work. I think it's worth noting that I believe we specifically designed the Mother 3 handbook to not be completely tied to the fan translation,

which is I believe why all of the screenshots in the Mother 3 handbook, they don't include any text because we didn't want to be tied to that specific. Like you could just use it to play the Japanese version of the game. If I remember correctly, it has been a little while since I've brought. but that was, I believe that was very intentional in our book. Oh yeah, I'm flipping through it now. I'm not seeing a scrap of text in these screenshots. Yeah, that was a very intentional choice because, A, because we didn't want to,

like, we wanted this to stand in the event the Nintendo came through and did their own localization. Okay, well, we still want this to be a relevant, you know, thing. And also just because, you know, the question marks about, like, legality and, you know, fair use and all that. There was a lot of like very armchair internet research that went into this. And that was where we landed was like, okay, no text in the screenshots. And so, yeah, there's none.

And yeah, we're talking about the fan transition a lot. And this could also be another podcast. This is this giant debate. But at this point, Western release seems very unlikely. Nintendo is still doing very well. I feel like if their back was against the wall again like they were in the Wii era, if that persisted any longer, maybe they would yield and let us have have this, but it feels like they're happy to tacitly let this exist in English and let people

find it if they need to. They are not making any statements that say as such, but it seems like the vibe is, if you guys want to play it, you can. We're not going to release this. And I don't see that changing unless there is like a remake. But yeah, I still feel like this is not going to happen any sort of formal English release of the game. Yeah, I think I can co-sign that. That's my exact thought and I have I have been barking up that tree for a long time. Like informally and formally.

And so that's where it lies. So it's not just Reggie Fizemae's faults. We can say Doug Bowser also just as guilty or whatever you want to say. Yeah, plenty of blame to go around here. Yeah. Now I've got some theories that I'd love to go into.

But, you know, I think Reggie came out and said, you know, this, whatever your feelings about the actual content of the game it really was a business decision where it didn't make economical sense to release a Game Boy Advance game in 2000, like at that time in the U.S. audiences. And I would go farther, you know, where my theory, not really, just Earthbound was a flop. Earthbound had a lot of backing. It was a tricky, risky thing that did not pay off. People have to back up those things.

People have to put their money where their mouth is. And usually there's executives that give buy-in into it. If you are burned in that way with a project of that scope, you're going to be hesitant. with anything that comes, like you will probably say you'll never touch that IP again. I've always felt that like there's probably still,

you know, I don't know how intense, but negativity towards that experience and not wanting to do it. In that sense, I'm actually more positive. I think it could happen, but I don't,

I think it would probably depend on some random internal people having a change of guard. You know, I think at some point, I don't think there's an economical reason why you don't do it. I don't think there's really a strong reason

why you'd like, you can absolutely do a localization that's softer in some ways where you avoid a lot of the stuff that might give you pause. I think you could do it, but there has to be a very intense will. Nintendo has never had that will for whatever reason, and for that, something internally would have to change.

And that is not our, no one has access to that. No one, that is just how people go through that corporation and do their thing. That is my opinion on the whole entire situation. I think it could happen, though. I still would have a hope. I'd like it to happen, yeah. I think with the original earthbound, that was a huge undertaking my Nintendo to get it in a great state of, you know, existence when it comes to the,

the English translation and there was a huge campaign behind it and they really wanted to make a splash in America but it didn't work out and I it seems that Nintendo uh kind of wants to bury their failures until they're comfortable with acknowledging them like we easily could have had virtual boy games on 3d S but I think it was still too soon for Nintendo so we're only getting virtual boy games on Nintendo Switch too and then again then you also need to buy we don't need to but they also want you to buy a giant piece of plastic to slide your switch into so they found a way to like kind of resell you a failure, but it takes them a very long time to be comfortable with this idea.

And even in like the new Mario Galaxy movie, there was a joke about ROB kind of being crappy. And I thought like, okay, it's been 40 years, Nintendo can finally say like, yeah, R.O.B stunk. We're sorry. But it takes, I feel like it takes them a very long time to get over their failures. And I understand. But that's just Nintendo. Yeah, I think it's just like an institutional thing that comes with the territory of being a company where people work for their entire line. I get very long memories over there.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I did want to touch upon the history of the development a little more by looking at who made the game. So Mother 2 was developed by Ape Incorporated and they would later become Creatures Incorporated. And of course, they were very busy acting as a Pokemon support studio by the time Mother 3 entered development for the Game Boy Advance. So Mother 3 is made by Brownie Brown, a studio formed by two former Secret of Manna developers from Squaboard. This made me worry about Mother 3 initially. I love the game, but I did not care for Brownie Brown's output, mostly sort of mana. I did not play magical vacation.

A lot of people wanted that to come over here, but those were their first two games before, Mother 3. And I thought they were just kind of mediocre. So I did not have a lot of high hopes for Mother 3 initially when I heard that this was the developer. But if you look at what they would eventually go on to do, Brownie Brown became OneUp Studio. One Up Studios now support studio for all of Nintendo's biggest games because a big game like Donkey Kong Bonanza or Super Smash Brothers or Mario Odyssey, they need like eight other developers to come and help them. And they are helping out on all of these huge games. So if you're wondering what happened to them, they are just like one of several studios helping make Mario Kart World for Nintendo alongside Nintendo. Yeah, I remember when we were petitioning Nintendo, both with literal petitions and also just bought.

them saying we want Mother 3. One of the things that came up from a fairly high-ranking Nintendo executive was like, listen, if you guys want Mother 3, buy magical vacation, you know, by these other games. And we looked at games like Magical Vacation. We're like, oh, this sucks. You can't make us do this. That's not fair. Yeah, magical vacation did not come to America, but then they published Magical Star Sign and

nobody cared and everyone kind of hated it. Exactly. And which is why we were like, we were pretty upset about like being told like, you've got to buy this. You got to eat your, you know, your dinner if you want your dessert. Yeah. So I wanted to go over a few of the key figures. We talked about Shigasatoi Toy. The director of this game is Nobuyuki Inouet.

