MOTHER-like games, with Twin Peaks Sprinkled on Top

[treefroggy]

@“gsk”#p78708

speaking of developers that had their hand in creating Mother–

When I first played Brownie Brown‘s Magical Vacation a few years back, I noticed a few things it had in common with the GBA version of Mother 3, that were probably due to their involvement. They didn’t seem to be there in the N64 version or Mother or Mother 2:

- The menu icon is a feather pen instead of the classic arrow. Looking at them side by side, they're nearly identical. The Mother 3 version just has different shading.

- The menu has its own music. (although the music in Magical Vacation is pretty rudimentary by GBA standards even.)

- The presence of many, many frogs.
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/xmuDxol.png]
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/jSVGdHe.png]

- The newly stylized menus in general seem to have taken after brownie brown's previous works on GBA.

This is one of the things about the game that kind of confused me when I first played it in 2006. It felt very un-Mother-like to me at the time. (I was 13, now, as an adult, it really doesn't matter LOL)

[treefroggy]

Another parallel to Little House on the Prairie, may be a stretch but watching this show every day has me thinking.
https://youtu.be/nUZfAw7DWFA
(unfortunately there's no HD upload of the theme song on youtube yet. I've got HD rips of all 9 seasons)
https://youtu.be/jzFR22uNHAM
Carrie always trips, falling flat on her face, with her little foot flying up in the intro. It's classic, and nostalgic to all the gen x'ers I know who grew up watching it. (like my father and mother, haha)
https://i.makeagif.com/media/5-12-2014/GSBsTY.gif
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/s5HmbD7.png]
The intro song and character introduction vibe is the same in Little House and Mother 3. In each opening they use the same iconic footage of Carrie running down hill and tripping onto her face... Lucas does the same thing, including the detail of his little foot going up...
https://c.tenor.com/9nkS4ZhI5kQAAAAC/conspiracy-theory.gif
there was an anime created in 1975
and of course the book
https://www.pineknotnews.com/home/cms_data/dfault/photos/stories/id/2/9/2229/.TEMP/s_topTEMP425x425-8104.jpeg
HMM... If the dog Jack from the TV series looks like KING... The Jack from the book cover sure does look like BONEY........ 🤔
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/kLqSIac.png]
With the allusions to Pippi Longstocking, Pollyana, etc. in the first game, I don't think this is coincidence anymore. They all got similar treatment in Japan. Hayao Miyazaki was also involved and inspired a lot of those stories. Little House on the Prairie is way better than Pippi or anything else like that though!

I have to ready the team to move my wagon now, but I'll be back.

[Irishninja]

this is a wonderful thread, and i was somehow unaware of Mizzurna Falls - even happier to see it has a fan translation!

[BluntForceMama]

@“beets”#p76224

@treefroggy

I’m about to bust this case wide open…

But I’m also ready for froggy to tell me that this info has been known for 20 years on the old forums.

So I’ve been playing Earthbound for the first time on Switch, totally enthralled and into it. Intend to write about that in the appropriate thread. But I wanted to do some research on the game when I wasn’t able to play, and I ended up finding the uploaded scan of the player guide, which I think froggy has linked before.

And as I’m scrolling, what pops out at me…[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/SNM4Klw.jpeg]

That’s it.. it must be.. Snoqualmie Falls in North Bend (location of Salish Lodge/Great Northern Hotel).

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/mRljMqq.jpeg]

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/pexWQCG.jpeg]

[treefroggy]

@“BluntForceMama”#p81297 Honestly missed this, because I don‘t look to the US guide for canon! I had it as a kid, before I know about the falls. I used to own the MOTHER ENCYCLOPEDIA and Mother 2 Guide book by APE, but they were stolen in 2020 sadly. Those are also chock full of photos from real places. Excellent find! In my headcanon, Threek is somewhere in the american south/southeast. Good eye, good call, and good post for this thread, even if it’s from the american guide.

The significance of North Bend and Snoqualmie falls will always be Twin Peaks.

