Mother Collection (Various)

Now, the only one of these I've managed to play completely through is the last one, but I know enough about them to understand how important they are, as a whole. Mother 2 is the only one to make it to the US, under the name Earthbound.

I'll admit that the graphics and battle systems aren't amazing (although Mother 3 has a really interesting one). Graphically you can compare it to an early Pokemon game (blegh), but the thing that makes these games so good is the story. It's one of those rare gems where you care more about where the game is going than what's actually going on as your playing.

 Written by Shigesato Itoi, who, before getting into video games, was a famous copy writer. I don't even think there's such a thing here, but apparently over in Japan, he was extremely well known, and the slogans he came up for with ads were quoted as often as popular song lyrics (I'm sorry for stealing from you, Wikipedia). He's even been a judge on Iron Chef a few times (Seriously Wikipedia, I'm so sorry.)

There's a few things that set the games apart from most RPGS. For one they aren't set in the medieval ages, where dragons and magic would be a national pastime. They're very modern, based in modern towns in America (or at least, what the Japanese assumed modern American Towns were like.)

And second, these games are extremely emotional. The tagline for Mother 1 was "No crying until the end." The promotional video for the re-release of Mother 1 and 2 on GBA had a quote from someone, saying "This game made me miss my real parents." Mother 3 kind of left me a wreck. Not completely, but close enough.

So for this update, I've included all of them. First is the GBA re-release/ports of Mother 1 + 2. Only Mother 1 has been translated in this (since Mother 2 is available in the US). There's a translation of the original for the Famicom, but I've always had problems getting it to load for some reason. If you're interested in that, you can try looking for the "Earhbound Zero" ROM. But for me, the GBA version adds a run button, which makes it much more bearable.

Earthbound, or Mother 2, is the one most people are going to be familiar with. You play as Ness (who looks a LOT like Ninten from Mother 1, but is somehow a different character.) (Actually it seems like you're using almost the same group of people, but it's not) who youngins will recognize from Smash Brothers. I actually had to explain who the characters were to some younger relatives that were playing Smash Brothers Brawl about a year ago. This is the one everyone sort of knows about.

And Mother 3. My personal favorite. I always had trouble getting started with Earthbound, and at some point in Mother 1 I got stuck. But jesus christ. It took me about a week to play through Mother 3, and that was mostly because I forced myself to put it down more often, because I didn't want it to end. This one has a really interesting battle feature that doesn't exist in the other two. I can't remember the exact name of it, but basically, you can do more damage (up to 16 hits) if you can hit the attack button along with the beat of the background music. There's a couple dozen different songs for battles, some are simple, and some are designed to mess you up. Luckily, if you can put an enemy to sleep, I guess you can hear their heartbeat? Which is the rhythm to the song playing. God dammit this one is so good. I almost cried at the end.

This download contains Mother 1 + 2 for GBA, Earthbound for SNES, and Mother 3 for GBA, along with a copy of the Earthbound Zero rom for NES. I wouldn't recommend that version, but if you really want to try it, I've included it. Also included were the fan translation patch readme files, even though they're pre-patched. Go to http://mother12.earthboundcentral.com/ and http://mother3.fobby.net to read more about each one.