So he's less of a known quantity. I did want to talk about the things he's worked on because I was impressed by his gamography here. So he was a planner on the original Final Fantasy Tactics. So my hat is off to him. And he also did a bit of work on the remake. Other notable credits, well, we just trashed it, but he did head up the magical vacation slash star sign games. He was a lead planner on Fantasy Life, which is a game I did enjoy. And also directed Professor Layton and The Last Specter.

And recent non-directing roles include Triangle Strategy, the Live Alive remake, and Valkyrie Elysium. So this guy just loves working on RPGs, and this is one of the best ones that he has worked on. And in terms of music, they did not get the two composers back from, mother two, unfortunately, and that's another thing I was worried about. I thought, well, that music is immortal. Some of my favorite game music ever, and these two guys did such a great job, and it's such an eclectic soundtrack, too. Music for this one, Shogo Sakai. This soundtrack doesn't fall back on quoting Mother 2 that often. There's just a handful of times it does, and then it kind of zags where you think it would zig. So I feel like it's, again, fulfilling that,

sorry, not fulfilling that nostalgia that you crave. It's sort of like, well, this could be the Mr. Saturn song, but we're taking in another direction entirely. And this is a massive OST. This has 250 tracks. Of course, a lot of those are just like little stings and fanfares, but it is a very, very big soundtrack. And like Mother 2, has a ton of battle themes. And Sakai started as a sound guy at Data East in the late 80s, and his first credit is on the Ronald McDonald game, Donald Land. So that's where he started off. And by the time he makes music for Mother 3, he's like 15 years into a very long career that persists to this Day. And he has basically been the sound guy on the Kirby games since around the time of Mother 3. And these are some nice sounding games. And I also want to shout out his soundtrack for part-time UFO, which is incredibly catchy. It is just one melody, but he finds many, many ways to reinterpret that. And I got a fist pump from Reed when I said the soundtrack.

Oh, lovely game. And also, like, 250 tracks is insane because, like, Undertale is considered to have, like, a pretty big soundtrack. And it's got like 109 tracks. So to more than double that, it's just bonkers. Yeah, it's a massive, massive soundtrack. And it's all just him. And I'm surprised he didn't get burned out. Maybe he did get burned out. But there's no point where any song feels like, oh, this is a lazy song.

Every song really hits. And I don't like the soundtrack as much as I like Mother 2 soundtrack, but I feel like they could not have found a better replacement for the original composers. He did a great job with this. Evertrak. Do we know when Sakai actually came? into the project. Was he around for EB-64? Like, if this songs were developed throughout the history of all the development, I could imagine that's why it became. So there's a few songs that

are literally just like thrown in at the gas station. They're like characters are like, hey, you want to hear a song? And it's like a full-fledged, incredibly well-done melodic, like, symphonic. I feel like they had more than they could ever even utilize effectively. And that wouldn't be surprising if this was a long-running, like they were not crunching it out, but this was something that they were inspired through over many years of seeing the game being developed. Oftentimes you have songs that are, even though the game itself has shifted

and you had an original idea of what this song was being intended for, the reuse of it and kind of re-implementation then kind of defines a new scene. So I'm just kind of interested. I would love to hear their story. I'm not sure if they would ever divulge that information, but it's a, there's something there because it is a lot of songs and it's more songs than it actually uses in a lot of ways. Yeah, I feel like he was there, at least from the N64 version,

because you could hear a Porky's theme in that trailer from 1999. And then it turns out that the theme of love from this game, they're sort of doing their own eight melodies thing here. That came in very late, but it sounds like Porky's theme was there from the beginning and it was the main theme of the game until E. Toy said, we want a nicer theme that'll play more into like the emotions of the game. Not just as the theme,

but the DCMC version stylization of it. That was like a rock version. So those concepts and probably muirms. music from that as like as them playing with yeah it likely was there for the long haul yeah he might he might have had 10 years to think of the soundtrack maybe that's why it's so big he's just making notes constantly as the game is being resurrected and canceled again yeah imagine thinking it's canceled and it's like no actually we're doing it again and all your music can come in and it's all going to be a big part i imagine how uplifting that would be but that's really fun yeah he'll just keep making music as long as they keep

paying them the soundtrack probably would not be as big if it didn't labor in development for like a But I just wanted to mention these key figures. And now we could talk about the game itself, which we've been tiptoeing around and mentioning some elements of it. But I do want to start off by asking how we feel about Mother 3's narrative because it's trying to tell a more traditional story than Mother 2. Mother 2 is more about like the vibe and the different moments and the story ultimately is a little frivolous. It's like, oh, the chosen one and go on this adventure and find these eight things, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, sorry, read? The hero's journey, yes.

Here he's journal, yes, yeah. And it is just like a structure built to support this road trip RPG. In this case, it's a traditional story told in a very non-traditional way. And I would compare this to Dragon Quest 4. And I have to assume they were directly inspired by that game because we see all the party members individually. And often they have a partner character or a character that's working alongside them. And then about halfway through the game, they all come together for their core mission here. And very, very different from. the original two mother games and just a idea you don't see very often in RPGs and I'm curious if you all like this because I do think the first half of the game is a lot stronger because you're just

you're not sure who you're going to be next, you're not sure what scenarios you're encounter often you're like, why am I a monkey? Why am I being abused? Why am I here? Just like the mystery is what makes it very interesting. The back half of the game I still enjoy, but that's more traditional find the seven or eight objects and then get to the last dungeon.

But let's start with Reed. How do you feel about the structure of this game? Did it surprise you? It did because I, like, insofar as games comprise so much of my life, I really am not that well-versed or well-read in games. And so, like, you know, I didn't know that there was, like, inspiration from a Dragon Quest game because, like, Dragon Warrior was the only one I played and then none after that.