[Irishninja]

@“treefroggy”#p81298 aw man that sucks, i've never seen either of those books but they sound incredible!

i do have that fan made mother 3 guide, as well as this weird/rare scratch & sniff i got from NOA back then for mailing off an answer to their infamous ad campaign

still need to get a giant stuffed mr saturn one day but thems ain't cheap

[treefroggy]

Some more Little House Comparisons. Just began season 5.

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/d5FjrR0.png]

In season 5 a railroad is built and the price of corn plummets, displacing the entire Walnut Grove community (historically accurate).
The Ingalls, the Olsons, and other families from Walnut Grove move to the city after 4 whole seasons. While it's not a complete modernization, (the "city" of season 5 resembles the chapter 1 form of tazmily village just as much as walnut grove did!), Mother 3 took the railway more directly and had is pierce the town at its heart, as the townsfolk make an abrupt transition from country town to city after life-shaking events. Eventually they are all displaced to New Pork City. The introduction of money to the community of Tazmily is a plot point of Mother 3, and the running theme of Little House on the Prairie is that it is much better to be monetarily poor, yet rich in spirit, than the other way around.
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/ltS40Sb.png]

If you equate each chapter of Mother 3 to a TV season, the arc looks pretty similar. Seeing these good people, who had their challenges before, confronted by the challenges of modern society.

Moving along, I have a comparison for Mother 2 as well.
Prior to this, besides the "struggle of the week", the Olsen family was the example of corruption in the town of Walnut Grove. They are upper class and vain, running the town store. Mainly Mrs.Olsen is the example of how not to be, reacting inappropriately. Her husband Nels has his moments.

When they all move to the city, there's an even richer and more evil presence they have to confront.

What I'm getting at, is they are an analog to the Minch family in Mother 2.

Nellie Olsen, the eldest in the family, is Pokey. Lauara Ingall's bully but also redeemed at times, always with a spoiled attitude. Unlike in Earthbound, these characters aren't as one-dimensional and static. This series is full of sentiment for even the worst family in town. Earthbound does touch on having empathy for Pokey and his family at times too, but the Olsens do have redeeming qualities where the Minch family doesn't really, aside for Picky.
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/SrVv0FL.jpeg]
The most direct comparison in the family is Mrs.Olsen and Lardna Minch. They both steal the show in identical ways... And Nellie / Pokey have nearly identical behavior, so far Nellie has not done a "spankety spankety" though. You could draw a direct line from Nellie Olsen, to Pokey, to Eric Cartman of South Park. If the world was in Nellie's control, she would make the same choices Porky did in Mother 3, haha.

I'm certain that as I go through the rest of this series there will be more comparisons to Mother 3, since I'm only two episodes deep from when they move to the city. Wasn't sure if I was ready to post this yet but I had already put together the image and drafted all of it.

[treefroggy]

Like I suspected the parallels keep rolling in through season 5. After everyone moves to the city, the Ingalls and the Garveys return to Walnut Grove to find it almost completely abandoned. The man who built the town on his own blood sweat and tears, Lars Hanson, gave up on living, had a stroke, and spends his days in the corner of a dark room. Very similar to the feeling of returning to Tazmily Village in Chapter 4 and finding the elders of the town all relegated to “Old Man's Paradise” dingy nursing home, while the rest of the town is empty and abandoned, anyone else who stayed behind has also given up hope and will to live.

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/Wh16MjB.jpeg]

https://cdn.wikibound.info/1/15/RetirementHomeWess.png

Leder was always an interesting and weird character. In so much that he never speaks until he gives a huge monologue, and he just stands by the bell, ringing it to alert the vilalge of danger.
He's basically a secularized, silenced Reverend Aldon.
https://imgur.com/aZesSts
In the N64 original, his bell tower was more clearly a church.
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/LrlhH8F.jpeg]

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/tW0RsmB.png]

Leder also being a sort of founder of Tazmily makes him sort of a combined Reverend Aldon and Lars Hansen.

I think there may be a musical motif taken from this episode of Little House and used in Mother 3. I will make another post when I find it.

