No way
Now this is huge https://twitter.com/ShintaKameoka/status/1781634683769704905
also see replies.
the art style much more resembles Magical Vacation, but also shows the transition from the inconsistent 3D artstyle to what it looked like in 2D before the extremely consistent Mother 2-like style we know today.
I feel like I’m the only one who has pointed out the amount of Brownie Brown which bled into Mother 3 after the switch to GBA. This really shows how much it looked like Magical Vacation and Sword of Mana for a bit.
i would suggest FRANKEN by Splendidland. its free and on PC. i’d say its closer in vibes than gameplay. great music and very charming characters all round
this is so cool! super rare photos released. look, that’s hip tanaka with a SFC controller in his hand! he only worked on two or three super NES games total!
It’s fucked up imo that Mother 1+2 GBA didn’t have a music player like Mother 3 did.
In general, I feel like the potential for MOTHER on GBC and GBA was squandered. Mother 3 was where all the hype was in 2003/4/5, and people were kind of overlooking how dope mother 1+2 is.
look at all these people on reddit regretting how much they shit on the soundtrack: https://www.reddit.com/r/earthbound/comments/qh4zwz/is_earthbounds_gba_soundtrack_that_bad/
I remember how everyone wrote it off.
I always disagreed. the chippification they did for mother 2 on GBA was actually hittin’ much of the time. it’s not SONY sample quality like mother 2 originally was, but the chippy, often 8bit approximation they did was awesome! at times, it sounds like what a GBC port could have sounded like.
Still some of the coolest tunes to ever come out of a GBA speaker.
Now when I replay Mother 2, it’s often in Japanese, on GBA.
it’s also quite a shame the mother 2 side never got a fan translation. Dope as hell that we got one for the mother 1 side though.
it’s getting harder to find the original rips that aren’t upsampled. but I like the hiss.
Double post.
I think the thing that makes the term MOTHER-like very different from other “genres” like metroidvania, roguelikes, soulslike, etc. is that so much isn’t tied to gameplay, and so much is tied to writing, tone, etc. that the majority of self proclaimed motherlikes that come out still don’t fully understand the original work they are imitating. It’s like trying to make an animation a ghibli-like, or a film a lynch-like. The other example genres have very clearly defined gameplay, and you can work within those restraints to do whatever you want. Gamers tend to understand mechanics more than nuanced writing, so they very easily focus more on the superficial aspects of the game, much in the same way twin peaks fans will hyperfixate on the cherry pie.
I’ve been saying this for years. I’m not gonna log on to the internet and be rude towards a bunch of passionate fans and talented creators, but this was my main takeaway from that recent Mother Direct. There were so many ROM hacks featured that just stripped away the truth and personality of these games for the sake of “upgrading” or “completing” them. “Quality of life features,” they call it… Sometimes I see the way MOTHER fans behave and wonder what it is about the games they even like at all