And so as someone who hasn't experienced, you know, a ton of other RPGs, I thought it was very interesting, like, these first, you know, like you said, the first, you know, five chapters. The, uh, the structure is so bizarre. And like you said, you don't really understand like, all right, now, yeah, now I'm a monkey. Like, where's this going? Like, what's going on here? But like, it's fun because it kind of pulls you through. Uh, and then you get to chapter seven, which you're like, okay, well, almost the end. And then you're like, oh, no, you actually have an entire, like, more than half the game is before you still, once you're in chapter seven. So it's just kind of like,

you know, another weird way where like, presumably because of the way the development went, just results in this game that just keeps you guessing and, you know, like surprises you even when it's like just doing the same thing. It's like, oh, we're still doing chapter seven. Wow. Okay. Yeah, it's not just different perspectives either. Things are happening out of order in a way. Not by any like huge leaps and bounds. It's like, oh, this character is actually, you're seeing what happens before they get to hear when you're playing as this character. So you have to keep it all straight in your head. It's a really interesting sort of structure to keep

you asking questions in the beginning. How does anyone else feel about this structure of the game? Charlie? Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, Dragon Quest 4 is probably my favorite of the Dragon Quest of the ones that I played, so that already tells you that I was pretty into this

whole thing. It is a pretty challenging thing to have to pull off because, I mean, you know, you start off with a character that you're with for a while. You get really invested in them. get to see them get stronger. And then the next chapter comes, and now that familiar character is gone. You kind of want to see what happens to them, but now you've got to shift gears, try to get

used to a new character, struggle to care about them because you still care about the other character. But I usually really like getting the chance to get familiar with new characters by having them on their own for a while. Like, you know, Jeff and Earthbound is a great way to actually get familiar with this new character or even like in Final Fantasy 6 you know early on whenever there's like the fork and then you have you know Locke goes and does his thing and Sabin does like a whole odyssey all by himself and you really or at least I really felt like I got he basically became my favorite

character because I spent so much time with him specifically um and if anything I think it's kind of a shame we don't get more of that because I like especially um in the mother games like Kumatora and Paula, but I think they both deserve their own solo adventures. And it's kind of a, it's a real shame that they were left out of that process. I end up usually, like, making that happen on my own just by, like whenever I'd get Paula in earthbound, I'd usually immediately go into the caves and unequip everything from Ness and let him get knocked out. So that I then have just Paula. And then Paula needs to get you know all the way to

the shining spot on her own before I'll let her bring Ness back so that she can really come into her own as a character instead of just being a person who especially in my first playthrues of Earthbound. She's just kind of a character that dies really easily and we're just kind of dragging her around most of the time. And I felt like that was very unfair. And it's

cool to know that if you do take the time to get to know her, that she is really a powerhouse. Yeah, I do like Dragon Quest for a lot, but I feel like the one bummer about that game is when you start as a new character, the gameplay is the same, and you're at level one with a new character, you have to do the grind again. But in this game, I feel like they recognize that flaw, and they find interesting combat puzzles for each of these individual characters and their individual skills. And then when they come together as a team, they each fill a particular role that doesn't feel like they can exist on their own. So I feel like they're good independently in these combat puzzles, and they're good as part of the team serving the role. role they need to serve. And the structure also can be misleading because you start as Flint,

and then you don't see Flint again until the final dungeon. So you might be misled to think, okay, Flint is the main character, no. And then Lucas, I believe, you start playing as him like in one of the final chapters before everyone gets together. And then characters like Salsa, the monkey, he's got a great chapter. It's one of my favorite parts of the game. But then he only joins you as a guest much later for a very small period of time. So this game does keep you on your toes guessing like unless I've seen screenshots of like you know chapter seven on words I don't really understand like who will be in my party uh in the final party of the game yeah I I have a lot to say about this topic it's it's funny to think about because I think

I really I really enjoyed it I think Mother 3 does very interesting stuff but I do want to say that earthbound and Jeff's journey especially is one of the best I always considered it one of the best sort of like you see a single character you see all their background you see all these relationships they have that couldn't exist without the main party. If the main party is there, you don't get them. You lose them. Tony isn't expressing sort of things. You don't have these interactions with your father. I think Jeff's from Earthbound is one of the best to ever do that concept. And they have their own journey. And then they become part of the party. And it's almost like that allows them to be a little bit less of a personality.

Because he's already seen them be like doing this on their own and like this journey of being pulled in. And I don't think it's quite as strong in Mother 3. I am, I think the salsa chapter is incredibly impressive. It's interesting and like it does stuff that is really novel, but it's also, it's all based around a core conceit of like, man, facade is a real monster, right? And it goes on and on and on like, it is a long stretch of starting from zero and like being totally dependent on it. And it's effective. It's really effective at this. But it's, it's also like if you kind of, for people that were coming from earthbound, and this was a complaint that I remember a few friends that were from the sermon in that community was like,

I just want to have the happy go lucky. I just want to get there. I just want to, I don't even know who my party is. I don't even understand who I am like trying to lead it to. Who is important? Who should I be leveling? Who should I be caring about?

Who do I need to see to the end? It creates a very strange space that some people just weren't down for. I was really interesting. I found it very interesting throughout. But I did have like, there's points where the game kind of takes you, like forcibly disconnects you from individuals like, oh, suddenly it's three years later. And there must have been things that happened.

There must have been some sort of journey there that, like, I feel like a little bit of meat there would have been nice to see as well. The separate, like, separating the action out of the characters, it's, I always come back to how are these sections utilized? What are they expressing? Like, Salsa does a really good job of showing, you know, the nastiness of facade, even if I think maybe it overstayed its welcome a little bit and like leveling up, you know, collecting dung to level up.

Salsa is like a little much of like, yeah, this is a horrible experience and they're being held a hostage. This is this is intense. Duster on his own and kind of being pulled in with Boney. There's there's these moments that can only happen because of it. But I think because of some overarching narrative difficulties that the game had, there might not be as strong and as cohesive as they could have been otherwise. So it's a love hate because I love this aspect of Mother 3, but I also think about, I wish maybe instead of salsa, we did spend more time with kumatoa. I wish maybe like bony as a dog that can effectively emote their feelings had more time to do things on there. Like all the main character becomes so like that in earthbound, you see this with Jeff and Poo and they're the two main, you know, two main characters you get after Paula. I wish Paula had a sequence or you're playing.