The evidence is compounding. At this point, I believe that Tazmily Village of Mother 3 is without a doubt based on Walnut Grove, as portrayed in Little House on the Prairie, the 1974 TV series. But references are also present in Mother 2 and Mother 1 as well. The Twin Peaks comparison is old news, I should rename this thread to *Mother 3 was Secretly Little House on the Prairie the Entire Time*
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/UMm8n5R.png]

[treefroggy]

Season 5 Episode 6 - There's No Place Like Home, Part 2
The very emotional ending of this climactic and iconic episode has music that sounded familiar. It may be a classical piece I don't know the name of, but to me it sounded like something directly reused in Mother 3. I went through the Sound Player track by track and found the one.
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/GbXUDt1.jpeg]

First, I'll have to copy the scene from the show-- it's not online anywhere that I know of.
https://vimeo.com/746330116

https://youtu.be/dn33Yk6i09k
Not exactly the same of course but there it is nonetheless.

I also edited the previous post with footage of Aldon's bell.

[humblepopstar]

bumping this thread for entirely selfish reasons: i managed to (mostly) articulate what i disliked about omori in a piece, and i'd be curious to hear what other folks think, if they have played such game or are just interested in reading a critical perspective about it. i sort of hate this game lol.

also i don't know if posts like this are kosher so let me know if they're not. mostly i just wanted to share this with The Folks On Here

[treefroggy]

https://twitter.com/kunta_/status/1650514940879355904?s=46&t=D5GbJtFgfALc-jfy7HgyTA

[humblepopstar]

bumping this thread to talk about melon journey: bittersweet memories, which i played recently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v13iOHGB7So

it's a nice low-commitment _mother_-like, clocking in at maybe 4-5 hours, with no combat and a very small explorable space. it's more or less one long trading sequence, with some optional character arcs along the way. it's got a very good sense of atmosphere and tone, though; it's somewhere between _earthbound_'s vibe of darkness beneath comedy and the small-town furry melancholia of _night in the woods,_ done up in a _link's awakening_ style. there's a lot of text and detail for such a small game, it feels like it was given a lot of attention and care. i liked it a lot. plus, there's a lesbian subplot, and it's #pridemonth.

[Irishninja]

@“leah”#p118156 oh man you had me at night in the woods, i love that game so much & am saving a replay for this autumn

adding this one to the list!

[treefroggy]

Just riffing here, no relation to above posts. This is a thought I had while talking to my bud about a certain game tagged as a mother-like:

I think a lot of the mother-inspired western games are created by people who had one bad thing happen to them which they never forgot, and so they made a game about that experience. They had to get in touch with reality once.

MOTHER is more about life in general, where shit happens, you get so much reality the point where you let go of it all, and the rhythms and truth of life becomes clear for what it is.
One is an immature reaction and the other is spiritually wise.

Sure, I know Itoi has cited specific life events, but it only ever amounts to a specific plot element. These western games revolve around one concept usually, like loss of a loved one.

I'm definitely speaking from my own personal experiences here, so it's just IMHO. I've had enough crazy lives lived to fill six mother games of content, and over the past few years I've begun just letting it go, forgetting half of it, instead of hanging on, or planning a whole mother-inspired game around it.

[Irishninja]

@“treefroggy”#p119233 ….is this about omori? i loved omori, but you can tell me if it's about omori

[Irishninja]

okok, serious post because this is lowkey one of my favorite threads here (i‘ve grabbed so many games based on recommendations from here) - i think the earlier question of “does anything handle a gap between iterations like twin peaks the return does?” is pretty meta, but actually is answered pretty interestingly by this very thread’s thesis

so when the return dropped in 2017, i was all over it! but it'd been some years since my last viewing of the first 2 seasons of twin peaks, and i'm someone who struggles to remember names/finer points of stories with wider casts, much less before getting into the subterfuge of a lynch story. i'm currently rewatching the series with my partner, and getting back into the return now, a lot more dots are being connected this time around, in ways that kinda make me think about earthbound as well

