There‘s some new Mother 3 64 footage from a PR CD recently won at auction.
https://youtu.be/R51fqY1MJ0k
the youtube channel also has a neat video showing another one of Shogo Sakai’s composition similarities.
https://youtu.be/1ao27EM1Y4s
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVA0S6YF4_4)||
@“kory”#p39886 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.
>
@“treefroggy”#p40006 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?
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@“treefroggy”#p40006 There’s a very fun spirit-bowling-ball scenario ahead, no spoilers
||[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/jg5emgh.jpeg]||
Hear me out brothers and sisters, this is Boot Hill Heroes, everyone should at least try it[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/9bTz22G.jpeg]
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)...
https://youtu.be/i-QVpCvxzZo
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...
http://www.unseen64.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/wbdy4.jpg 
https://www.unseen64.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/VmRUB.jpg
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!
https://www.unseen64.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/fantasy-life-ds-2d-1.jpg 
https://www.unseen64.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/fantasy-life-ds-2d-7.jpg
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)](https://www.unseen64.net/2010/10/27/fantasy-life-ds-unreleased-beta/)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OGSXeko-iY
Impossible to not smile during this.
(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
@“saddleblasters”#p62366 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.
@“treefroggy”#p62370 They don‘t need a reason of course, but I would think that working on a more realistic and down-to-earth subject matter than typical RPGs of the time might prompt one to pick a setting that they’re more personally familiar with. This is almost always the rule with, say, (realist) literature or cinema: no matter how influenced a writer or director might be by foreign sources, they tend to set their stories in the culture that they grew up in. Many other JRPGs with a modern setting (e.g. the Megami Tensei series) were also set in Japan. While there's obviously a lot Japanese media stuff that takes place in the West, it tends to be more fantastical/absurd.
As you mentioned before, one of the things that makes the series great (especially compared to its imitators) is that Itoi has clearly had actual experiences that he's thought deeply about. So the fact that he decided to transplant the fruits of those experiences to an American setting is at least sort of interesting, I think?
Though maybe I'm not understanding this for the same reason I don't understand why so many Chinese and Japanese punk bands sing in English lol. (I mean, I understand on an intellectual level, but I still don't really get it.)
I don‘t know if it was a conscious decision but setting the game in not-the-USA adds a level of dissociation that probably helped when it came to writing dialogue, and certainly worked in terms of establishing some degree of verisimilitude without drawing attention to all the inaccuracies or details that, by necessity, weren’t going to be reflected in a dinky Nintendo game.
Anyway, a game for the thread: Sepas Channel, a Mother-esque galakei game from 2008 and one of the highlights of the G-MODE Archives reissue line—you can grab it on Steam or Switch (via the Japanese eShop) but it hasn't and may never be translated:
https://store-jp.nintendo.com/list/software/70010000036397.html 🇯🇵
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1671220/GMODE28/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM-DIoSskis
Just learned that the same sprite artist for Mother 3 created a feature phone ni no kuni game, and it looks wonderful
https://youtu.be/iOM4WrgbbNY
also, here's the video discussing preservation of feature phone games
https://youtu.be/tKH0x21rj1Y
we were robbed
I‘ve been watching a ton of Little House on the Prairie.
I always wondered what the inspiration was for the three dogs in the Mother series. MOTHER1's dog is named MICK or something so I assumed it was a combo of Snoopy and Mickey.
Mother 2 and 3 I was never so sure, besides generally assuming dogs from films of the time or dog breeds the creator liked.
But now that I’ve seen Jack, I‘d wager he had something to do with King. Jack and King are both really helpful animals, and they kind of resemble each other.
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/Q5ZCbNR.jpeg]
Again, it’s just my personal idea, but also I really, really love Jack and King, both are pretty kickass dogs.
rip Julee Cruise 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsLJxUEbkG8
North Bend, the town where Twin Peaks was filmed also hosts Nintendo of America.
I have been unable to find the history of when this facility opened. I did find [this](https://www.encyclopedia.com/economics/economics-magazines/nintendo-america-inc#:~:text=Nintendo%20of%20America%20Inc.%2C%20which,game%20units%20during%20the%201980s.):
>
Nintendo of America Inc., which was completely owned by the main company in Japan, was created in New York City. In 1982 the company was moved to Redmond, Washington.
Redmond is close to North Bend, but from my understanding they are not the same location. I am curious to know if NOA moved there after Twin Peaks premiered. If not, I wonder if being partly in the same town, employees of the company feel a connection to the TV show.
I like the idea of higher ups at Nintendo (JPN) moving the business to North Bend so when visiting they can stay at Salish Lodge & Spa (The Great Northern Hotel).
@“beets”#p76224 Redmond is NOA headquarters, North Bend is a distribution center. Just a distribution center. Though it may be hiding some dark secrets……
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/AOq9Szg.jpeg][upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/xif0zMZ.png]
Before Little House, Michael Landon and many of the same staff produced the western action series Bonanza. Flint of _Mother 3_may be named after Clint Eastwood, but as a father and homestead builder he's basically Charles Ingles from _Little House on the Prairie._
I'm on Season 4 now, and there's been a lot of episodes where one of the kids goes missing and the whole town has a search party every time. Same as the first chapter of Mother 3.
There's also LOTS of barn fires in LHotP where the fellas have to push and hold and release the B button to dash into and bust down the door.
Does anyone know anything about the game Famicom Bunko: Hajimari no Mori?
Its a jp only snes adventure game from 1999 developed by pax softnica. Im posting here because apparently pax softnica worked on mother 1, and this art really gives me some great mother/Boku no Natsuyasumi feelings.
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/8xOJfML.jpeg]
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/UlGU6JW.png]
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/1MbBXhp.jpeg]
Have any japanese speakers here played it? Is it any good? Does anyone know how pax softnica is involved with mother? I can’t find a ton of info on it, so i thought id ask the pros here.
Pax Sofnica was a regular contractor for Nintendo that was assigned to do the technical work on Mother; all the major creative decisions came from Itoi/APE and collaborators, but Pax contributed inasmuch as they were broadly responsible for the map design and establishing the structure/pacing of Itoi's scenario in game form.
Bokunatsu is a very apt comparison for Hajimari no Mori, as it's very much in that same nostalgic, idyllic vein (and it did it a year or so earlier, too). The game itself is very old-school command-based ADV with the occasional action minigame... it's a successor of sorts to the ADVs Pax was making with Nintendo during the FCDS days, but unlike those games which could be silly or just plain weird, it's pretty straight-ahead and not all that difficult, and definitely something that you play for the vibe rather than any degree of mystery or challenge.