It's like Paula did bust out. Like there's some way that Jeff or somewhere that Ness wasn't able to save them, but they end up doing it themselves. I think these expressions of the main character should have been the pivotal most important and if there was time hit the other salsa would be a secondary concern. So that's sort of an overarching sort of critique of like I am so happy that they did this

but I think maybe the resources could have been even more impressive if they were a little bit more dialed in. Yeah, yeah, it does feel like you can kind of sense gaps that couldn't be filled, especially when it comes to the ending, which I guess we can talk about at some point. But yeah, I definitely,

there are highs and lows with this approach. I mostly enjoyed the experimental nature, but I can see how this could rub people the wrong way. I did want to talk about the themes of this game, potentially controversial themes in Mother 3, especially today, because this, I feel like, is one of the most surprisingly anti-capitalist games I've ever played,

and it's coming from an unexpected source, the third entry of a quirky RPG series. And I will say, to be fair, subtlety is not E-Toys strong suits, because what he's trying to say is very, very obvious. But it's still interesting to see it expressed in this form in such a big bummery way because essentially the story of Mother 3,

which really surprised me when I played it for the first time, we start playing the game. We're like, okay, let me go to the stores. Oh, there are no stores. Well, this is all part of the theme of the game because you start with this very peaceful agrarian society that has no currency. And folks, that is the reason why they're so peaceful and loving

and helpful towards each other because they do not have the idea of money. And when that is introduced to them by the evil fascist overlord Porky, the society falls apart. They all become jerks. And another thing that helps them become jerks is the happy box, which is essentially a television. So again, subtlety is not a strong suit. Also, if you look at anthropology, well, of course, before money, people were bartering and things like that. There was an idea of currency.

But Yitoy is saying, like, money is evil. and here's what happens when you become obsessed with money. These peaceful, lovable people all become jerks and despicable. And to watch that happen to them over the course of the game is very, very tragic. So this game is not about making you feel bad, but it is surprisingly melancholy. Everdra. So it's funny because I think the anti-capitalism and the rise of fascism, those sort of themes, they actually are enabled by a deeper theme of what memory,

and institutional memory means and is required within a society for it not to crumble. The only reason that capitalism and Porky and the entire army and the fascism, the reason that is able to do what it does in the game is because all the people that came from the apocalyptic past on the white ships, they came to this new world, they very consciously, as the very first action they took was wiping all their memories of the past, so it would never happen again. they didn't learn from it. They removed any notion.

They became ultimately naive and the best suckers that could ever exist. This notion, if you lose all, if you try to forget everything, if you throw away all the memories of the bad, you just become susceptible again. I think that's actually, Pocky is a very, I love Porky is one of my favorite characters of all the time. I love Pocky Port. Big fan, huge fan of Porky love. And they're only, they're enabled by conditions that, other people presented to them. They're like they they're like ultimately enabled. And the notion that like the capitalism is bad for sure. And obviously capitalism has so many evil aspects to it. But what Porky, it isn't even like it is a falsehood of capitalism. It's completely, um, rigged from the start in every possible way in a way that like anyone that had a sense of, um, history, a history of familiarity would know that they're being, um, suckered. Fasades and

everything is suckering these people that are the easiest marks they could ever exist and they're still trying really hard to pull them in and to like as easy as it is they're still doing everything again as propagantic forces. It is memory is such a core

role in this. I would actually say it's like the biggest theme of all of it because you have these you have the hummingbird egg which removes everybody's memories. You have Duster who has a whole sequence of like years who has lost his memories and become lucky in the band. You have Porky who's completely absorbed with his old memories and never able to let them go. You can't be so far in one in either direction for it to ever work.

And then the entire success of the game, the ending of it, it's all bringing back the memories of someone who had them forcibly stripped from them into a robot sort of level. Memories are like, I thought that was the core theme of this game that is so, and you see all these things of like, you know, I will save, even the fraud, the save fries, you know, I will hold your memories. I will keep them for you. Memories are like an incredibly huge deal. And the idea that if you live like the Mijipsies for thousands of years, well, your memories,

memories have an interesting sort of impact where they have almost a less reference for them. But that also makes them susceptible. They don't even care that something horrendous is likely going down. It's interesting. It plays through all the concepts of the game. Yeah, and Everardard, you're tapping into the actual plot of the game. So on the surface level, the plot is there's a peaceful village on these islands and these fascist take over sort of by just like, kind of insidiously infiltrating the society, giving them currency, giving them the happy boxes,

and sort of setting up and becoming more militaristic over time, and everyone gets corrupted by money and television essentially. But the real behind the scene story is there was an apocalypse. Wave goodbye to all your mother two friends because they're dead, except for Dr. Andonuts somehow. And the people you're playing as, the people you're seeing are remnants of that civilization who have wiped their memories in an attempt to forget about the sins of the past and restart things anew. So it's got a sort of like book of Genesis thing happening on these islands, which again, a very big swer for the mother series that was normally about let's make an RPG about like Americana. And there are some deeper themes to be found in there. But this game, it is telling a very ambitious story. And then I do want to dig into this a little bit.

We want to talk about the gameplay at some point. But there's a big theme at the end about nostalgia and how nostalgia is also corrupting and how it can also be an evil. force because a lot of Porky's attempts in the end are about recreating the world of Mother 2 and Earthbound and Mother 1. It's all about like, I'm building you this monument to Mother 1 and 2 and you're going to walk through it. Look at all the nostalgia around you. And the fate of Porky is to be sealed in this capsule where he's safe forever. And that is just, again, the lack of subtlety on E Toys part. But I feel like there's some inkling of this game where E. Toy feels maybe a little playfully resentful that people want to...

want more and more mother from him. And maybe this is a project he was more interested in in 1996 and not so much in 2006. Charlie. Yeah. I mean, I guess to, you know, to hit the hammer on the head a little bit,

I think it's very interesting that, you know, this game comes out in 2006 and suggests that, you know, a rise in greed, consumerism and reliance in technology and nostalgia would lead to a fascist regime read by a geriatric petty man child obsessed with images of himself. and then we have, here we are, 20 years later.

