MOTHER-like games, with Twin Peaks Sprinkled on Top: Page 4

MOTHER-like games, with Twin Peaks Sprinkled on Top

treefroggy

This is an awesome quote from Itoi, but American fans always misinterpret it as permission to regard their fan content as a true successor to the series, lol. It means go live your own life, MOTHER is a reflection of stuff that happened in real life. It doesn’t mean you have the right to make MOTHER 4. 🤦they are taking it literally, at face value. I would interpret it as more of a nice way of saying “get a life!”

Gaagaagiins

Whoa, no wonder Ness and me had the same favourite food! He was me all along!

kory

Itoi-san: Your fourth mother was the friends you made along the way

kory

Naido is a confirmed inhabitant of the Mushroom Kingdom

treefroggy

For those who don’t know, Nae Yuuki was in Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks: The Return. Great find, kory !

seasons

Are there any games that have done The Return the way twin peaks has? At least in the way that characters have aged along with the audience? Doesn’t have to be a reboot specifically, but seeing shenmue 3 on the shelf and then seeing this thread got me wishing good ole yu suzuki did something more along those lines than just continue the story as it left off what with the 20 years between releases and all. I suppose metal gear kinda fits? I haven’t played enough of them to say for sure.

Syzygy

It doesn’t fit the spirit of your question really, but: because the initial 2010 release of Final Fantasy 14 was a failure; and they incorporated the reboot into the story of the game as an apocalyptic event, including a time-skip; but they didn’t want to give up their existing character designs— all of the important NPCs are unusually old for a JRPG, plucky heroes in their mid-30s and established leaders in their 50s-60s.

seasons

Oh yeah, I remember the surrounding promotional footage. It was really cool that they blasted their own creation for the reboot and fit it into the lore.

Syzygy

Thinking about it more a looser read of the question could be its own thread.

treefroggy

The influence of the original Twin Peaks on Japanese culture and world wide may not ever be replicated. Part 3 did very well but times are just different now. Game developers are clearly more inspired by Game of Thrones than Twin Peaks: The Return.
Usually, quite unfortunately, game series don’t end gracefully, or on a good note. They usually are run into the ground and resurrected multiple times before dying off seemingly for ever. I can’t think of a game series that has had The Return treatment. The Return was significant because Lynch had to fight tooth and nail for complete creative control, proper budget, etc. The games industry doesn’t give their creatives that kind of power. Just look at how Kojima was treated.
In fact, I think Death Stranding was the closest to a Twin Peaks: The Return. It was the return of Kojima-san, and when it launched I chose to decipher the lore during the first parts of the game using a Lynchian lens, which was fun.
But that doesn’t take into account your intent behind the question– a literal return where characters have aged….. I’ll leave that to the thread syzgy made.

treefroggy

There’s some new Mother 3 64 footage from a PR CD recently won at auction.

the youtube channel also has a neat video showing another one of Shogo Sakai’s composition similarities.

Syzygy

treefroggy
Per Forest of Illusion on Twitter some more Nintendo materiels leaked yesterday, mostly e-mails, and I expect this is associated: stuff sent to press or internal proofs thereof.

Speaking of, Saturday will be the 1-year anniversary of the “gigaleak” and there is some scuttlebutt expectation of another dump.

kory

OK, just a quick off-the-cuff free association, but for anyone who both played Mother 3 and watched Twin Peaks: The Return, I just witnessed the scene where Aeolia disappears by morphing into a small ball of light while lounging on a rather large chair and, at least for me, there is an uncanny resemblance to the scenes in the Red Room in which the Dougie and Diane tulpas similarly transfigure out of existence.

Probably a coincidence, but this felt important enough to commit to writing! <3

edit: oh geez, now Ionia just wafted away in a manner not entirely dissimilar to that woodsman in the jail cell

treefroggy

kory At the end of Mother 2, the characters spirits return to their bodies with a little animation. Very common to depict spirits physically this way. Did you finish The Return? There’s a very fun spirit-bowling-ball scenario ahead, no spoilers.
On the subject of the Woodsmen though, some of the characters in Twin Peaks are named directly after their role in the story, Bobby Briggs being thrown into jail, for example. The woodsmen, symbolizing telephone poles or trees or something, log lady etc. The characters in Tazmily Village are all named stuff like Lighter, Fuel, Flint, etc. to reflect their part in the story.
The way Lumber is used as weaponry by Flint and Lighter, later Lukas to a lesser degree, is also an interesting choice.

kory

treefroggy Bobby Briggs being thrown into jail

Wow, never made this connection!