so [here's a writeup i read about the ending to the return](https://whatculture.com/tv/5-years-later-twin-peaks-the-return-ending-finally-makes-sense), and while i don't agree with every point made, there's some bits worth discussion - there's this narrative that in the 90s twin peeks, there's this vaneer of something both wholesome and quirky, that attracts both the viewer and agent cooper to want to stay. laura palmer's grisly murder - and the number of townsfolk who had a glimpse at the horrors of her circumstances - chose to turn a blind eye because to acknowledge her living hell was to both diminish this cultivated image and also admit some degree of culpability, which made it a perfect place for the black lodge to exist & thrive. which is to say, twin peaks was about the illusion of a unique, wholesome slice of pacific northwest america

the return offers seemingly none of these comforts. it gives bits of the diner & places that viewers recall, but without the zany comforts the original series provided. mother 3 takes quite a bit longer to peel back the curtain, but then shows you why it's perceived as for the better - everyone plays their role, no one has to wake up from the dream. the lead villains of both stories suffer a similar, almost pitiful fate (well, judy gets the last laugh in twin peaks, but, you know)

sorry if this seems obvious to others, drinking & kinda running with it here

[mtvcribs]

Here's a Mother-inspired game if i ever saw one.

https://twitter.com/WhatsOnSteam/status/1673848950372147200?t=3ayvt8Hg_AFR9ESVXVgD2A&s=19

[Funbil]

@“mtvcribs”#p121813 I‘m 99% certain this image of the main character from the Steam description was traced from Ness’ Super Smash Bros. Ultimate render

[saddleblasters]

>

@“treefroggy”#p119233 I think a lot of the mother-inspired western games are created by people who had one bad thing happen to them which they never forgot, and so they made a game about that experience. They had to get in touch with reality once.

I've been thinking about this since you said it, since I definitely have noticed what you're saying when I've played various Mother and Yume Nikki inspired games, of which Omori (the game you don't want to talk about but which I'll talk about anyway) is at the nexus of.

I think one factor might be that "the long term repercussions of one very bad event" has become a very common way to frame stories, across mediums, in the last decade or so. [See this New Yorker article about "the trauma plot"](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-against-the-trauma-plot). I saw a lot of people reacting very negatively to the article when it was written, but I think it is accurate in at least diagnosing this sort of narrative exists and is widespread. The time frame matches the period that Mother-likes exploded in popularity. So I wonder if what you're describing is just the manifestation of that particular trend in video games? In theory Earthbound and/or Mother III ought to serve as references for telling other kinds of stories, but I think in using these games as inspiration, many creators see them as an aesthetic or feeling rather than a structure, and instead come up with their plots more intuitively, which often results in following cultural trends. I'm not sure though, since I am not a literary theorist (lol).

In Omori's case, I do think it's a loss, since the creator does seem to have other experiences to draw from that end up getting downplayed in the game. For example, I found the depictions of American sprawl/suburban life (especially the supermarket plaza) to be one if the most interesting parts of the game, and something you don't really see in games that much. Suburbs tend to only be depicted in a surface level way, without trying to deal with what it's like actually living in them. Omori didn't really succed at doing that either, but mostly because it spent too much time in the protagonists dream world wrestling with his trauma.

Anyway, your casual remarks have given me things to think over for months after the fact (as usual)

[treefroggy]

There’s a lot of those types of games, where the less I say about those specific games, the better. Many of these I have personal ties to, and had personal relations with people involved. Feel free to discuss here, and I may still pop in whenever I want to, but thank you in advance for respecting my boundaries. I’m more open about this sort of thing IRL.

I think one of the pillars of a great mother inspired game is living in the real world. One point of the game is bringing reality to the shut-in RPG playing stereotype painted by late president Yamauchi:

>

People who play RPGs are depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games

That’s one part that makes mother great, part of its magic, and a main reason I like it. If you don’t do that— and it takes a life well lived, a spiritual concept— I don’t like your game.

Call it coming of age, call it slice of life, call it “Miyazaki-like”, I think it brings together the beauty and truth of what we call Life into video game form.

That’s just my opinion, that’s just how I feel, a random fool online, etc.

This has been post #111 in the thread, thank you.