But I also think it's interesting that that's a lot of stuff that's going on a bit in the background, whenever the emotional core of the game kind of ignores all of that. Because, you know, yeah, you get this huge lore dump from letter or leader. And, you know, he tells you all of this stuff, but you didn't need to know any of that stuff to get to where you got at that point. and doesn't really affect very much what happens afterwards. The emotional core is about grief and loss and family. And in the end, you don't save the world. You don't save the island, not really, but you do save your brother.

And, yeah, in the end, you focused, your main character has focused on a much smaller problem than all of that. And I'm wondering what exactly is that saying while he's also, you know, exploring all these other bigger concepts in the background. Yeah, I think he had like a lot of time to think about many ideas to cram in this game. They don't always work together, but they each get their time to like kind of stand on the soapbox. And really what I was getting from the Porky, the final dungeon upon playing it again is now that it's 2026, you see a lot of the videos where it's AI recreating like, here's a Walmart in 1997. or here's like a high school in 2002 and oh don't you want to go back that just that kind of feels like the same vibe he was going for with game boy advanced technology in 2006 he was showing like it's evil to sort of like dump this on someone this idea like oh reach for the past you'll never get it but the yearning is powerful I just feel like okay I kind of now get a sense of like the the goals of porkie and how misguided they are in this game it's speaking is a big fan of porky and someone that I'm a if I'm a anyone he couldn't be. I'm a Porky apologist, most likely. Speaking as far as the arc of Porky as a like an abused kid that was very unhappy in Earthbound, their experience and how it,

they're recreating this notion that yeah, they were good friends with Ness. Yeah, this was my best friend. Yeah, these experiences, they actually included me. This was my journey too. You can see this co-opting of this like super fan effectively of Earthbound. Even in their, you know, that's their real world, he was completely absorbed in every detail of what went down with Ness and their journey. He clearly, like, was recorded, you know, in the movie theater, they recorded all that the entire journey. They saw every, not just the photos. They have straight up shots that weren't photos.

It was at any time it looked like. So he, and he has all these items when you take the ride, the, the, the nostalgic ride, boat ride. It's showing, like, they have Tessie in there. They have the phase distortor. They have all these items, some of them, completely inconsequential. they had the black and white, black and white sesame seeds from the dusty dunes desert.

They have everything from that game that they think are treasures of this past. And they're completely absorbed in it in a way that is, it's beyond childish. It's so, and it's beyond nostalgia even. It's like their entire existence, their identity was formed by what they saw secondhand of this person they considered their best friend.

Like they were part of that. And they forcibly made it part of that. And there's even little things like when Poki in Earthbound, I'll always interchange the names. But when he goes off into the cult of the happy happiest, you see Carpainter, and he's like, he's part of that experience. He is part of the journey of the Moni Mani going through that world.

They, Carpainter, their main ability is summoning down lightning from high, like a holy lightning. They use that to take people out, to take out unbelievers. And Poki literally recreates that with the generator tower. Like he creates the thunder. power to be able to have that same power that he saw as a child from another person that, like, was the start of his evil villainous arc journey. He's, he's pulling even in the overarching story, not just when you get to Newport City, he's pulling these beats from what his history

experiences were and what was developed in earthbound. It's really, like, there is a lot of nuance. And I thought, like, it's not going to, there's no way to cover everything here, but like, I've thought about making videos about Porky and their journey because it's, it's something really interesting. He is not a one-note, oh, there's a gross, pathetic childlike character. There is something there that stems from abuse that might stem from them, like even self-enabling,

because the Moni-Mani had to be planted. And he went back in time and was, there's all sorts of notions that could be there as far as maybe, you know, he's like an endless figure. He's an entity that has no maybe has no real start giving the cyclical nature that could be going down. And then certainly has no end. He's in the

absolutely capsule forever. It's, he's really interesting. And he makes, he does make the game. This is why I would say that like Mother 3, I do like it better in some ways than Earthbound, just because Porky becomes a very interesting nugget of complexity to think about once you drill into them. Yeah, he's a tragic figure. And it's just, it's just funny to think about this, who was once the brady neighbor kid, who was sort of a villain, eventually a villain in Mother 2.

He just becomes like a dictator in Mother 3. It just, I guess we're all used to the idea, but it is really crazy. And then the tragedy of Porky is that his fate does seem worse than hell, like just being trapped in the safe capsule forever and just rolled away. He does get what's coming to him. But after you see what he does to these people, you're like, well, my sympathy only goes so far with you, Porkey. Well, I do want to talk about some of the gameplay elements before we wrap up here, because one thing we have missed entirely is the rhythm system of Mother 3.