I really need to sit down and ruminate a bit more on the shared themes here, but for now I’ll continue the free association…

How about teddy bears used as a means of distraction? (Hello Johnny, how are you today?)

Gloves that can be equipped to augment your physical strength?

kory

treefroggy There’s a very fun spirit-bowling-ball scenario ahead, no spoilers

YeeHaw

Hear me out brothers and sisters, this is Boot Hill Heroes, everyone should at least try it

treefroggy

Major oversight on my part– I knew of this mini game in Layton since before it released, but got it confused with the Fantasy Life project that began as 2D before being rebuilt with lame 3D polygons. I believe that Fantasy Life, Layton London Life, and Mother 3 were all the same pixel artist.

I wish this person got to make more games, if it wasn’t for the games industry climate, I feel like this person would have moved along after MOTHER 3 to make an entire series of RPGs with another company… They’ve had their hand in plenty of projects, but none since Mother 3 have been much more than little minigames like this and that mobile app dragon breeding game or whatever (yuck)…

I can easily imagine all kinds of projects they’d be suited for…. Remakes, indies, RPGs, sports…. It’s a shame.

Fantasy Life got the ball rolling for my distaste of the 3DS’s software. I’ve written this in the 3DS thread also, and just a fair warning this is somehwat of a personal mega-rant:
I completely lost interest in Fantasy Life when it was moved to 3DS and the graphics were replaced with unexpressive, cheap looking and directionless polygons– that’s what began my distaste for 3DS in the first place, because that’s what most of the games ended up looking like, and compared to the vast quantities of beautiful 2D graphics from the original DS, the 3DS seemed to drop the ball for the potential of 2D sprites in stereoscopic 3D, with few exceptions, all of which I thought were amazing.. Fantasy Life especially seemed to take steps backwards in art direction, the 3D didn’t look like an expression of what was there in 2D. The direction took on more of a generic art style…

This looked SO much cooler man…

It may have been just mockups from the artist (they do these pixel landscape mockups a lot, see their twitter) which makes it even more devastating that whoever was in charge didn’t go with it… Polygons are preferred over pixel art because of cost and value perceived by customers… It’s heartbreaking. IMHO these pixel graphics have more texture, charm, character, intrigue, and value… But with what Fantasy Life became– a multiplayer experience– it just made more sense from a production standpoint. People went crazy for Fantasy Life when it came out….

Anecdotally, these years were some of the darkest points in my life mental health wise, and meanwhile the games industry was taking a huge turn away from what I enjoyed, making things even worse for me as I was playing just Dark Souls and nothing else… I had nothing to look forward to anymore and my favorite types of games were simply disappearing, replaced with, if I may be so frank, cheap, polygonal, iterative, garbage. Games had become mainstream in a way that diluted what was on offer. I feel like popular games had stopped building on what came before and instead just started rehashing things that most people forgot came out 20 years before, reskinned in inferior packages for the modern market. It’s when almost every game someone would mention to me seemed like something I’d already played before with much better art design and cohesive presentation! Games were becoming more expensive to make and less ambitious overall, you’ve heard it before and I’m not going to explain it here!

But you can see this artist was in a creative flow after Mother 3! They had it in them to keep making more deeply interesting RPGs…. The fact they’re still making Mother 3 pixel pieces says a lot.
(screenshots from beta64 website)

Snowdecahedron

Impossible to not smile during this.

saddleblasters

(Appropriating this thread to just talk about general Mother stuff)

I’ve been playing the original Mother (I’d only played Earthbound in the past) and I have a dumb question:

Why are these games set in America/an America-like world? I’m sure someone (on this forum or elsewhere) has talked about/analyzed this topic at length, so feel free to redirect me lol

treefroggy

saddleblasters Well as far as cited sources go, Itoi was inspired by a trip to Chicago in the 80’s. But really, did they need a reason? Steven Spielberg movies were all the rage world wide, Japan always loved Peanuts, etc. etc.

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