It's funny that this game releases sort of alongside Rhythm Heaven for the Game Boy Advance, the first one that never came here, because there are some similar ideas going on. And essentially, this idea was thought of back during its original development, but in the battles, you essentially, you find the beats,

and then you tap the A button along to the beat after your character starts attacking, and then you can attack up to 16 more times. You don't need to do this to finish the game. I assume it would be very hard if you didn't do this. There is no in-game tutorial for this. They don't force you to learn how to do this to move on. I believe, like,

in chapter two, a frog might tell you about it or a mouse might tell you about it, but there's never like, okay, play along with me and let's make sure you do this. It's all purely optional, but I see a lot of people saying, like, oh, my emulator's broken or I can't get this. And I feel like I have no rhythm, and I can almost

nail every song outside of the few ones they make very tricky on purpose. But it is just one extra element to this game that makes the battles way more engaging than if you just have to just like spam a like you would do in mother two uh ever try it just real quick i think i think it ends up being about 2.5x like it is a significant amount of damage increase if you get the full 16 combo uh the final hit does the most like there's a significant portion of that extra

bit uh but it it is impressive that the it is so you do not need to use it especially if you're going like if you're going attack heavy yeah it's really good to do it but if you you can absolutely depend on psychic attacks what i thought was another really interesting mechanic as well is that They bring back the rolling hip point meter, and they make it more usable on the English. I think it was, you could get your inputs faster. In earthbound, there's a limited use of it. It goes really quickly in earthbound. But they actually slowed it down and gave you methods of slowing it down even further in Mother 3,

which then makes it very viable to essentially just heal in response. You're about to die from fatal damage, mortal damage, but then you can just heal yourself. And it creates a really interesting sort of just in the nick of time, saving yourself when enemies can be allowed to do unbelievable amounts of damage. So really neat mechanically. Yeah, I think this game has the best battles in the series, even discounting the rhythm element. I feel like they're incredibly well designed.

Every character has their purpose. The rolling hit point bars feel a lot more utilized in this version. There are many nick of time moments. There are certain times where everyone's – or characters about to die, so you have to rush through everyone else's turn just to get to the character to heal them. And then, like, again, we talked about this earlier,

but when you have just one character in your party all the battles are tailored to like how will this be more fun with one character but then when the party expands you start fighting really tricky bosses where you have to start thinking okay what's the boss week against what kind of shields do I need to put up who needs to be on healing bony is always like

the fastest character do I need to fill his inventory with healing items or magic point healing items or so on there's just I found like in terms of turn-based role playing they really nailed it here when I feel like in mother one and two those are fun games but the battle system is a lot less elegant and thoughtful than this one.

I feel like they really thought about what would be a fun turn-based system that relied on some other one and two elements and they rolled with it here. Yeah, certainly, especially with Mother 1, which doesn't seem like it was terribly well-tuned whatsoever. I enjoy it, but it is not... There's a lot of one-hit kill things that both in your own arsenal and also in the enemy arsenals. I am curious

Have they fixed in the emulated version the timing issue for the for the timed attacks? Because I remember that being a big issue that was present in the ROM version but not in cartridge versions. I see, yeah, I guess so I played this originally

when it first released, the fan translation, whatever emulator I was using back then and I was able to nail the timing and this time around I was able to nail it as well. So I guess it's a case of like, what your emulator is, but I think now they are so accurate that you really shouldn't have any problems. And I didn't even back in the day. So I place the blame on you, the player, if you can't get this.

I always look this up because it is accurate. Back in the day, I believe the most popular was VGBA. That's what I use, yeah. So that was back in the day, that definitely had timing issues. The thing is you get used to it. It's a number of frame delay and you just intrinsically, and the harder ones become near impossible. Like the harder ones are actually varying it up. It is very hard to react to that.

Today, I think the most commonly used emulator is MGBA. I'm not sure what the M stands for. But that is, I believe, an improvement, but they themselves, the devs, I was looking this up just the other day. It's like, there's no, when you're playing it on not hardware, this sort of sinking is really difficult because there's a lot of variation of just the actual hardware that you are playing it on will create discrepancies. And like, they do their best, but there is absolutely a limit. That is always there. If you do not play it on the 3DS, if you do not play it on the GPA, if you don't use a flash cart,

there is absolutely a delay that is still there, even with the best case scenario now. It's just, it has improved. And ultimately, it really doesn't matter that much. It essentially makes the harder ones more difficult. Because the beats are coming pretty fast, if you are off by a few frames where you're like hitting the next one, it'll work out to be 16 hits anyway.

It affects things less than you would expect until you get to the very variable ones. But when you see somebody that has played it on hardware, and very familiar with it, they can like ace everything. They can master those songs. So there is a persistent, it's just an issue with emulate. It's very hard to get. There's two tracks that are constantly playing, one that isn't normally hearable until you use the thief move

to make their heartbeats louder. But those have to be synced perfectly than the timing of the beats, the inputs have to be. It's a tricky problem. And emulators are not good at it. Yeah, I assume if there is a delay, but it's probably consistent across the board. So you just fall into it and get used to it over the

course of 30 hours. And then with some of the harder songs, I feel like if I had the original hardware, maybe it would be easier, but also I'm not intent, the game is not intend me to get everything perfectly every time. And if I did, it'd be very, very easy. Everdread brought up the rolling HP meter and how, how

tactical it has become in Mother 3. And I got to say, as somebody who has played this game on stage in front of a ton of people, it is great at making it a very theatrical event, especially the final battle where it's basically all comes down to your

ability to manage the rolling HP. And how in front of this crowd, I managed to time it to where I did the final action, you know, did the final turn against the, in the final battle, just as it was rolling down to almost zero. I think it stopped at like two and there was just this gasp from the audience. They were like, no, no. The best is when it hits zero and it rolls back up to one because you fought, you did clear the battle. That's the absolute perfection. Yeah, yeah. There are some attacks where it's like everybody's HP is rolling down to zero. What are you going to do? And you can escape from that situation. And it's really satisfying when you can. But yes, the battle system rules. And also there's a

visual element I did want to mention that when you start the combo, the notes start rotating around the enemy, that gives you another tell to let you know, like, am I on the right track with this beat? But I have a lot more to talk about. This is a game that merits a lot of discussion. Maybe we'll return to it. But before we go, I did want to ask, what do we see are the flaws of this game? And I did mention, I'll go first.

I did mention that I find the back half of the game a little weaker. This is an experience I loved from front to back. And I love that this game is like 30 hours long. More RPG should be this short, by the way. And this feels still kind of long to me. But the back half not as interesting. and I feel like the appeal of Mother 2, at least, is that you're always seeing something new.

You're always meeting new people. You're always in new scenarios. But with the back half of Mother 3 in this quest to pull the seven needles, a lot of it is just a bunch of very long dungeon scenarios. And the battles are fun. The battles are always fun. It's always fun to engage with them, to find new equipment,

to find your way through the mazes. But I found like it was lacking the variety I like in the first half and the variety I like in Mother 2. So towards the end of the game, I was getting a little fatigued despite how short it was. So I was happy to finish it again, but I really feel like there should have been more there

than just a lot of dungeons that would lead you towards needles. A lot of more fun, unique scenarios you saw in the first half of the game. That is me in terms of my problems with Mother 3. Other than that, I love this game. Let's talk about what we don't like about the game. Let's go to read. Do you have any issues with Mother 3? Any issues that need improvement, anything you wish wasn't in the game?

I mean, I think the, you know, coming at it as an earthbound fan, just the, just what a huge bummer. It's like storywise. It's a big bummer. And it's, but, you know, like it is, it is kind of fun having the, you know, the, you know, it's always very leftist politics, kind of carrying forward and, you know, being much more forefront in this game. But that is inherently just kind of a bummer because, you know, there's so much that's, like, in terms of. both politically and just, you know, just with the characters and the family, you know, members and everything. Just there's a lot of, there's a lot of sad things in this game. And so that's, like, Mother 3 is not a comfort game in that way for me and any at all.

Like, Earthbound, I'm like, oh, my gosh, I love playing Earthbound. You know, just there's nostalgia and whatnot. And Mother 3, I still enjoy, but I approach it much differently. It's more like, like, a game that I admire. but not a game that I play because like, oh, I just love playing Mother 3, you know, which is kind of a strange way to approach it, but that's just kind of my feeling towards it. No, I totally understand. I think it's the reason why I put off playing it again for another 18 years,

despite how well-crafted it as a game, I understand like the emotional journey I'm going to take and how you learn that like, well, everyone from Mother 2 is dead, and then potentially everyone after the game ends is also dead, but the world is better for it. So it does, it does, I mean, I enjoy engaging with media that makes me feel certain ways. I'm not all about like seeking out like comfort. But, you know, this game is you sitting with the 30 hours of just very melancholy tones and themes. And sometimes you don't want to engage with them for that long. I would say that for me, Mother 1 and 2 set a certain expectation for what Mother Games would be.

And part of that, I think, was how it was an exploration of modernity and Americana and exploring that. and then Mother 3 just kind of pulled that out so that like a lot of the things that made Mother 2 so fun and quirky were simply not in Mother 3 I think the only like the big modern thing they have as far as like mode of transportation is like the train which is you know pulled back over from Mother 1 but yeah I just really

enjoy these games and especially RPGs that explore modern day and how that can be translated into an RPG and there's not a lot of games that there are more games now that

are set in modern times than there used to be the persona series for instance is definitely just straight up here's Tokyo you know but I don't know what the difference is like as much you know i enjoy the persona games but it's not uh it's it's not the same as earthbound i don't know if it's because of the the setting being specifically

japan and not a weird version of america or because they're just not um reveling in the mundanity of it uh the way that the mother series did uh but if anything it seems like mother three completely rejects that out of hand like you know all those modern things are actually bad for you. And so we're not going to have a lot of it. Or whenever it does come in, it's going to be framed as part of the corruption of the society, which I can understand.

That's what they're exploring. But it's, yeah, it's a little disappointing that, you know, it wasn't able to explore those same things that, or, you know, yeah, that it just kind of got rid of that stuff. Yeah, because of the setting, you can't like order a pizza in the game or go to a hotel and read the newspaper. All the, all the really fun quirky things about Mother 2 kind of fall out because of the setting of the game and what can and cannot be allowed in this world. Everdread.

Oh, man. I've got to pick. So as a pokey fan, I play Mother 3 for Chapter 8. It's Porky fan service. It's just if you look at this game as all this setup, all this building of emotional tension and sadness and grief, all for the punchline of it was a. all for this horrible monster to have a laugh. It becomes this grand punchline of like, and this is what they did it all for.

All these people sacrificed what their lives were. It becomes, I love Mother 3 for being a set up into something that is a it is a crotesque joke being played at the expense of what you were expecting out of Earthbound, out of Mother 2. It is a profound joke that Poki has pulled on everybody. Like, Pokey literally, you know, who knows, maybe Poki affected the development of the gay, you know, the idea that they have changed history to enable this serenade to themselves at the end of Mother. It's, it is so delightful. I do have, for like, realistic complaints about the game, I do think the needles could have been woven in a little bit more organically throughout the journey. Having them all in Chapter 7 is a little, you get to chapter 7 is a little, you get to, oh, yeah, I have all the needles to get at this point. That's, um, that's a lot. And then maybe most importantly, I would have liked, if not happy moments, more moments for the team to like have a good time or like a shared moment together where they do something. And it's like this journey has been realized.

I feel like Earthbound very natively did that or the experiences of going through all these areas. But like these characters have more, Mother Three does a better job of characterization within them expressing stuff. But they don't have as many moments of them feeling like a shared experience. Like they go through some really interesting spectacles like when they ride the fridge. when they have the rope snake repeatedly kind of letting them down. And the characters don't actually react all that much. They don't have emotion to it. It's more like the other characters kind of play their role.

At that point, they're party characters. So I think maybe in some ways they don't want them to be expressive. But it's, I think you see the most expressive moment very early in the game with Flint reacting to the grief, the passing of Hanawa. And like, I really wanted to see more of these sort of high emotional moments with the other character. They can obviously pull them off. So I think that's the more emotion that they could have expressed, there would have made Pokey's dominance so sweet, even better. So they should have done an even better.

That is the entire point of the game. You need to build up these characters so you can knock them all down. I think that they could have done a little better. Yeah, ultimately, I feel like there was a much bigger idea in store for this game. And there was for a very long time. And they managed to fit some expression of that idea onto a Game Boy advanced card. And it is very impressive that they were able to. But like we're all saying, you can kind of see the area.

as they couldn't address, the parts of the story they couldn't tell. But I feel like what we ended up with it's not just better than nothing. It's a very, very good RPG. That might be very different than Mother 1 and 2, but I feel like I'm just very happy that we have it in this world. And I don't think there will be a Mother 4.

I don't think there's going to be a Mother 3 English release and Mother 4. It seems like, it really feels like Etoe was interested in games in the 90s. And he stopped being interested in games, but people still wanted Mother 3. And this is not my speculation. I think he said as much in interviews. So I think he was happy

to get this off his chest and I think he's also happy to make lots of merchandise for us to buy. That's very expensive. But like we said in the last year's podcast, he has re-embraced mother with all these anniversaries and now there is no shortage of mother merch to buy from Mother

1, 2, and 3. So even if there won't be more games, there will constantly be figures and stationary and key chains and any way to... Testke nostalgia to satisfy us all forever. In a way, he has become porky. It's very sad, folks.

Well, it's kind of funny because one of the things that, I didn't catch this when it came out, but the Mother 3 Deluxe box, you know, the Game Boy Micro, has a faceplate, like a custom faceplate, a Mother 3 faceplate. And it just looks like it's like, well, there's like a map or something printed on it. Like, it's hard to tell what's going on with the faceplate. And for years, you know, I would play with this thing. I was like, I don't know what this is, but it says Mother 3 out of it.

So whatever. And an old friend recently pointed out, he's like, well, no, the idea with that is that, like, it's supposed to look like the face plate has been worn down from being played over and over, constantly, you know, messed with. I was like, wait, really? And I looked at it. I was like, oh, he's right. Like, that was kind of what they were going for. Kind of like the theme of, like, you know, nature versus, you know, industry or whatever. And so apparently what I was trying to communicate there was that, like, this is a collector's edition, you know, thing that.

a ton of people are going to buy and never touch. But, you know, I want you to, I want this to be something that you use and like, you know, use until it wears down. So here, I'll get to, I'll give you a head start. So just a fascinating little, you know, that's great. That's great. That I kind of blew my mind recently. Yeah, I don't think I ever took a close look at the actual model of the Game Boy Advance Micro

because those things are so small. I never wanted to touch one or play a game on one. But yeah, it's, you can see the, the chrome plating or whatever it is approximating. It's worn away around the control pad and the A&B button. And so that's very clever on E Toys part. Like you won't touch this, but I'm going to make it worn down in some way to make it loved. Yeah. And it's just funny, like, you know, both from my perspective as like someone who does merchandise now for a living, but also just seeing like, oh, well, he does too.

So, all right, well, we're kind of in the same boat here. But I appreciate the thought that he always puts into things like that. You know what? The last thing I'll say is that we compared Porky to a certain political figure who may resemble in many ways. And I feel like the new White House ballroom could be the final. dungeon of the White House. So get your party ready, everybody. He's going to have some big surprises on that top floor. We're going in. Anyhow, this has been another episode of Retronauts.

I've been your host Bob Mackey. And if you want to find us online, we'll go to Patreon.com slash Retronauts and sign up there. And you can support the show. And for five bucks a month, you get a lot of stuff. You get to hear the episodes in advance. You get to hear the Mad Free. And you also get to hear two bonus episodes a month. We've been doing this for, I think, six total years at this point. So there is a ton of stuff behind the paywall if you haven't heard our back catalog yet. So check it out at patreon.com slash retronauts. And there's also a weekly column and podcast by Diamond Fight at that level.

So I will give my plugs last. Let's go around this virtual room here. Now, everybody is a fan gamer. We know that. Do you have anything else you want to throw out? Anything new? Any places where we can find each of you individually? For myself, I want to give a plug to the Starman Mother 320th anniversary,

Fun Fest. So if you search Starmen Mother Three Fun Fest, you'll find it. And we are currently auctioning several items that, like, Camille made three new Mother Three figurines, which she really made the original batch of like, you know, 40 or 50 figurines back in the day and hasn't made many more since. But she made three new ones that we are auctioning as part for our charity for World Central Kitchen. And we're also auctioning one of the two Mother Three deluxe boxes that I bought when the game came

out and I took it with me on my recent trip to Japan and had a toy sign the deluxe box. And so that is currently going for $3,200. So if you have more than $3,200 and you want to get in on this, it's going to a good cause. Awesome. For me, yes, I do work at Fan Gamer. The most recent thing I worked on that I would really like people to check out is the UFO companion for the guide for UFO 50. I was very fortunate to be able to write that entire thing, basically, with the help, of course, of the UFO 50 team.

And it's a beautiful project, great artists, especially Derek Yu, helped make it look awesome. I want people to check this out. And, of course, it's also a really helpful thing to have if you are playing. UFO 50 because those games do not explain themselves whatsoever. And so it helps to have a little guide if you don't want to beat your head against the wall to try to figure them out. And Everdread, how about you? Not really. I'm fairly reclusive. I've been so for a while. So there's not a whole lot of reach out. I guess for a recent project that I do feel pretty proud about, off, we re, fan gamer, another fan gamer promo, we released off a little while back and that's

been our first sort of developed game that was working with Mortis Ghost. And I think So I contributed some animations to him. I did the trailers and a little video promotion for it. So that's always any fans out there that still have not checked out or somebody that is interested in surreal RPGs. In the nature, definitely inspired by Earthbound and other games and many games since being inspired by it, notably, Undertale, Delta Run sort of things from Toby.

Definitely go check out off and have a good time with it. There's a lot of interesting indie RPGs that are exploring spaces that AAAs just won't touch. And it's worth going and seeing what they're doing. And as for me, I'm Bob Mackie. You can find me on Blue Sky and Letterbox, many other places, as Bob Servo. And my other podcast is called Talking Simpsons.

You can find that wherever you find podcasts. If you want to hear more, you go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons and sign up there for a bunch of bonus shows. You probably know my stuff by now. But that is it for this episode of Retronauts. We will see you again very soon for another new episode. Take care.